In Andrea Uptmor's The New People, newlyweds Emma and Rachel have relocated from Chicago to small-town Riverbend, Ind., pursuing a tenure-track professorship for Rachel while Emma recovers, emotionally and physically, from a recent miscarriage. Between the emotional angst of a stalled writing career and the physical challenges of IVF, it's easy enough for Emma to chalk up the odd and inexplicable occurrences in their small picturesque Cape Cod--a leaky washing machine, a flipped breaker, a splash of orange juice on the floor--to shoddy construction and her own fatigue. But the reality is far more concerning: Charlotte and Dirk, the former homeowners, are secretly living in the attic. The arrangement is only temporary, the aging couple having been displaced by foreclosure and left with nowhere else to go.
In The New People, Uptmor moves through examinations of privilege and identity, extraction and gentrification, politics and parenthood, holding it all with a delicate sense of emotion that keeps this debut from ever veering into the territory of diatribe. Instead, Uptmor successfully balances the tender and intimate revelations about these two couples, worlds apart and yet sharing the same roof over their heads, with a sharp sense of humor and wry insights into the many ways the myth of the American Dream leaves victims in its wake. The New People is a carefully crafted story of what makes a house a home: the people that share it, to be sure, but also the community built (or not) around it and the many marks left, both good and bad, on the spaces inhabited. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective