Fireworks Every Night

April 10, 2023
Raymer’s lively if meandering debut novel (after the memoir Lay the Favorite) follows the ups and downs of a dysfunctional Florida family in the 1990s. Wayward patriarch Calvis Borkoski moves the family from Ohio to Loxahatchee, Fla., where he’s convinced there are greater opportunities. While things seem good at first, with a newly built house and pool, the family fractures after Calvis’s wife, Mary Kay, has an affair. At the center is youngest daughter, C.C., who does her best to lose herself in basketball but is pulled back by family dramas, which grow more dire after Calvis spends all their money. When the oldest child leaves, C.C. is caught in the middle of a violent struggle between her parents. Woven through C.C.’s coming-of-age are scenes with her as an adult, married to a man from a well-off family who leaves her feeling “gentrified” (“You buy one fifty- three-hundred-dollar dresser and before you know it it’s spawned seventeen-hundred-dollar nightstands and a six-thousand-dollar headboard for a bed that you’re not fucking in anymore”). While there isn’t much momentum, Raymer impresses with heart-rending characters and clear-eyed exploration of class differences. Though it’s a little messy, there’s a great deal of life on the page. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books Literary Agency.

June 1, 2023
C.C. was surprised by the pomp and circumstance of her engagement party, but she'd never been used to nice things. Having grown up in the swamps of Florida, with a tumultuous home life and a weak grasp on her own sense of self, she often feels like she's tricked her fianc�, Alex, into marriage. Alex's warm and welcoming family, his trust fund, and his sense of ease in the world are all entirely foreign concepts to C.C. When she returns to Florida to visit her father, she's both shocked and not at all surprised by the rough conditions she finds him living in. In her first novel, Raymer, author of the Las Vegas memoir Lay the Favorite (2012), plays with time, jumping between C.C.'s childhood, her recent past, and the present day. Thematically akin to memoirs like Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and Tara Westover's Educated, Raymer's novel contrasts the heart-wrenching difficulties of C.C.'s upbringing with the independence and resilience that followed her into adulthood. A sharp and smoldering debut, Fireworks Every Night crackles on every page.

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Starred review from April 15, 2023
A family of South Florida transplants has a shining moment of promise, then the hard times start rolling in. As the book opens, C.C. Borkoski is at an engagement party being thrown by her wealthy future in-laws, the Wellmans, whose Connecticut home commands a view of Long Island Sound. She is surprised to learn that her mother has been invited--because the guest list was so "lopsided," her fiance explains. "Your side was basically blank." "There's a reason for that!" says C.C., shocked to learn her mother even has email, much less that she has RSVP'd that she will be attending. The remainder of this novel will explain what happened to C.C.'s family, people who live in a very different America than the Wellmans. From the engagement party, we flash back to C.C. at 12, at a Florida rest stop eating sliced orange samples. Since her family's used car lot and home in Ohio burned to the ground, they are on their way to a new life. And as it turns out, "Loxahatchee was the best life my childhood self could conceive of." For a while. But while C.C. gets her first boyfriend and becomes a regional basketball phenom, her big sister, Lorraine, turns into someone she can't even recognize, and let's not even start on what happens to her parents or to C.C.'s marriage into the upper crust. The same evocative language and crackerjack storytelling Raymer displayed in her debut memoir, Lay the Favorite (2010), make her debut fiction a richly entertaining read even as the betrayals and misfortunes come raining down. The mythic level of the difficulties that confront the humans in the book are highlighted by C.C.'s job as a marketing writer at a Florida zoo full of animals in desperate straits due to changes in the environment--a homeless shelter, as she thinks of it. As Raymer's readers, we are like the manatees in the last image of the novel, having a fine old time playing in the warm-water discharge of a power plant at sunset. This unsparing version of the modern American tragedy is more fun to read than can possibly be right.

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