Four years after her critically praised debut, In a Pale Blue Light, Lily Poritz Miller returns with a second instalment in the lives of the Hoffman family, first of Lithuania, then South Africa, now newly arrived in America on the heels of the Second World War.

Widowed mother Sara and her children fetch up in a small New England town inhabited by textile mills and a bossy uncle with a rags-to-riches work ethic. Through the eyes of Sara, daughter Libka, and others, we’re drawn into the family’s efforts to rekindle the middle-class security they had in Cape Town, even amid the entrenched anti-Semitism that drove them out. Sara takes a stab at opening a bakery, then has some success with a laundromat. She tussles with Uncle Meyer over her son Beryl’s future; will he learn a trade or spend years earning a college degree? Libka, meanwhile, despite her headstrong and reclusive ways, falls prey to a matchmaking scheme with Melvin Kaplan, a suitor attractive mainly for his father’s thriving hardware business.

Miller builds a lively, gently humourous portrait of a loving but fractious family grappling with a new world. Both Libka and her mother remain attached to friends from South Africa, whose letters fill them with mixed feelings about what they’ve lost and gained by emigrating. Libka babysits for a prominent local family; one night she is sexually violated by the father, who ensures her silence with a threat. The passage is finely tuned; steeped in anticipatory dread, then heartbreak, as we watch the naive Libka snared in her attacker’s trap. Other plot threads emerge and entwine, among them Libka’s plan to reunite with an old Cape Town boyfriend in England.  

With their engaging quirks and distinctly wrought personalities, these characters convince. As storytelling, though, the book has a haphazard quality. The overall structure and the accumulating, shifting points of view have a random feel, while pivotal plot points seem dropped into the action rather than arising organically out of a well honed narrative, as they did so effectively in Miller’s debut. The Newcomers remains a diverting read, however, an old-fashioned tale of family and the challenges of immigrant life.