Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer is a story of family secrets and dysfunctions, self-discovery, and non-traditional family connections.
There’s an excerpt on the Brilliance Audio Site that will give you a great feel for the tone of the story. It is in teenager Lorca’s point of view, having been caught cutting in in the bathroom at school. Her mother’s reaction and Lorca’s interpretations sets the stage nicely for the conflict throughout the novel, Lorca seeking to get attention and love from her mother, who is grappling with her own feelings of being unloved. At the core of the story is her mother’s unresolved feelings about her adoption. She is close to her sister, with whom she and Lorca live in NYC after leaving her husband and the “provincial” New Hampshire life he forced on her. But she doesn’t seem to have much real connection to her parents, and she’s never looked for her birth parents either.
The other narrator, Victoria, has just lost her husband Joseph after a long illness. She’s grieving him, but also the loss of closeness in their relationship caused by her choice to give their baby up for adoption before they were married.
Lorca’s and Victoria’s paths cross when Lorca decides to reach her mother by preparing masgouf for her, a Jewish Iraqi dish that hearkens to her birth roots. Lorca has to find the perfect recipe, so she goes to the source, finding Victoria, the cook at the restaurant where her mother had the dish.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where this might lead Lorca and Victoria.
This book seemed to be cut a little short, but perhaps that’s just because I didn’t want to let go of these characters. There was resolution in all the storylines, but I felt as if there was more to be said about Lorca and her mother, and Joseph.
AUDIOBOOK NOTES: This book has dual narrators to represent the alternating points of view from different chapters, Kathleen Gati and Kate Reinders. I always like this (although until the end, I actually thought it was one very talented narrator with a gift for distinguishing her voice between a teen girl and an older Iraqi woman). You can hear both narrators in the 5 minute excerpt on the Brilliance Audio Site.