Rescue dogs amble around the living room, and once-stray cats lounge atop her childhood bed. Everything is just as Ariel Siskin remembered it when she left six years earlier.
Review: 'The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals,' by Becky Mandelbaum
FICTION: In a nuanced first novel, a fractured family is drawn together after a bigot attacks their animal shelter.
By Kevin Canfield
August 28, 2020 at 10:22PM
The lead character of Becky Mandelbaum's new novel, Ariel is at the heart of a timeless tale dressed in contemporary garb. In "The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals," a stressful family reunion occurs amid the political discord of the 2010s. The mood is leavened by a supporting cast of four-legged mammals. This is a wise, big-hearted debut from a talented young writer.
Ariel is a promising high school senior when she lands a college scholarship, but her mother, Mona, insists that she stay home in western Kansas and help run the family's animal shelter. Mona's diligence cannot be doubted. She'll happily "spend an hour chewing up a T-bone steak for a dog with bad teeth."
Ariel loves animals, too, but she chafes at Mona's inflexibility. They argue, and then Ariel scrams. So begins a painful estrangement.
Years pass, and Ariel, now 24 and living at the opposite end of Kansas, learns that the sanctuary has been set aflame by a vandal who targeted the Siskins because they're Jewish. Two horses are dead. Anti-Semitic graffiti mars a garage door. An old high school friend of Ariel's — he has a bigoted blog and lives in a house fronted by a Donald Trump sign — is in police custody.
The horrible news arrives as Ariel has reached a crossroads. She's agreed to marry her longtime boyfriend, but she's not sure about him — he's sweet but immature. Anyhow, wedding plans will have to wait. She needs "to do what daughters were supposed to do" — to be with Mona in her darkest hour. It'll be a complicated journey — Ariel will probably run into an ex she still loves — but there's no other way.
Mandelbaum writes with humor and empathy about Mona's commitment to her work — it's easy to like a character who gently applies Orajel to a Chihuahua's aching backside. And she describes Ariel's homecoming with admirable insight and palpable detail, capturing how her earliest memories are inextricably linked to animals: "the stink of them, the brush of wet fur on an ankle, the stick of slobber on an open palm — it was all synonymous with home."
Occasionally, the 2016 presidential race intrudes in unproductive ways on the main story line; there may be new angles on Trump's misogyny, but Mandelbaum hasn't found them. As the novel deepens, though, the broader right-left divide becomes a fitting backdrop for her story of strife in the Siskin household. "The silence between" Mona and Ariel might seem as "solid as a wall," but unlike so many political combatants, at least these two are willing to listen.
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.
The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals
By: Becky Mandelbaum.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $26.
