It Looks Like This

In spare, understated prose heightened by a keen lyricism, a debut author will take your breath away.

A new state, a new city, a new high school. Mike s father has already found a new evangelical church for the family to attend, even if Mike and his plainspoken little sister, Toby, don t want to go. Dad wants Mike to ditch art for sports, to toughen up, but there s something uneasy behind his demands. Then Mike meets Sean, the new kid, and hey becomes games of basketball, partnering on a French project, hanging out after school. A night at the beach. The fierce colors of sunrise. But Mike s father is always watching. And so is Victor from school, cell phone in hand. In guarded, Carveresque prose that propels you forward with a sense of stomach-dropping inevitability, Rafi Mittlefehldt tells a wrenching tale of first love and loss that exposes the undercurrents of a tidy suburban world. Heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming, "It Looks Like This" is a novel of love and family and forgiveness not just of others, but of yourself.

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