Porcupines

Sonia believes she knows what is going on in her daughter’s life – some days she is consumed by the weight of all the knowledge. However, unbeknownst to her, a little wedge of mystery inserted itself into their lives two days, four hours and thirteen minutes ago, when Mila started the computer languishing in a corner of their living room.
Porcupines begins in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin wall, when 18-year-old Szonja Imrie travels from Budapest to stay with her older sister in Los Angeles. She’s an eighteen-year-old in search of adventure in the land of the free.
But it also begins in 2000, when Mila, Sonia’s precocious and socially awkward 9-year-old daughter, concocts a plan, inspired by those excellent life-bibles Sleepless in Seattle and the Parent Trap to get her mother, and the man Mila is kind of sure must be her father to meet.
The plan involves Sonia being corralled into chaperoning an orchestra of nine-year-olds (most of whom seem to be called Megan) on a road trip from LA to Seattle, some badly spelled emails, a jar of several thousand jelly beans and a whole bunch of misassumptions.
Porcupines shuttles dazzlingly between these two time lines as the fallout from Mila’s best laid plans has repercussions far beyond her imaginings, and the secrets Sonia has been holding tight to for the last decade spill out all over her carefully constructed life.
This is a deliciously funny and poignant story about family and history, immigration and belonging, and what happens when walls begin to come down.