Take What You Need

by Idra Novey

This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for complicated people. My stepmother Jean was a complicated person.

Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition.

But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history.

Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, zeroing in on the joys and difficulties of family with great verve and humour, and illuminating what can be built from what others have discarded.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Art, Contemporary, Family, Novels

238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 2023

About the author

Idra Novey is the author of TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and one of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year. The novel is set in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where parts of her family have lived for over a century.

Her earlier novels include THOSE WHO KNEW and WAYS TO DISAPPEAR, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She's written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages. Her new book of poems, SOON AND WHOLLY, will be published in 2024.

Reviews

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

"To come convincingly to life, characters have to consist of mixed-up inextricable elements. We all contain aspects of self that make us anomalies, aspects that don't separate easily into flaws, flashbacks, and virtues."
-Idra Novey

A small town in the Southern Allegheny Mountains was home to young Leah, her father and step-mother, Jean. At that time, Leah felt loved and lucky, happily standing with Jean on the hidden shores of the creek. In her father's eyes, the secluded creek was a nasty, filthy place. He paid for membership to the pool at the golf club. Suddenly, one year later, Jean moved out. Contact with Leah was abruptly halted and prohibited. Two decades later, Leah would need to reflect on her complicated relationship with Jean after receiving a call from a stranger named Elliot who informed her of Jean's death. He claimed that in her will, Jean had left all of her metal sculptures to Leah. "...there's no returning to these hills without allowing Jean to gnaw at my heart again...". In alternating chapters, the ambivalent relationship between Leah and Jean unfolds through a dual, first person narrative.

According to Leah, the close bond forged with her step-mother ended when Leah was ten years old and Jean abandoned her. Leaving small town life behind, she attended college then moved to Peru, living there for a decade. She now lived in Queens, New York and worked at a company publishing bi-lingual children's books. Husband Gerardo was a linguist. The trip back to her hometown was unsettling. "The open distances here feel unfamiliar to my citified mind..." Lost, gas needle on empty, they stopped for gas and encountered a woman who insisted on knowing why Leah and Gerardo did not speak English. "We speak English quite well but [didn't] need to speak it for her sake." "This [was a] dying town that Jean never had the audacity to leave though she had the audacity to leave me."

According to Jean, "I'd become a nonentity to Leah now, former stepmother being a non-position...I found out she married from a group e-mail. I was now an acquaintance. I had made many mistakes, the most significant when Leah visited four years ago. The lines of communication were permanent severed.

Jean chose to stay in her old dilapidated house. There were many empty houses...frequent robberies....gunshots at night. At age 60, she started to invest in herself. Watching YouTube, she learned how to use welding tools, constructing what she called "Manglements". Sheets of metal were creatively sculpted into towers. Cut off spoon heads served as solid backs to plastic figures encased within discarded camera lenses for clear front magnification. Art was the embodiment of her self expression.

Jean recognized goodness in poverty stricken Elliot. "His curiosity, and a softness overtook me, one of those moments, when the heart refuses to close...how easily he could break in here, rob all the precious machinery I had acquired...it felt good to be taking in the sad trickle of humanity left." Elliot helped....she overlooked.

"Take What You Need" is a complex, unsettling read that is both thought provoking and providing no closure. I would have liked the addition of a thread written in Elliot's voice as well. A highly recommended read.

Thank you PENGUIN GROUP/Viking and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook ….read by Christina Delaine, and Idra Novey
…..5 hours and 49 minutes

WOW…..zeeee!!!!
One of the best complicated brilliantly crafted — ‘fascinating-as-can-be audiobook-novel’, that I’ve read this year!!!

Taking place in a fictional town in the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania.
Idra Novey explores an interesting estrangement between a stepmother (Jean) and her daughter (Leah).
It’s REALLY GOOD….
SOOOO thought-provoking!

GREAT DISCUSSION BOOK!!

The visual story involving awesome metal-scrap-creations that Jean does is not only ‘very cool’ but has therapeutic values.
The poverty is felt.
The anger Leah has for Jean is felt.
The regret that Jean feels in association with Leah is felt.
A relationship that develops between Jean and a neighbor, younger man, name Elliot, felt kinda — c r e e p y —to me.
Jean’s sexual fantasy description while thinking about Elliott gave me the ‘willy-jilly’s’ ……
BUT…. she was a fascinating character.

Love, loss, regret, anger, misunderstandings, mistakes, longings, and self-serving pride are some of ‘delve-into’ themes…..
…The familiar themes ‘sound’ universally ordinary….
but, I promise it’s ‘not’ (ordinary).
I mean — what are the general rules between a step mom/daughter relationship when the Mom & Dad split up? What are the responsibilities? Moral obligations? Or….. something else?

There is so much more I could say about this story — [divide of our country. etc.] ….
but I’m keeping this short.
I’ll add just one more thought to reflect on:
*The title* …..
The deeper I got into this story… the more sad I felt— and the powerful multifaceted title made me achingly sad….
yet, it’s perfectly fitting!

If “Take What You Need” isn’t considered one of the BEST BOOKS of the YEAR….
then something would be very wrong.
Its an ‘honest-to-goodness’ terrific novel!!!

🪁🪁🪁🪁🪁
FIVE FLYING KITES!
Recommend!!!

Note: a book I want to discuss with friends —

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take What You Need by Idra Novey was recommended to me by fellow author and friend, Judith Heneghan, and I loved it. It's on my top ten reads of the year, and we're not halfway through 2025 yet. In rural Pennsylvania, sculptor, Jean is mourning the estrangement of her step daughter, Leah, and remembering how four years ago their relationship broke apart. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties welding metal alone in the sitting room of her father's old house, when a family move into the almost derelict house next door, where the water has been cut off. Jean starts a friendship with the young man of the family who helps her with her work. In alternate chapters we hear from Leah who is returning, to Jean's house having learnt of her death - and is examining the prejudices she encounters and finally, her own.
Goodness, this is so good. Propulsive and with brilliant writing. It looks at the sexuality of older women, American poverty, sculpting, bias and expectations, motherhood - there is so much to think about, but without the story feeling overloaded. Highly recommended.

[Aura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is amazing. So emotionally honest and psychologically complex and suspenseful, too. It blew me away and I know so many people like Leah who have stopped speaking to someone in their family. I was lucky to get an early galley of this extraordinary novel. Jean and Leah were such strong, memorable characters and reading about Jean's sculpture process was really different. It was so good, the whole book. I will read this one again.

[katerie · Rating 1 out of 5]

to be clear, the one star is for myself for finishing this book.

Would not recommend.

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Every day, you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” — Louise Bourgeois

Take What You Need by Idra Novey is an extraordinary, deep, complex, and subtle novel. It’s a beautifully written, propulsive, and multilayered story with multidimensional characters, who are both flawed, not always likable, yet sympathetic. I was completely absorbed from page one and couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.

Jean and her estranged stepdaughter Leah narrate alternating chapters that explore the complicated ways in which they both fiercely love and yet repeatedly fail one another. Jean raised Leah, for 10 years, before she fled her marriage (to Leah’s Dad) without talking to Leah or keeping in touch, something Leah has never gotten over. Actually, Jean had assumed that she’d remain a part of Leah’s life, but Leah’s father didn’t allow that. Later, Leah (maybe misunderstanding a lot) more or less cuts Jean out of her life. That is, until Jean dies and Leah, with her husband and son, is summoned back to the small Appalachian town where they’d both lived, and where Jean remained, living alone.

Jean had read art magazines for decades, was a devotee of artist Louise Bourgeois and abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, and had painted a little (not well). Even so, she believed that, as Agnes Martin had put it, “A real artist has to be able to fail and fail and still go on,” that “contentment with oneself, that is success.” But then she stumbled into metal sculpture. She learned the practical aspects of metal-working, its tools and techniques, by watching YouTube videos and proceeded to build large complicated metal sculptures: towers comprising intricate boxes — the boxes containing viewing windows with odd combinations of tiny elements inside — that were welded together. She built these large sculptures in her living room, using a lot of power tools and toxic materials indoors. Eventually, Jean befriends Elliott, an out-of-work, morose, unkempt, and much younger man who lives next door and who appreciates what she’s doing. The two misfits form an odd and unstable alliance that I’m not sure would qualify as “friendship.”

I’ve seen Jean repeatedly described as an old woman. She’s no spring chicken for sure, but the woman is only 64 and is a dynamo, brash and bull-headed, and following her own path whether anyone else approves or not. She’s also one who sometimes takes actions that she deeply regrets and that she can neither set right nor dismiss.

The story involves many aspects of parent-child and other relationships, poverty, aging, mistakes, regrets, our longing for a fairy-tale life and a fairy-tale ending. But underlying it all is the mysterious and thrilling intersection of art and life. What raises Jean to the level of heroic character is her unflagging devotion to making art for herself alone. Her art is informed by her life and her life is incorporated in her art. Everything that’s shaped her goes into her work — at both a symbolic and literal level, to the point where she adorns her towers with quotes and phrases that have shaped her life, for good or ill: “Triangulation of the self.” “What’s a stepmother, anyhow?” “I meant well, I swear.”

Leah seemed less fully developed and less interesting to me at first, but in retrospect, I’ve started to understand her better. She was injured and angry at Jean for leaving her. Readers will probably have different perspectives on Leah. I think that Leah’s still wishing for a fairy-tale mother, a good mother, who would stand by her always and take care of her. She can’t stop struggling to “make sense” of being abandoned and of the life Jean has chosen. In the chapters she narrates, the words fairy tale(s) occur 17 times. “I know,” Leah says, “even fairy tales that bend toward mercy have their brutal twists.” And “Why didn’t it occur to me that she [Jean] might be crafting a fairy tale of her own, a realm as utterly unclassifiable as Jean herself.” I found it hard to decide who’s really crafting the fairy tale here. One thing is certain: Idra Novey has woven a remarkable one, a story that reminds us that the truth of a life is subtle, nuanced, and often just too slippery to pin down.

I was at first perplexed by the end of this book. Leah gets the last word, of course, but seems to step out of character as she relates the eventual “discovery” and recognition of Jean as an artist and the display of her unique metal sculptures in a Baltimore museum. I felt that this development undercut one of the overriding themes of the book: that real art is what you do — that it’s what you’re passionate about and for which you’ll take big risks. The ending seems, at first, to go against all that Jean believed and lived by — the value of her life and art being informed, or determined, by her dedication, risk-taking, indomitability. She was making her elaborate sculptures for herself, alone. If they had succumbed to oblivion, would that make her any less an Artist? Did her work need to be validated by public acclaim? But this ending is prefaced by Leah saying, “For this fairy tale, let’s say no rusted spikes fall off Jean’s towers before they reach the museum in Baltimore. . . .” And she continues: Let’s say this. Let’s say that. And I realized that Leah’s version is not likely to have actually happened. But wait, none of this has actually happened. . . . Let’s just say that Leah’s telling herself, and us, the biggest fairy-tale of all. Maybe that’s the only way the final section makes sense. One thing is for sure. I can’t stop thinking about this book and trying to make my own kind of sense. It’s one I’ll be thinking about and recommending for a long time.

Many thanks to Viking and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy. I look forward to its publication in March and will probably buy a copy, too.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

A woman is estranged from her stepmother and struggles to reconnect to her as an adult. The stepmother spends her time making huge sculptures that represent the emptiness of her life. The stepdaughter has walked away from her Appalachian childhood and is only condescending and angry. Both women were hard to like. I didn’t take what I needed from this book and have no idea what the title represents.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is lots to like about this novel but ultimately the experience of the audiobook was challenging in ways that impacted the storytelling and created a really uneven experience.

The story is told from two main characters' points of view: Jean, an artist in her 60s who creates massive metal sculptures in her home somewhere in Appalachia, and who ends up getting involved with a young man (in his 20s, I think), Elliott, who starts as a next-door neighbour, becomes her assistant of a kind, and ends up homeless. This relationship is complicated, and Novey pushes the boundaries of it in all kinds of ways, especially in her description of Elliott's physical characteristics: he has horrible body odour, acne, bad teeth, he's scarred and emaciated ... and that's on a good day. Nonetheless, Jean's sexual attraction to Elliott is as primal and unrelenting as it is inexplicable and fascinating. Jean is read brilliantly by Christina Delaine who brings a gritty, laconic, fierce intelligence to the character.

Then we have Leah, Jean's estranged step-daughter. We first meet Leah on the road to Jean's house with her Peruvian husband and young son after she's learned from Elliott that Jean has died. The backstory of Leah's relationship with Jean, told in alternating chapters, includes a pivotal scene during which Leah, on a much earlier visit to reconcile with Jean, meets Elliott. The character of Leah is read by the author.

And herein lies the problem. It is a rare author who narrates their own work really well. (One exception is Louise Erdrich, who reads her stuff beautifully). Novey is not Erdrich and worse still, the chapters she voices alternate with those read by a professional voice actor who is doing an absolutely gorgeous job of it.

I don't know for sure if Leah's storyline is naturally less compelling (I suspect it is, tbh, however ETA: I am decidedly in the minority on this given reviews by people who have, most probably, read the novel with their eyes not their ears), but I do know that Idra Novey's reading didn't do Leah's chapters any favours.

Smart reviewers have lauded the novel for presenting the complicated relationships that exist between people and their homes, people who stay and people who leave, especially when home is impoverished, disintegrating, politically regressive, and possibly terrifying.

But Leah seemed to me such a one-note character. Her own story of escape seemed almost trite or else was told so sketchily and superficially, that it couldn't counterbalance the richer and more compelling portrait of Jean.

It seemed to me that Leah's purpose in the novel is to flesh out a bit of Jean's character in ways that Jean obviously can't do from a first-person POV and raise the question of Elliott's politics, i.e., whether he is a white supremacist as his friends are and whether he is a danger to Jean (a question that exists separately from his racism) -- all with the intent of giving the reader some ambiguities to chew on. But ultimately Leah's own story line feels moot and irrelevant, as do her husband and son.

And here's another place that the novel goes off the rails for me ... it labours to ground itself in American politics during the age of Trump and shortly afterwards. (God, I hope it's afterwards).

We have a robust view of the horrific poverty of Appalachia where Trumpism and the racism and violence that he enabled finds fertile ground to flourish. But Novey pushes it a step too far, in my opinion: we get overt references to Jan 6, to the pandemic, to red ball caps and Trump lawn signs. (Many of these seem to occur in the very last bit - why even add them, I wondered?)

We don't need them. Elliott tells that story, Jean tells that story. We get the every day acts of racism in this dying little town in Appalachia, even without Leah and her Spanish-speaking husband and son. We get the guns, everywhere guns. We get the implicit-turned-explicit threat posed by young, poor, white men.

The scene on the top of the mountain, with Elliott and his friends, with Jean and Leah, tell that story beautifully. All in one scene, everything we need is there. This could have been done from a single POV.

I wanted more of Jean and her passion for her art and for this filthy, impoverished, and physically repulsive young man, 30 years her junior. I didn't need Leah, the Leah/Jean storyline, or any of the present-day political references to get that context, and found they detracted from this novel's main strength.

[Matthew Keating · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idra Novey’s “Take What You Need” is a beautiful book about a complicated family relationship and the endless drive to create. In the present, a young woman named Leah has learned of her stepmother Jean’s death, and that apparently Jean has left her a large collection of massive, metal sculptures. She’s traveling with her husband and son to go and see them. The catch is that Leah and Jean haven’t spoken in years; and Elliot, the man who informs Leah of all of this, is someone she has never heard of, who apparently moved in with Jean prior to her death. Chapters from Leah’s point of view alternate with those from Jean’s, which also take place in the past. Jean is an old woman living on her own in a very poor small town, consumed with the need to make sculptures out of sheet metal and other odds and ends.

For me, the strongest parts of the novel are Jean’s sections, especially when they focus on Jean’s experience of the value of her art. Crucially, Jean is an old woman living in relative poverty, with no artistic training at all and no support in the form of teachers or friends. Moreover, the kind of sculpture she’s making involves the use of heavy power tools, the kind of thing an old woman is pretty much guaranteed to be scoffed at for attempting. But she has a deep need to make something, an urge to create that has permeated her entire life, been stifled by numerous people and is just now starting to blossom. Everything is stacked against Jean’s success, but she manages to figure out a way to keep going. Her only guides are YouTube and the writings of Agnes Martin and Louise Bourgeois. This is a portrait of the artist, in the sense that most artists exist today: completely unrecognized and laboring because the drive is there, rather than publishing work or making a living off of it. There’s a real beauty and pathos to watching Jean struggle to find value in her work and manage against the odds to continue to create.

There’s a point in the novel where Jean’s actions in her personal life have powerful, lasting repercussions, and she’s consumed with regret and shame over the ugly way the situation plays out. The way Novey looks at these feelings is so true to life: a single moment continues to haunt Jean afterwards, an image she returns to multiple times; it has imprinted itself in her mind. As writers we are often people concerned with beauty, and I think there is a powerful temptation to look away from ugliness; Novey refuses to do so.

This relates directly to the careful balancing act that is conjuring a sympathetic character while still, as an author, taking responsibility for their actions. The way the novel is paced, I think the reader gets to know Jean, and to sympathize with her, faster than with Leah; and since Jean and Leah’s relationship is deeply troubled, it would be very easy to botch the way Jean comes off in Leah’s recollections. By this I mean it would be very easy to turn a complex, deeply human dynamic—between two people who ultimately love each other despite their differences—into a faux-black-and-white situation where the reader feels compelled to “side” with Leah and repudiate Jean completely. But Novey doesn’t do this: she manages to look straight-on at the depth of pain Jean has caused Leah in the past; when reading sections from Leah’s point of view in the middle of the book, the pain is so palpable I didn’t even want to defend Jean. And yet, going back to Jean’s sections, the sympathy was still there for me, alive and well. I think it speaks to Novey’s ability to portray more than one consciousness within a novel with a level of skill that makes both completely engrossing.

Human beings are so complicated and multifaceted, and they are capable of hurting with one hand and healing with the other, however messy that is; I’m so excited to find books where the harm a person has done is allowed to coexist, without trying to wash it away, with their triumphs.

“Take What You Need” is really a novel about balance: the balance between the love we can hold for someone and the ways they have hurt us; the balance between the futility of creating art in a world that often refuses to support its existence, and the unquenchable desire to make something.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 4 out of 5]

i loved that by page 39 idra novey had referenced cindy sherman, artforum, agnes martin, louise bourgeois, diane arbus, & carmen herrera. the story though was depressing & made me uncomfortable; it hit up against our current political environment & i'm tired. i'm really tired. OTOH, the writing was excellent & the themes were sound. but again, i'm tired.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This short novel is hard to rate. On the one hand, the writing is good, and the character of Jean, Leah’s stepmother who becomes an artist and has an unusual relationship with a young neighbor, is well done. On the other hand, the character of Leah, the estranged stepdaughter, is not well developed in addition to her being unlikeable. Although art is central to the skimpy plot, there’s too much discussion and description of welding.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tells the story of two women: Jean and her stepdaughter Leah. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties living in rural Appalachia who creates large metal sculptures from industrial scraps. Leah is a web editor and young mother living in New York who moved to the city to make a clean break from her rural childhood. Jean’s home is full of her giant sculptures, and a young man named Elliott has been helping her. The story is told in alternating perspectives between Jean and Leah. It is a book about family, art, and the urban-rural political divisions. I enjoyed Jean’s story more than Leah’s, and there is something about this book that feels incomplete, like it is just skimming the surface. The characters’ motivations are only vaguely defined. I think it could have flowed better, but I liked it enough to read another book by this author.

3.5

[Charlie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idra Novey, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, by Idra Novey, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, expected publication March 2023

Idra Novey.

In a just world, just those two words, “IDRA NOVEY”, would be like saying Stephen King or Nora Roberts; not, mind you, that she writes like either of them, but, rather, her work deserves to be as deliriously devoured and desired, awaited and celebrated.

Having been sent her first novel, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR, before it was published, and becoming awestruck by its wisdom and insight wed with gorgeous prose, I was salivating for her second, THOSE WHO KNEW, and rather than a sophomore slump, we were treated to even more layered and evocative storytelling.

Storytelling. Yes. That. In a publishing environment where so many novels are structured and shaped in the approved MFA-mold, as if written by the same committee in the same university classroom, Idra Novey writes in a singular voice. Her plots are plots, not nascent notions around which she arranges pretty, practiced sentences, but, rather unique and compelling stories written in unexpected and thrillingly readable prose, tales always reverberant with emotional strata that grabs you and shakes you and wakens you to what literature can be.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED has an awful lot to say about family, loss, judgment, finding a way in a world of our side/ their side, some of us tip-toeing, others of us jackbooting through life, too often unaware of — or dangerously uninterested in — how others perceive us, blithely ignorant that maybe we're part of the problem.

Leah has built a life determinedly unlike her childhood in the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania, estranged from her stepmother, Jean, who had once when Leah visited her as an adult, exposed her to danger and forced her to look at the past and her stepmother in a harsh and heartbreaking light. When Jean dies, Leah returns to the uber-rural scene of their falling away from each other, and is faced with the giant, welded sculptures Jean has made from the scraps of metal left behind by the now dead manufacturing industries that once existed in the backwoods wasteland. And, too, comes in contact with Elliott, who she recognizes as one of the antagonists from the dangerous night when Leah realized what Jean had become, what she had accepted as okay, and understood it to be a threat to all that Leah loved in the world — including her husband and child. Elliott had apparently been living with Jean, and the conflation of his knowing of her, Leah’s knowing of her, and Leah and Elliott’s assumptions about and fearing of one another and who they were to Jean, come together via the converging perspectives and narratives told from Leah and Jean’s point of view in this searingly truthful, honest, and heart rending novel.

At the risk of imposing on Idra Novey’s gorgeous novel my own perspective, what struck me as genius about this was the way in which she took a riveting story and played with its beginnings, middles, and ends, creating this mosaic, a whole, which so brilliantly captures what is going on in the world today. How many of us in the last eight years have discovered we don’t know — didn’t know — people we loved, or we believed loved us and thought as did we politically, philosophically, humanly? How many of us have tried — are trying every day to make something of beauty from what is left after the destruction of the once presumed unity in the world. How we struggle every day in a reality where hatred and indifference and violence are not only no longer surprising anomalies, but, rather, the stuff of the daily.

And how do we survive it? How do we trust? How do we walk through this miasmal uncertainty, and recognize what we need, take what we need in order to live another day?

In TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, Idra Novey has described in compelling, tension filled, carefully wrought writing, that very shared situation and conundrum in a personal and beautifully rendered novel.

100% recommend. Read it and encourage others to do so. Talk about it. Think about it, Let it into your heart and perhaps, as literature can and should, it will change you for the better.

[Royce · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I drank (I hope this is the correct form of the verb, please feel free to correct me) two glasses of mimosas, feeling a bit giddy, in a mesmerizing whirlwind just finished reading Idra Novey’ s Take What You Need. What an excellent story this is! I am no literary critic, but I think this novel describes rural life just before the advent of “he who shall not be named” and during his presidency, in a way Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon C. does not. Ms. Novey depicts both the people and the place in a subtle and realistic way that reads and feels more genuine and authentic and believable to this reader. I already miss the characters, Jean and Leah, knowing (and hoping) they will stay firmly placed in my mind for weeks to come.

Take What You Need, the title and the book, perfectly describes the relationship between stepmother(Jean) and stepdaughter (Leah), the search for love and fulfillment in one’s life, as well as the role of art and creating art. The story takes place in a fictional town, Sevlick, close to the Allegheny Mountains, (somewhere in western Pennsylvania, I think). (They drink a lot of PBR, if that helps locate the place.?!?)

Take What You need relates to what we learn from others, whether family, friends, teachers or neighbors. But, it is also a testament to what we take from our intimate relationships with and from others, without considering their perspective or point of view. So much in life gets lost on what we think or thought the other person was telling us, rather than fully understanding where their opinions originated from or what their intentions were. While on the surface, Take What You Need, is what Jean, the artist, took from junkyards or flea markets to construct her beautiful metal towers she calls Manglements (boxes made of welded metal). Her feelings of compassion, pity, empathy, and even sexual attraction for her young neighbor, Elliot are explored. Although they are also questioned because she is much older than him. Yet, all the relationships in this story feel so genuine. I believed every word I read.

Highly recommend this gem to those readers looking for a character-driven story of ordinary people finding meaning and redemption in their lives.

[Chaitra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a short book, so it wasn't much of a loss. But the book felt like it was Jean's art - she didn't know why she was compelled to make some of her structures but she made them anyway. I feel like the sculptures won out here - at least they had shiny mirrors.

I don't mean to be a philistine, but beyond a lonely woman engaged in a rather weird relationship with the neighborhood drug user/never do well, and a random relationship she supposedly had with a step daughter she lost touch with ages ago but makes no attempt to reconnect with her even when said step daughter tries, there's nothing much to the story. At least Jean has a personality, weird as it maybe. She has an arc too, with the guy. Not with her step daughter, the person she loves most in the world, but it's something.

Leah on the other hand, is nothing but insecurities about going to certain sections of Pennsylvania. I mean this is valid - she's married to someone from Peru, and white supremacy is on the rise in these sections of PA. But this is her only character trait, and it's tedious to read about someone like her.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a weird and strange book. Felt pointless to me, maybe just not my cup of tea.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take What You Need is a quiet, stirring novel about the estrangement between a woman named Jean and her adult step-daughter, Leah. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, this character-driven story seeks to subvert stereotypes and to highlight the complex, multifaceted inner lives lived by the people we think we know best.

Told on dual timelines from the alternating perspectives of Jean and Leah, we learn about the events that led up to their estrangement and how they were each shaped through the years by their complicated relationship. My own experiences have taught me how beautiful and important a relationship with a stepparent can be, and Idra Novey examines the complexities of this type of bond in emotionally resonant ways. The characters are fascinating and flawed, particularly Jean, through whom Novey explores the use of art as a creative outlet, juxtaposing Jean's almost fervent need to create her sculptures with her insistence on remaining in her dying, poverty-stricken Appalachian town, in the house where she grew up. The art aspect of this novel is so beautifully described and wonderfully strange.

Take What You Need is an emotionally rich, honest character study exploring regret and shame, resentment and redemption, and the complexities of love and family. It examines familiar themes in such an interesting, unexpected, and fresh way, and is a book I'll be thinking about for a long time.

[Rene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this novel! Jean and Leah are such complex, fascinating characters, and I was drawn to both of them. I think the relationship of stepmother and daughter hasn't been explored enough in contemporary fiction, and Novey renders this particular relationship with such nuance and verve, I couldn't stop reading. The story introduced me to a part of the world I don't know much about, and it caused me to think more deeply about class, political blinders, and so many other aspects of our current moment. The novel is such a wonderful exploration of art--who defines it, who decides what it means, and who is the person who makes it? Jean's commitment is rendered as honestly as her insecurities, and her artistic vision is unique and captivating.

I'm a big Idra Novey fan. I love reading her sentences. Her sensibility is witty, compassionate, and wise, and she's such an inventive storyteller, I would recommend every single one of her novels.

[Melissa Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Appalachian fiction and folk art but Leah’s self righteousness ruined this for me.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars for the accurate portrayal of how gross and sketchy rural Pennsylvania is. The author has nailed the hopeless, ugly and boring vibe of that area.

The plot is slight and dull. Told in alternating voices (Omg I am so sick of books structured this way, when will this trend die?) of a poor rural woman in her mid 60s who maybe has borderline personality disorder and creates outsider art and her former stepdaughter who is in her mid thirties and lives in Brooklyn and is insufferable. Both women scream “I am a stereotype.” Neither struck me as remotely real.

I couldn’t decide who irritated me more, the wacky artist or the stick-up-her-ass stepdaughter. Basically, whoever's chapter I was reading was who I hated the most at the time. There is also a super creepy guy in his mid twenties who is a drug addict and homeless at times and maybe a murderer? Props to the author for creating a believable loser guy. I feel like I’ve seen this exact sort of guy when visiting that area.

The author tacks on some political stuff about Trump which I did not feel like reading. At this point you are either preaching to the choir or enraging someone. It’s not like anyone’s mind will be changed reading this. It also feels like something that will date/age the novel. The book would lose nothing by leaving the January 6th references out, other than turning off right wing readers.

It’s a short book, under 300 pages, so that’s a positive. I’m curious to hear what my book club thinks of this book. Maybe they will explain it in a way that I haven’t considered?

Quotes to reference during my book club:

The woman at the other pump asks why we don't talk in English. I don't tell her that I was born thirty miles from here or that my husband is a linguist who speaks four languages in addition to English.

The number of gunshots and boarded-over windows seemed to go up every year regardless of who slept in the White House.

A ridiculous man on TV was still peddling lies about the president's birth certificate. In my revulsion at how l'd pushed things with Elliott, I forced myself to keep watching the sick pleasure this greedy man took in pushing things, too. I thought of Steve across the street, likely squandering his day on his parents' old couch watching this same bastard on TV, licking up these bigoted stupid lies like ice cream

I tried to stop picturing the heavyset friend of his who'd made the popping sound of a gunshot with his mouth, and all the sickening occurrences across the country l've watched on the news since then, returning in my mind to that cliff and my silence while they joked about shooting a Black person at their work site.

The tall one seemed absolutely craven, straight out of Deliverance. I knew how to handle him, though. I'd been handling men like him my whole life. It was Leah I hadn't known what to do with, with her woman's face and expensive-looking haircut, the irritating reserve in the way she spoke.

Her insistence on lumping Elliott in with his friends, assuming they were all card-carrying members of the KKK or white nationalists-or no, she'd said supremacists. I'd started noticing the younger newscasters using that word on the TV now, the ones closer to Leah’s age.

I didn't expect him to get so vengeful on the phone, accusing me of having a personality disorder. He made it more than clear that he had no interest in a reset, no intention of letting me see Leah again for even one last Blizzard together at the Dairy Queen. And what could I do about any of it as a stepmother? Nothing.

the local news reported four young men dead in a condemned, vacant house on Ohio Street, just a block down. I kept watching to make sure Elliott wasn't among them.Drugs is what the news said. Utter desolation is what the faces said when the local news shared close-up photos, none of them Elliott.

My sister never liked him, he explained. Chris was always asking her what she thought was good at Taco Bell, but everyone at school did that….He'd done nothing until Chris spit in his sister's face. And spit in her friend's face.

I didn't think Chris would go to that fuckin' rally in Deerfield, he said. Did he just want to stand around, I asked, with a bunch of deaf old KKK dragons who haven't died yet? That's not what it was, Elliott said, and explained the rally was huge, with hundreds of younger people.

I'd listened to one uppity newscaster on TV throwing around the words white supremacy like Leah had in the truck. I had to click away to another channel, imagining Leah off in New York sinking deeper into her judgment of me, her decision to scrub me out of her life like I was a character stain.

I told him about Leah wanting to get the hell away from that crew of his, too, her calling them racists and white supremacists. It was a shock to hear so much talk all of a sudden about what had always gone over as normal here, the expectation to just put up with people's bigotry like you do a flare of a pain in your skull, hoping it'll go away

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic third novel by Idra Novey. I found her protagonist, Jean, to be incredibly compelling; it's rare to find such a complicated, driven, and hyper-focused woman artist represented in literature (or anywhere). Her nuanced and strange relationship with Elliott was another great delight--Novey doesn't bother to clean it up, and that's as it should be. The setting and the characters' lives and interactions speak volumes about the polarized state of our nation; this is a timely and thought-provoking novel that grips the reader from the very first page.

[Dylan Kakoulli · Rating 2 out of 5]

One word, underwhelmed.

On the surface this book “sounded” right up my street.

However what started out promising, rather quickly derailed into pointless, mind numbingly dull details, that served absolutely NO point (or progression) to the “story” -other than proving the author knows a lot about sculpting, and can relate an Agnes Martin and/or Louise Bourgeois quote into almost any situation.

Flits far too frequently between being either too subtle and abstract, meaning you have absolutely no idea what’s going on, to then being unbelievably overt and cliched in metaphors.

1.5 stars

[Manda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book. Thick as molasses to wade through. Made me feel gross with the thoughts that ran throughout the book - pretty sure I had my eyebrows creased the whole time. Too deep into this grandma’s welding projects and an underdeveloped character of a kid who dips in and out of the book. The daughter’s character is also uninteresting.

She also doesn’t use any quotation marks for dialogue - which as a writer I might like writing that way… less typing… but as a reader it’s annoying.

I gave it one star bc I can’t give it zero. I wish I would have just stopped reading it. Pick a different book.

[Sierra Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel like I knew I wouldn’t like this book but read it anyway, I hated that there was no quotation marks for dialogue, I feel there was really no plot, wayyyyyyy too political in my opinion, no actual resolution at the end, and weird events.

[Brooke Shaffner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The powerful story of the complex bond between two women, our country, the ways we see and don’t see one another, and art’s possibilities—empathetic, propulsive, unforgettable.

[Robert Case · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting turns of phrase and the allure of a character driven story about an aging irrepressible stepmother with a soul-driven need to make Art, kept this reader turning the pages of Idra Novey's latest novel. I even own a hardback copy with notes in the margin.

One of them says: "A lesson in how heartfelt connections can be made across cavernous political and cultural divides." My observation doesn't refer to the relationship between Leah, the stepdaughter, and the sculptress: That parent-child relationship is a case study in the ease with which family members use distance to disengage and mute conflict. Instead, my marginalia described the healing and trust that painstakingly developed between Leah and Elliot, a twenty-something neighbor and product of western Appalachia.

I had the pleasure to attend a local booksigning event in Denver, Colorado and meet the author. Most of my reads come from the library. This one was different, and I can recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding and bridging the divides between rural and coastal America.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book landed on the New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books for 2023, which reminded me I had it hiding on my TBR shelves and inspired me to actually read it…and I’m glad I did. Novey creates a fascinating main character and uses her to explore issues of family estrangement, America’s class divides, and the drive to create art. She writes with a delicate touch and leaves behind a deep sense of sadness over connections that are missed or lost.

[Kimberly Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. Both major characters were creepy. The daughter was neurotic about rural white men, flags with mottos on them…. Really? Get a grip girl and join the human race. Then when the 60-plus mother starts a physical affair with a man 40 years younger… sigh. I just couldn’t relate to either of these women.

[Anne Blatchford · Rating 1 out of 5]

A weird book was my 1st thought on my last page. I gave it 1 star for keeping me hopeful it was going to capture me. It never did but I did finish. Hence, 1 star.lol. 2 main characters, I never connected with either. Too political, in a way that really didn't reflect much in the story to me. Just weird.

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idra Novey's Take What You Need explores relationships. A neighbor's water was shut off and Jean allowed her neighbor to take water from her outside tap. Her son Elliott came to fill their water jugs. Jean had been teaching herself welding and and experimenting with metal sculpture. Elliott was fascinated by her efforts. He ended up helping her move the heavy pieces of metal. When she was injured in a grinder accident, he drove her to the ER. Jean was an angry older woman with no close family other than Leah, a former step-daughter she has not seen in years. Jean's anger and sense of injustice works against her. Elliott misunderstands her intentions. Leah visits and feels misunderstood and frightened; she leaves without seeing the sculptures. The rest of the book focuses on the fragility of human relationships and the magical endurance of art. Novey manages to create an atmosphere that reflects the growing awareness of outsider art and people who create it.