I can't pretend to know what this book is really about but here's my take: it seems to be a commentary on the life of Christ, or maybe those whose faith follows His path. Pew (found in a church, how appropriate) draws others to him/her and becomes their confessor. Pew first inspires generosity in the townspeople but they become uneasy with someone who doesn't conform to their beliefs. The novel ends with a religious-based forgiveness ceremony with allusions to needing someone to die so their confessed sins can be forgiven for another year. This novel certainly inspires lots of reflection on its meaning!

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC to read and review.

As soon as I read the premise of this book, I knew I had to get my hands on it. This is 100% something that's up my alley: a little quirky, but thought-provoking nonetheless. It definitely delivered on that front.

Pew is not the kind of book one should go into hoping to connect closely with the characters or become incredibly engrossed in a fast-moving plot. The only real glimpses we get into the townspeople are when they're baring their souls to Pew—the silent, gender fluid, racially ambiguous main character of indeterminate age—or in the few instances we see them functioning as a community. What this does, though, is give a glimpse into the "good" white Christian society full of people who swear up and down that they want the best for everyone while obviously meaning they want what's best for the people who appear to be just like them. It's interesting to see them interact with someone who is not clearly part of their ingroup OR their outgroup and the way each character chooses to address this. In a town with so much racism, sexism, classicism, and xenophobia hidden in its underbelly, Pew is a confusing newcomer who becomes the talk of the town and the target of multiple townspeople's microaggressions (and sometimes just straight up aggression).

By the end of the book, there are still a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, but it didn't particularly bother me. If you accept that some things will remain a mystery, you'll find that reading 'Pew' is an enjoyable journey that will make you think about contemporary American society and the issues it so often brushes under the rug, including the echoes of past oppressions it claims no longer exists but that continue to thrive beneath the shiny veneer of "good" communities.

This book kept me guessing right up until the end. Parts of it felt a little like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", so I was expecting a big reveal at the end and I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed how the different ways in which characters related to Pew said more about them than about Pew themself. This memorable, short read left me with a whole lot to think about!

I live in the South and always look for books set in the South with Southern authors. This one intrigued me after reading some reviews. Although I can say it is not my usual genre, I am really not sure where it fits because the story is not like any other I have read. People come to church only to find someone or something asleep in the pew. It is unidentifiable other than knowing it is human. Pew does not speak but in the days ahead Pew will be spoken to by many. The town is getting ready for a festival and their experience with Pew shows them many things about themselves they don't necessarily want to know. It is a short thought provoking book. Perfect for a book club discussion. I give it 4.5 stars. I'll be watching this author for more great books to come. It's always good to step out of your comfort zone and read something different. Thanks to @netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. #pew #catherinelacey @catherinelacey

Oddly enough, when the novel ended, and all my questions regarding our main character, Pew, remained unanswered, I discovered that I didn't mind the concrete resolution, and rather enjoyed the ephemeral response. Lacey's novel takes place over one week, each day, a chronicle of the events surrounding the mysterious guest found sleeping on a church pew. No one is certain of Pew's age, sex, race, or identity. Every now and then Pew will answer a question to a young person who asks a question, basically with a confirmation of not knowing the answer of age or where they came from. This small southern town is about to celebrate their Forgiveness Festival, where all transgressions are forgiven, meaning the night before the event, some let go and do whatever, knowing they will be forgiven the next day.

This is an engaging novel that takes place in a church community, where church members feel compelled to help "Pew," providing "Pew" will undergo exams, which are refused. As everyone speculates his origin, and the festival nears, there's never really a culmination of forgiveness or understanding, but we watch a town intimately feel righteous in their pursuit of claiming to care for a "stray" soul.

Interesting story that touches on a lot of topics: racism, sexism, religion, class, and societal norms. Very thought provoking and a great book for discussion A person shows up sleeping on a pew at a church in a small town. This person does not talk. No one knows the person's age, sex, race or family. They decide to call the person Pew because of where he/she was found. Pew is taken in by a local Christian family, but remains silent. The town is getting ready for a localannual religious rite called the Forgiveness Festival so Pew becomes caught up in the activities prior to the festival.

This was a short novel and very well written. There is not a lot of action and I kept waiting for the climax, but was kind of disappointed to be honest. I think, though, that the point is really to make you think about how society reacts to someone out of the norm. There is a lot revealed by how people respond to Pew and it made me think of how people in general react to someone different.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux through Netgalley for an advance copy.
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I would classify this book as literary fiction. I feel the book aims to make us think. It's all about existentialism. When a person is found sleeping on a church pew, but cannot speak, he is taken in by a family. Without being able to really talk, he is named Pew and soon questions arise as to who he is, how old he is, is he a he or a she? The story culminates in a festival of forgiveness. As curious as I was to who Pew was, somewhere after the middle, I was frustrated with the author because she wasn't giving us much. And what she was giving us was philosophy. I felt preached to at times about life and it's meaning. Our bodies and their meanings. Shouldn't we all just be our thoughts? It's a weird book. It could have been brilliant but it let me down.

Catherine Lacey will always and forever be one of my absolute favorite writers. She can make the strangest things make the most sense, writing into consciousness things we have existed in forever. In this book, a community is changed, and in the process, readers are as well. The earliest pages have you wondering where the story is going after a stranger wakes up in a church pew not knowing where they came from. Who belongs to whom? Where does anyone go when there are no labels to judge based on? This piece is a fascinating discussion of what matters, who decides where we go next as a society, and why some voices are louder than others. A must read.

Pew was not what I expected, but there was a lot there anyway. It isn’t really about Pew, but rather all about the people Pew comes into contact with. Reminiscent of books like Winesburg, Ohio, but with a contemporary lens, this is a case study on small town America, her flaws and all.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.
What a brilliant premise, I'm obsessed with the Ursula LeGuin short story The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas and teach it to all my students. I often contemplate the story from the point of view of those who chose to walk away in spite of the utopic conditions, but have not contemplated the POV of the child, meanwhile my reporting, specifically the investigative reporting I do on children in the child welfare system is much about shining a light on the child in the basement.
The prose was nice too:
I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.-17

A town has a feeling, I remembered someone telling me long ago, because certain kinds of thought are contagious.~ from Pew by Catherine Lacey

I grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Detroit and lived in and around Philadelphia as a young adult. My first time in a small city of under 8,000 left me struggling. A woman told me that everyone needed to fit into a box, and no one knew what box to put me in. When I took up quilting, people relaxed. Quilters they knew. I finally fit into a box.

Nothing can be more closed than a faith community. The best are open and affirmative. The worst sort people reject outsiders who challenge their values. Been there, too. Are you with us or against us? And if you don't join them, you become the outsider, an enemy.

Some humans are comfortable with ambiguity, but most want to parse the world into black and white, good and bad, male and female, us and them, liberal and conservative.

Catherine Lacey's Pew introduces us to a character with no past, no name, no identity.

One Sunday morning a worshipping congregation in a small town finds a being sleeping on a pew. Out of Christian charity, a family takes the foundling home. They name the being Pew.

The foundling has no identifying characteristics and is mute in response to people's questions.

Clothing is offered to see if Pew chooses male or female attire. The pastor tries to learn Pew's age; there are rules about how things work based on age. A social worker and a physician are brought in to discover if Pew has suffered physical or mental abuse. Pew does not respond, will not disrobe, will not speak. Pew does not know the answers to the questions being asked.

Christian charity turns to self-protection, discomfort, and even fear.

This community is separate from the world and has their own ritual of forgiveness. Pew has appeared a few days before the festival. It unnerves the community.

There is a Shirley Jackson feel to the novel, The Lottery coming to mind. The small town, the closed society, the ritual of the scapegoat are in this novel.

Pew's voice takes us into some deep territory, showing what it is like to be on the receiving end of social pressure that seeks to categorize people---put them into a box.

Can't we just be and let be? Why do we have to 'fix' the things we don't understand? Must our bodily being determine our place in the human community?

Pew sometimes catches a visual memory, almost can articulate a past. But words fail, they are misunderstood, and eventually forgotten. Some things are incommunicable.

Members of the community project identities onto Pew, seeing what they want to see.

A woman tells Pew about her son faith journey. The son determined that to truly follow the teachings of Jesus one had to give up all attachments in the world. The son gradually let go of his identity, becoming one with all creation. Her son's mystical journey of ego death has shattered his mother and she hoped to discover Pew was her lost son. Pew is shuttled from the white community to the black side of town. An old African American woman sees the 'new jesus' in Pew.

People tell Pew their stories, revealing sorrows and horrible acts they would not confess to a community member.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and I can't whittle it down to one idea. Perhaps readers will all see their own story in the tale, project what they want to find. I will be ruminating on this one for a long while.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Literary fiction at its best characters that come alive.I was drawn right in to this novel ?Catherine Lacey is a creative unique writer.Highky recommend,#netgalley#fsg

"Since I had woken up on that pew, the meals had been endless and I wishes I could have reaced back and given one of them to those days of hunger in the past, or that I could have moved this plate to a place - there must have been such a place0 where someone else was hungry."

This was such an interesting and unusual book. The main character is a person who wakes up in the pew of a church one morning and one of the church members takes the person into their home. We don't know the gender or the race of the person as each of the characters in the book tries to figure it out desperately. They name the person Pew for where the person was found because Pew won't talk to anyone and won't tell them anything.

The writer does an excellent job of showing how the discomfort of being in the presence of someone who doesn't talk can overtake other people with their need to fill the void. I also liked the Shirley Jackson-esque Festival towards the end. The unsettling, eerie tone accompanies the whole novel and crescendos in the release that is the festival.

No revelations, no twists, no surprises, this is merely a thought-provoking well-written novel.

Thank you to netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting book, which I feel may somewhat slip through the cracks. Told in first person of which we don’t know if is male/female, race, age. For the purpose of this novel it really doesn’t matter. This character is the vehicle we have into the lives it sees/experiences. How others judge or feel the need to keep talking to hear themselves. This is a deep novel. The unfortunate thing against it is publishing date. When the world wants to escape during these trying COVID times, I fear this will be overlooked at its release.

This is such an unusual and intriguing novel, original and thought-provoking. I’m still not sure I know exactly what it means, but I found that its strong point as it’s a book that is open to many interpretations, a strange and unsettling tale that offers no easy answers. In a small unnamed town in the American south a stranger is discovered asleep on a church pew when the congregation arrives for their Sunday service. Following Christian principles, a local family take the stranger in, but become increasingly bemused and then irritated by the stranger’s refusal to speak, not to mention the impossibility of identifying his or her sex or race. For want of anything better, the stranger is given the name Pew, as that is where he/she was found. At first no one in the community is judgemental, but over the 7 days during which the novel takes place, this begins to change, and Pew’s presence increasingly begins to unsettle them all. It’s a first person narrative but Pew remains a blank to the reader as she/he does to the townsfolk. The novel plays with ideas of belonging and community, how others perceive us and how we perceive outsiders, what happens when we don’t conform, and how there’s a human need to categorize the other and when we can’t then initial acceptance can soon turn to hostility. A fable for our time.

No one knows where Pew came from, what their name is, how old they are, or what their story is, even Pew. The townspeople name their newest resident because that’s where they were found - sleeping on a church pew. Pew is taken in by a local family while they “get back on their feet,” but Pew can quickly tell that they are not the only mysterious thing about this small town. I flew through this short novel, my first social isolation 1-day read. The writing is beautifully descriptive and it is such a unique story.

Interesting concept and lyrical writing style (almost reads like poetry), but found it a little obscure to hold a true narrative.

I enjoy Catherine Lacey’s writing and this is no exception. Loved the way the novel unfolded, but the ending was disappointing after a lot of lead up.

Pew is a story for our time. A story that deals with complexities and toxicity there is when people face the unknown. The desperate need to know.
the story started of strong and built up a climax only to fall flat in the end. though this book is very different from laceys other work i will still actively seek out her work.

Pew is a fascinating novel. It considers the ways in which our self-presentation is dependent on how we predict others will perceive it. When faced with a person without gender or race, and a mutism that removes fear of retribution for confessed sins, the people of an unnamed Southern town confess a lot. Not just confessions of words but via their actions. The churlish and ungracious actions of the town dwellers when their charity is not met with what they feel it deserves highlights exactly what religion does best, hypocrisy. The townspeople offer contractual charity, where giving only occurs because something is expected in return. The quid pro quo in Pew’s case being that they must conform to racial and gender stereotypes in return for being taken in by the town. I loved this book. As well as being a compelling and interesting story with great characters it also forces the reader to examine what they require from others in terms of identity. It asks the reader what is required before listening to someone in a way that holds their opinion in high regard, and why that might be.