The Book of Mothers: How Literature Can Help Us Reinvent Modern Motherhood by Carrie Mullins
Goodreads Review
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Goodreads Review
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
All They Ask Is Everything by Hadley Leggett
This novel HAS to be your next book club read. You will love it! It's a debut but reads so proficiently and smoothly with such narrative expertise, you wouldn't think it was a first for the author Hadley Leggett. The story flows with connections between the POVs of three females, all with a powerful sense of responsibility for two young girls Wren and Ivy, who are taken into foster care after they are found waiting in their car for their mother outside a grocery store.
This premise is reminiscent of the opening of The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan's frightening sci-fi novel. In Leggett's novel, it feels even closer to home since it is set in modern Seattle and presents contemporary living and parenting.
The three women who lead us through the tale give the reader insights to the young girls Wren and Ivy's needs from different perspectives. We feel sympathy for the girls and readers who appreciate the ramifications of parenting will appreciate how this novel tears the reader from one opinion to another, each time the narrative shifts between the girls' mother Hannah, their assigned foster mother Julie and their maternal grandmother Elaine. It's a rollercoaster of emotions and I was gripped throughout the novel to know what would be deemed best for the girls and what would happen in their favour or against their livelihood. Not to mention how those decisions might affect their birth mother, caring foster mother and concerned grandmother.
And the ending ... YES! Brava @hadleyleggett . Powerful, emotional, strong and perfect for this novel.
Here's a snippet of the back cover copy. I wholeheartedly recommend you get a hold of this novel for your future (book club) reading:
"Each woman thinks she's the best possible mother, but none understands the full truth. Old hurts, long-held secrets, and budding new relationships collide as they fight for the girls who could make them a family."
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Liars by Sarah Manguso
Goodreads Review
This novel oozes with subtle exasperated wit. But it's so close to sadness too. It exposes the rawness that suppressed women can end up feeling alongside particular, controlling and self-absorbed men; those who have not managed to grow up. At many points I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at Manguso's prose.
Jane is honest and self-deprecating with the reader with retrospective narration of her life before, during and right up to the point when her marriage implodes and pulls her towards a post-divorce catharsis.
Jane is vulnerable in her actions, thoughts and reactions to her boyfriend and then husband John's position in her life. Manguso's simple paragraphs shift the narrative quickly from one state to the next and before she knows it, she has allowed herself to become even more of a controlled victim in John's narcissistic self-absorption. Yet, sadly there's also his oblivious ignorance hinted at in her anger of his actions or inaction. He doesn't seem to know how terrible and selfish he is. He's simply too ignorant to know how to live with and care for another person with empathy. He lacks that connection and understanding of anything other than himself. John is horrendous and downright incompetent yet Jane also seems to perpetuate it with her inertia and inability to take control of her own life, in spite of admitting herself that she is a control freak. It is so sad reading of this character's situation and bad luck in having ended up with someone so incompatible to her.
"And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I decided to carry on. After all, a person can be grandiose without being a clinical narcissist. And I was a control freak, a neat, freak, a crazy person. A long time ago, in my twenties, I'd even spent ten days on a psych ward after a hospital-administered overdose of steroids for my autoimmune condition....
Ultimately, it seemed to me that their relationship was purely incompatible. I say that with a whispered thought that actually marriage isn't terrible for everyone! Even if much of the annoyance on both sides of this relationship was embarrassingly familiar.
And here a few paragraphs earlier is one of the numerous examples of quiet, unrecognised moments of utter frustration that pop up throughout the novel:
"After I sent the final email to confirm the housewarming party I'd been planning for a month, John said, Wait, I'm going to be in Calgary that night.
I took one of John's favorite mugs out of the cupboard, shattered it on the front steps, carefully swept up all the pieces, and then cleaned the entire house."
A blinder of a novel. Really. Shocking. Eye-opening. Funny. Sad. Troubled but also frighteningly true in many instances.
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
What a collection! These personal essays are curated (and written!) so beautifully that they sweep the reader through the various universal emotions of family, what it is to be female, a daughter, a sister and a friend, grief, self-imposed guilt, pride, humility and ultimately kindness. Ann Patchett reveals herself as a strong-minded creative individual with ambition and ideas (lots of them) but the main thing I learned of the voice behind these essays is how important it is to grasp hold of your creative self and allow it to shine, to give, to love, be loved and offer all that you can to help others.
I know that Patchett would not think this necessary to say, but I found her status as a female who has chosen not to have children influential to her attitude towards and her approach to many things. I don't know many women without children through choice, but those I have known are all similar in their complete outpouring of kindness and positivity to others. My aunt Sandra who lived alone but had sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, colleagues and friends who adored every ounce of her creatively independent, generous-with-love being. Family friends of my parents who have always given to their heart's content; love, kindness, gifts, time and empathy. And another example being my recent running friends who exude positivity and enthusiasm for others, listening and giving time, when I know they're not always interested in listening to stories about other people's children!
Many of Ann Patchett's essays hit a nerve with me, such as her tales of college life and living away from home, sustainable living and lenten observances in her case with clothes shopping 'My Year of No Shopping', minimising life's belongings in 'How to Practice', the influence of authors from childhood, flying, knitting, friends and mothers ... and grief, in particular the title essay 'These Precious Days' which details her time spent with friend Sooki along her journey involving pancreatic cancer.
If you've only ever read novels by Ann Patchett, this is a must-read. Such simple topics but oh so poignant insights and observations on humankind in every essay. As The Washington Post succinctly said: 'A beautiful reminder of what's important," and the New York Times: "Excellent."
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor
There is something about this novel that I can't quite label except to say that it is hauntingly brilliant. As a debut, it is magnificent with its simplicity but depth of emotion and representation of powerful topics and thoughts.
It is set on a fictional remote island off the coast of North Wales in 1938 when a dead whale washes up on the shore and Manod, the eighteen-year-old narrator is drawn to accommodate two English ethnographers who force themselves into the culture of the island, seeking narratives that are simply untrue and pushing Manod and her Welsh-speaking sister to view their surroundings differently. She is faced with a realisation that she does have interest in the world and experiences away from the island, yet she also sees that her vulnerable community is being misconstrued and exoticised.
We learn that Manod has lost her mother and so looks after her father Tad and sister Llinos. She appears older than her years, with an intelligent but innocent understanding of what is happening with these English visitors.
In her acknowledgements, author Elizabeth O'Connor gives thanks to "the wonderful international publishers who have picked up [my] strange little book about Welsh fishermen, and taken it to new shores," and I think this perfectly sums up the humility and efficacy of this lyrical book that is exactly that: strange but fabulous. It is also useful to know that though the island setting is fictional, O'Connor has based her setting on an amalgamation of islands around the British Isles. The Note on the Text at the end is worth a read.
Finally, I'd like to note the connection I felt this novel Whale Fall has with Haven by Emma Donoghue, also a remote island setting, though a wildly different time period of the year 600. Not the stories or characters, but the style and lyrical mood of both novels can be compared in terms of how unhurried and haunting the literary styles are.
Look at these exact and astonishing quotations of praise O'Connor has received on the back cover of her Pantheon Books US edition. Truly marvellous debut novel.
"A haunting, unhurried, unusual debut that vividly evokes the life of a teenage girl on a sparsely populated Welsh island in 1938. O' Connor offers a clear-eyed exploration of our tendency to fetishize the rural, the isolated, and what it means to become an object of study." Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre
"A powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy." Colm Toibin, Brooklyn
"The quiet cadences of Whale Fall contain a deep melody of loss held and let go. It is a gentle, tough story about profound change." Anne Enright, The Gathering
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Here is a heartbreaking tale converging past and present storylines in Vietnam. Due to the Vietnam war and its reverberating impact on all those involved, the characters we meet in the various timelines are each vulnerable, wholeheartedly tugging on our empathy throughout this historical novel of experiences.
The main timeline is in 1969, tracing to Vietnamese sisters Trang and Quynh, who leave their rural village to work in a bar in Sai Gon, with the hopes of earning enough money to send home to support their parents's medical debts. They are drawn into the seedy bar lifestyle of the city, one in which young girls like them are used to drink, flirt and entertain the American soldiers in return for money. Naive romance between one of the sisters Trang and an American GI who rents her an apartment and misleads her to thinking he is in the relationship for romance, as she is.
The second storyline follows an American veteran, Dan and his wife Linda, return to Vietnam to face and with hope, heal his PTSD. Once there, Dan is reconnected with his past wartime but also relationship experiences of his time spent in Sai Gon during the war. There is also a third collection of people including Phong, an orphan who is now an adult, who is eager to find his American father and move to the US for a better life.
There is much sadness in this novel. There are many twists and revelations in the story related to the intersecting lives of these Vietnamese sisters, Trang and Quynh, the American veteran Dan and his wife Linda, and the Amerasian man Phong and his wife Binh and two children Tai and Diem.
The title 'Dust Child' refers to Phong's story, as he grew up with darker skin to his fellow Vietnamese orphans, was called 'the dust of life', 'Black American imperialist', and 'child of the enemy'.
Essential reading though achingly raw and full of poignant historical information about the aftermath of this horrendous war.
I look forward to Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai joining our Writers' Book Club discussion with @lidijahilje
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
