Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
by Sarah Yahm
Dzanc Books, 2025
The night after fleeing her mother's funeral, cellist Louise Rackoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease—the same one responsible for her mother's slow, agonizing passing.
Determined to spare Leon and their daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. Her disappearance forces the Rosenbergs to grapple with how to find meaning in the face of mortality—a manic and mystical quest that sends them careening across the globe, colliding into tattoo artists, Chasidic Jews, playworkers, and witches. And finally, back into each other.
Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm's own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.
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Praise for the Book
“An extraordinary novel about the inescapability of family patterns—some of which can be reversed, but all of which leave indelible marks—the story holds Louise and Leon's love for their daughter, and her love for them, at its incandescent center. Devastating and unforgettable, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is a celebration of unabashed family love.”
“In Yahm's bawdy and irreverent debut, a Jewish family copes with a congenital illness. The story is heartbreaking, but it teems with life thanks to the family's irrepressible witty banter. This cathartic novel will move readers.”
“With irresistible wit and tender heartbreak, Sarah Yahm's Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation explores a family unraveling over decades, its members grasping for control and meaning when fate offers neither. A memorable, moving debut.”
“This is a big story, told with enormous skill and compassion... Readers will find themselves riveted.”
About the Author
Sarah Yahm has worked as an educator, oral historian, documentarian, writer, and editor. She's published in Slate, Bellevue Literary Review, and placed pieces on NPR and affiliates. Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is her first novel. She is a developmental editor for fiction, creative non-fiction, college and graduate school personal statements.