We Are Called to Rise: A Novel
McBride’s powerful  debut is a tour de force of imagination  that packs a wallop. She took a single real-life event and from it spun an immensely moving morality tale about how four vastly disparate people, each traveling his or her own road, all converge at an intersection of time and space to profound effect. Eight-year-old Albanian immigrant Bashkin Ahmeti writes a letter to an American GI in Iraq as part of a school pen-pal project. The reply he receives from Specialist Luis Rodriguez-Reyes, a native of  Bashkin’s new hometown of Las Vegas, spirals into a vortex that pulls in every bad act, personal and international, that McBride can think of into one cataclysmic event. Fans of tales about the butterfly effect will be drawn to this novel, though some may object to McBride’s heavy hand at driving the point home too often and with over-the-top intensity. But, without question, McBride is a truly commanding literary presence, and her themes and characters, especially Bashkin, have good weight. --Donna Chavez