Trust Me
As a last-ditch effort to save his marriage, Lewis--an East Coast suburban Jew who has run from his roots--buys a cabin on a wild and scenic river in the Cascade foothills; after the marriage falls apart, he moves to the woods and makes the long commute every morning to Salem, the state capital, where he works a tedious government job. Skye stays with him on weekends, leaving behind her middle-school friends, her cellular service, her cat, and her mom in exchange for ancient trees and clear water and moss-covered rocks. In fifty-two vignettes--one for each week of the year--that alternate between Lewis's perspective and Skye's, the novel traces their days foraging for mushrooms and searching for newts, arguing over jigsaw puzzles and confronting menacing neighbors, hosting skeptical visitors and taking city jaunts, finding pleasure in small moments of wonder and coping with devastating loss. By turns comic and heartbreaking, Trust Me is a study of the uneasy bond between a hapless father and his precocious daughter, of their love for a complex and changing landscape, of the necessity and precariousness of the relationships and places we cherish most.
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"Nadelson successfully evokes the peacefulness and wonder of the wilderness setting. Thanks to the affecting family story at its core, this stands out among the recent spate of climate fiction."
--Publishers Weekly
"Scott Nadelson beautifully, movingly sketches the balance between turbulence and poise, wonder and boredom, bravery and vulnerability that is being twelve, or raising someone who is twelve, and perfectly captures the muddled marvel of feeling like a child, while also feeling like an adult, which is true here of both father and daughter and, as we read, maybe all of us."
--Laurie Frankel, author of One Two Three
--Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die
"Scott Nadelson has a remarkable ability to let his characters love and laugh and fumble and grow and burn and bleed right on the page. Alternating between the perspective of a recently divorced father and his teenage daughter, we follow two intertwined lives as they each awkwardly find their way. It's a gift to witness the humanity of this story. Trust me."
--Yuvi Zalkow, author of I Only Cry in Emoticons and A Brilliant Novel in the Works
"Trust Me is an exquisite novel: tender, funny, and wonderfully absorbing. Nadelson shows us a father and daughter marked by the seasons, pressed to redefine themselves in the world and with each other in luminous, spirited prose."
--Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North and The Portable Veblen
"Scott Nadelson's Trust Me is tender and impossibly wise, a soulful tapestry of fifty-two moving vignettes depicting the unbreakable yet eternally fraught bonds between fathers and teenage daughters. Watching Lewis and Skye circle one another amid the buffeting waves of adolescence, divorce, isolation, wildfires, and more, Nadelson reminds us (to every parent's chagrin) that the only constant is change. He is a compassionate, witty, and attentive observer of these fundamental familial ties."
--Mark Sarvas, author of Memento Park and Harry, Revised
