This novel took me to a Brazil I’ve never visited: from cold London winter to the yellow house on the Brazilian beach with family hugs & kisses, musical language, sandy bikinis, tropical food and icy beers. Appealing characters though the narrator’s voice, the stubborn archivist, might confuse as she shifts between you, she and the baby. Boldly for a debut author, she combines the confusion of being of dual heritage (“But where are you really from?”) with stories of coming of age as a woman. Some of the writing is poetry, fragmentary and artful in use of blank space and two languages.
Child of a Brazilian mother and British father, this suggests auto fiction and the author knows what it is to straddle two cultures. The section on Mr. Darcy at the end is hilarious. Highly recommended. ( )

When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world.

In Stubborn Archivist, a young British Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her—her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Our stubborn archivist takes us through first love and loss, losing and finding home, trauma and healing, and various awakenings of sexuality and identity. Shot through the novel are the narrator's trips to Brazil, sometimes alone, often with family, where she accesses a different side of herself—one, she begins to realize, that is as much of who she is as anything else.

This was a moving look into what it's like to be from two different cultures and the journey to finding out what that means for you.

*Book received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review* ( )