Take What You Need

"Leah has settled into a worldly life in New York City when she learns that her estranged stepmother, Jean, has died in their hometown. Jean had an accident while welding steel sculptures in her living room and bequeathed her oeuvre to Leah. Take What You Need alternates between Leah’s Trump flag-lined journey home to the same insular slice of the Rust Belt where Idra Novey herself was raised, and Jean’s path to belatedly producing outsider art. The result is an odd and beautiful novel about the ineffable impulse to make art, wedged into an exploration of what happens to towns and people left behind."