Since How to Read the Air is full of characters who fail to communicate, it presents a challenge for Corey Allen: How do you narrate a book full of failures in communication? Allen tackles the text by choosing to almost never modify his voice as he switches from character to character. He is always Jonas, the main character and narrator, and he delivers the dialogue with the same flat, pained intonation whether the line is spoken by Jonas, a young schoolteacher living in New York City, or Jonas’ wife Angela, a lawyer he meets when she’s an intern. Allen only adds a slight accent when Jonas’ mother and father originally from Ethiopia are speaking.

The novel begins with Jonas recalling the story of his parents reuniting in Peoria, Illinois, after a three-year separation. Jonas’ mother is pregnant with him, though his father doesn’t know it yet. They are on their way to Nashville for a vacation, and it quickly becomes clear that their years apart have caused them to become something worse than strangers. The first half of the book toggles engagingly between the hauntingly written story of Yosef and Mariam’s car ride to Nashville and Jonas’ own story of meeting, falling in love with, and marrying Angela in a cold, metallic, post-9/11 New York City. The second half tackles Yosef’s immigration as Jonas imagines it, from Ethopia to Sudan and eventually to the States, as well as the dissolution of Jonas’ marriage.

In Jonas’ telling, his parents are estranged from each other and their son, and his wife becomes completely isolated from him; all four insist on interacting with the world from a balled-up fetal position. Yet Allen is able to capture the connections that run through these characters despite their fervent struggles to disconnect. By the end of the novel, because Allen never modulates his voice or intonation, the characters develop into a unified voice that speaks a powerful moral. Maggie Frank