Review: Brass by Xhenet Aliu

by MK French

Elsie is a waitress at the Betsy Ross Diner in Waterbury, Connecticut. The old brass factory had shut down, so most of the people remaining in the town are poor and with few options. All Elsie can really do is wait tables for the change she gets for tips, hoping to one day move away. Bashkim is the Albanian line cook at the diner, and they fall into a relationship even though she knows he has a wife in Albania. It doesn't feel real until she becomes pregnant, and all of his schemes don't seem to amount to anything. Seventeen years later, Elsie's daughter Luljeta is rejected from NYU and suspended from school on the same day. It makes her feel trapped in Waterbury with her mother, and suddenly the father she never knew seems like the way to discover who she should be.