I would never have picked this book up on my own, but I’m glad I stumbled upon this read. Mothers and Other Strangers looks at the relationship between mothers and daughters in a new and interesting way. Elsie is the only child of a narcissist mother with a compulsive lying issue. We start the story at the end, when Elise is called back to her hometown to find that her mother died of a heart attack. Elise has had a less-than-healthy relationship with her mother […]
A 5 star book with a major caveat.
Every Last One is about a mother with three teenage children. They all have very realistic teenage concerns and dramas. There’s depression in the mix, an eating disorder, relationship problems, very well-written dynamics between the kids and their friends and significant others and how they all interplay. Mary Beth’s marriage isn’t really the point but there’s also some very subtle but very real commentary on being married for a long time. The parents are each doing their best to figure out how to effectively parent […]
If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
Mothers and Daughters and Meh
Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite authors, so I was eager to tackle this one, and yet, meh. Two mothers, one who put her daughter up for adoption and has carried the secret with her (Lila), and one who is facing an unplanned pregnancy (Rae) have their lives interwoven through serendipitous means. This is a tale of tragedy, hope, and forgiveness, and how small missteps can irrevocably change the lives of our protagonists, and those around them. Magical realism is usually my jam, but […]