parenthood

April 9, 2024

Top Ten Tuesday: C’s Favorites

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a freebie, so it felt like the perfect time to highlight some of C’s favorite books! I don’t talk about him overmuch here because the internet is wild and you never know who might be out there, but of course he’s an enormous part of my life and I really hope I am able to impart my love of reading to him! Here are ten books that he’s loved, some of which have come in and out of favor but all of which he has demanded at some point or another.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom: One of my own childhood faves, this has been a reliable hit and is part of our every night routine.

We’re Different, We’re the Same: Sesame Street is golden around here, so he loves this book and finding the parts of his face as well as his favorites on the pages!

Little Pookie: Truly every Sandra Boynton book could be on this list! He loooooves her. He adores the series of books about Pookie the pig.

I Am Sam I Am: Based on Green Eggs And Ham, I have read this board book so often that I have it memorized.

Llama Llama Wakey Wake: Another one where he loves the entire series (we have all the seasonal variations too!).

What A Wonderful World: This one is the lyrics to the Louis Armstrong

You’re My Little Sunshine: We have all the variations they’ve made for this series as well, and they’re in various states of disrepair from being read so often.

Little Owl’s Night: Another nightly must-read!

I Like It When: He loves acting out the pages…pretending to eat the food, playing peekaboo, and getting a big squeeze!

January 1, 2024

What A Year: 2023 Edition

It’s officially 2024 now, which means it’s time to take a look back at the 365 days that were 2023. Some of them were great! Some of them were less so. But we all made it through and we are so excited about the (leap!) year to come!

In Life…

This year brought plenty of its own challenges, but looking back at last year’s post reminded me how far down I was emotionally in 2022 and honestly 2023 was a giant step forward. Part of that was finally, finally seeking help for the ADHD that my pre-parenthood coping strategies were no longer able to sufficiently compensate for. It turns out when you can hold a thought in your head for more than two minutes before it’s inevitably replaced by another, and then another, and then another, until you get home and realize you forgot to get batteries at the store AGAIN, and aren’t constantly blaming yourself for your inability to just focus and get things done that need to get done, your life is easier to manage and your self-esteem increases! Despite the struggle of finding my ADHD meds every month (shortages have lasted more than a year now!), it has been absolutely worth it and I’m so glad I did it.

C remains the joy and delight of my life. He walks (runs!) and talks (sings!), though he was late to both with virtually no incremental or precursor steps before he took to doing them. It seems like that is going to be his way: not interested whatsoever until he’s ready, and then a wholehearted embrace of a new skill. Which is nerve-wracking, as a parent! You just want to feel like your child is normal, keeping up with his peers. But we would never want C to be anyone else than who is, and who he is the most charming, sweet-natured, busy and active little man in the whole world.

This year saw us check off some “first”s for him outside of the official milestones. I went through my first legislative session as a mother, which was honestly really hard. He had just turned one so he was still pretty small for most of it and I leaned out as much as it is possible to do during a session, leaving as early as I could in the hopes of being able to see him before he went to bed. That’s not something I can repeat going forward if I want to keep myself in the position I’d like to be career-wise. And while I’m sure each new session will bring its own challenges in terms of the conflict it will inevitably create with being present as a parent, I’m glad that this first one is over and done with. We also took our first major trip as a family, to visit my parents and my sister’s family in my native Michigan. He was such a little trouper for most of the trip, cheerfully meeting tons of unfamiliar people and adjusting admirably to not just my mom’s house but my sister’s when we stayed there for a night to give the cousins some time together. The plane trip back would have been bad enough with all of the delays we experienced, but C getting food poisoning and barfing all over me on the last leg of travel was a rough one and I hope we have our most dramatically awful travel experience behind us.

I also managed to travel on my own a little bit, from a work retreat in San Francisco early in the year, a very quick solo trip to Michigan, a weekend in Las Vegas with my sister to see Adele, and my annual girls weekend with my besties in Los Angeles. It’s getting harder and harder to leave C, he’s so much fun right now, but I know it does me a lot of good mentally to take time to be a person outside of being a mother here and there.

In Books…

Read: 60. Despite the “easier” books I indulged in last year to give my overtaxed brain a break, I didn’t feel very satisfied with my year in reading. The number looked respectable enough for a new mother, but I wasn’t enjoying my books in the same way I usually do. I suspect at least some of that was the aforementioned overtaxed brain, but I decided for this year to just fall back into my normal reading patterns and let things fall where they would. In the end, not only was my number better this year (despite reading three long classics!), I also felt much more engaged with my reading and for that, I am very grateful. I’m actually doing a little experiment with my reading for 2024: I’ll only be reading books by women (I am undecided, currently, about whether to do exceptions for my IRL book club because I have no ability to influence those choices). I honestly don’t think it’s going to mean a better/more fulfilling year in reading, I haven’t noticed a significant difference in my average book rating between male and female authors. I’m just curious about what it will feel like to have my brain engaged almost solely with writing from other women for a year. And now for superlatives from the past year!

Best Book of the Year: Tin Man

It’s quite short, but so so beautiful. This story of a man who is remembering and coming to terms with the loss of the two people he loved most in the world, figuring out how to be true to himself for maybe the first time in his life, is poignant and sweet and hopeful and tugs on the heartstrings in a way that doesn’t feel emotionally manipulative. I read some good stuff in 2023 but this was the standout that stuck with me.

Most Reward For Engagement Demanded: The Hakawati

This book is quite long (over 500 pages), and told in overlapping stories that wind back around themselves and each other. If I wasn’t paying particular attention as I read, I often found myself flipping back to figure out where (and when) I was in each storyline. But the storytelling is so great that it was a pleasure to let myself get drawn in. You have to pay active attention to be able to follow this at all, but it’s very much worth the effort.

Most Searing Memoir: Know My Name

There was competition here, because I also read Therese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries this year. Both are stories from women of color about traumatic experiences, and both are beautifully written despite the difficult subject matter. But I found Miller’s prose irresistible, I was constantly thinking about it even when I wasn’t reading it. She really takes you on a journey with her, as incredibly difficult as that journey is. I especially appreciated the way she dealt with the non-linear nature of trauma recovery and the secondary victimization of being part of the criminal justice system. It’s so easy for public figures to get turned into symbols but her writing makes it impossible to forget that there’s a real person behind the name in the paper.

Best Classic: Middlemarch

It’s a doorstopper (nearly 1000 pages in the edition I read), and a clever look at what happens after the happily-ever-after, as both of the leading couples get together early in the book. From there, we see how their personal flaws and the other person’s inability to be exactly who they were expected to be combine to create unhappy marriages. Not all of the characters are especially likeable, but they’re richly drawn portraits and feel like actual people. Bonus points for the witty, eviscerating writing! Austen could be savage but she’s got nothing on Eliot.

Worst Classic: Dracula

It’s so boring and dragged so badly and all I wanted was for it to be over.

Most Immaculate Vibes: The Night Circus

To be fair, this book is like 95% vibes, so if the vibes didn’t work it would be a big mess. Judging by the Goodreads reviews, not everyone agrees with me that the vibes do work, but given the book’s enduring popularity, I think I’m on the right side of this one. I just sank into the world it created. I can still picture it in my head, months after reading it. I can also remember most of the plot (which isn’t normal for me), because there was so little of it.

The Adaptation Was Better: The Run of His Life

Like seemingly everyone else, I watched the FX miniseries about OJ Simpson with Sarah Paulson and Sterling K. Brown and loved it. I actually already owned the book at that time, but hadn’t yet read it. Now that I have, I can say confidently that Ryan Murphy (and/or his actors) did it better. I would not have thought that Murphy would be someone I would point to as a source of emotional realism, but he and his cast work to find the real people inside the figures that Toobin treats more as pieces on a chessboard (or, in the case of John Travolta’s Bob Shapiro, find the most funny version of that person). It made for a much more compelling depiction and I would recommend it heartily over its source material.

Best Step Outside My Comfort Zone: Annihilation

I don’t read a lot of science fiction or horror books, though to be fair this book isn’t an example of a particularly hardcore version of either genre. There are very few jumpscares here, and essentially zero gore. What there is is a masterfully created sense of unease and tension. I couldn’t really read this book at night because it so unsettled me. It’s intriguing and haunting and quite short at just about 200 pages, so it goes very quick. I absolutely loved it. Honorable mention to Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, the war novel I never would have thought I’d love but it was phenomenal and restored my faith in historical fiction as a genre.

January 1, 2023

What A Year: 2022 Edition

As I abandon my previous, birthday-to-birthday format for my yearly updates, I’m starting a new tradition. What A Year will be a look back at the major events of the previous calendar year, both personally and thoughts on what I’ve read as well.

In Life…

What a lot of changes from where I was a year ago! Baby C was still an inside baby, kicking away at my ribs. I think back on the long stretches of free time that I had back then, and as much as I love my son, I have to admit I do miss it. I was pretty uncomfortable for those last six weeks of pregnancy and sleeping was a challenge. Everyone who tells a pregnant lady to “sleep while you have the chance” should have a watermelon taped to their abdomen and try to turn over in bed. C was late, so I had an induction scheduled for first thing on Valentine’s Day, and we watched the Super Bowl and then headed to the hospital. C has always had his own idea of how to do things so he did not join us until the next day, and I have not felt well-rested since. But we are so lucky, he is such a happy little dude with so much curiosity and such a good nature.

Becoming a mother has been wild. As I’ve written about before, my mental health was Not Great after birth and I am still being treated for post-partum depression and anxiety. Our dryer crapped out TWICE and our water heater tried to burn the house down in the first month after we brought C home, which certainly did not help the state of my brain. We’ve had formula shortages, antibiotic shortages, children’s pain reliever shortages. C has gone from being a little potato to a crawling, pulling-up-to-stand, babbling baby who loves to play with his stacking cups and watching him grow has been so fun. His giggles are my favorite sound. But motherhood has meant an inevitable change in my conception of myself. This is hardly an original observation, I know, but it’s true. The things that I thought of as fundamental to being who I am have had to get crunched down into smaller spaces because so much is taken up by parenthood. I have a new appreciation for the challenges my mom faced as a single mother because I struggle to imagine doing this without my husband. Parenting is scary and exhilarating and joyful and hard. I am not the same person I used to be, for better or for worse.

I’ve tried to not let go of everything, though. I made my first international trip since 2015 to head to Skate Canada International in Toronto with my best friend for two full days of figure skating and catching up in person. And then my annual girls trip with my high school besties resumed for the first time since pre-pandemic (I still remember, in the early days, debating whether we would be able to go on our June vacation, which was scheduled for Charleston). We spent a long weekend in San Diego and explored museums and breweries and shopping and talked and talked. Both were very fun and very good reminders that I am a person outside of being a mother. And, of course, I’ve read. Significantly less than I have previously…I won’t hit 50 books this year, which marks the first time since 2014 that’s happened. I’ve noticed that my taste, for the moment, has been changing as well. My familiar favorite doorstopper character studies have been harder to get lost in. I simply don’t have the time to immerse myself in a slow-moving, nuanced world the way I used to. I’ve tried dipping my toes into romance and YA, with mixed results. Maybe more mysteries? Maybe more light nonfiction? I’m sure as C continues to get bigger and his needs change, my preferences will continue to evolve. But books are, as always, my favorite form of portable magic.

In Books…

Read: 46. This is not a terrible total honestly, but is less than half of my top recent reading year (2016). I could make excuses to myself about longer, denser books tripping me up but the reality is that I read four of the Bridgerton books, too, so it all balances out.

Added To My Physical TBR: 125. Eep.

Favorite Book: Wojtek the Bear

This book relies on the shock value of the idea of a beer-swilling, cigarette-eating bear who was adopted a cub by a Polish Army regiment and went with them to World War 2 as its hook, but the story goes deeper than that. Not just of Wojtek himself, who is saved from an almost whimsical storybook quality by occasional reminders that he is in fact a bear, but the story of the regiment and the story of what happened to them after the war. It’s a story of love, and loss, and new beginnings, and it’s all true, and it’s a great book.

Unexpectedly Wonderful Book for Younger Readers That Older Readers Will Enjoy Too: The Graveyard Book

I should not have been surprised that Neil Gaiman wrote something wonderful but I do have to admit that it being a Newberry Award winner, and aimed at a tween/teen audience led me to expect something less…delicate, almost. That was my bad, because this book about a little boy who grows up in a cemetery was one of the highlights of my reading year. There’s adventure, there are of course some spooky moments, there’s a poignancy that grabbed me by the heart. Do not let this one pass you by.

A Book That Should Stay With Younger Readers: Tuck Everlasting

This is a “childhood classic” that I’d never read but seemed like it would be easy enough to get through in the newborn days. It was in fact too easy to get through, with a plot twist that can be seen coming a mile away and a central romantic relationship that would absolutely seem swoony to a pre-teen but to an adult felt creepy and weird. Some books really aren’t meant for adults and that is 100% fine!

Book That Made Me Want to Know More About Zelda Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night

Though my reading this year also included the fictionalized account of her life, Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, the book that actually made me want to learn more about her was Tender Is The Night. A thinly veiled account of their marriage (along with being a portrait of the world of American expats in post-WWI Europe), F. Scott renders the Zelda insert character, Nicole, as much more interesting than his own alter ego, Dick.

Surprisingly Readable Intersectional Feminism: Feminist Theory, From Margin to Center

I’d never read bell hooks before, and was a little intimidated to start this because I thought it would be academic and dense. But hooks doesn’t let herself get bogged down in jargon. Her arguments that a full implementation of feminism would be a radical change and that in order to fully effectuate that change and liberate all women, we must break down other oppressive systems like race and class, are clear, incisive, and insightful. Is it like, light reading? No. But neither does it feel like a homework assignment.

Book That Turned Out To Be Less About Ballet Than I Thought Based On Its Title: Pointe

Theo IS a ballerina, and her dedication to dance is very much a part of the narrative. But the cover and title suggest that this is a “ballet book”, when it’s in fact about a Black teenage girl living in white spaces, like her high school and ballet studio, who is learning how to recognize her past experiences for what they were instead of what she’d imagined them to be at the time. I quite liked it, though I thought it was perhaps trying to do too much plot-wise. There is a LOT going on in this book, but it ultimately works because of Theo herself, who is not always 100% sympathetic but is always making choices for understandable reasons.

Book That Was Weird But I Got Really Into: Chime

I can’t even recall how this book ended up on my radar, exactly. It plunges you right into its own kind-of-fantasy, kind-of-real-world, vaguely steampunky atmosphere and does not give you any explanations. You discover as you go, but the more fantastical elements of the story are counterbalanced by a beautifully portrayed, complicated relationship between sisters Briony and Rose. There’s a mystery plot and a romance and the aforementioned supernatural bits and I feel like it would go very love-it-or-hate-it but I loved it.

Non-Fiction That Is Excellent But Really Hard To Read As A New Parent: One of Us

It is absolutely horrifying how normalized it has become for there to be mass shootings in the United States. When it happens elsewhere, it’s much more surprising. This is a comprehensive examination of the 2011 terror attack in Norway committed by Anders Breivik, including an in-depth examination of the perpetrator’s life, how he came to be the person he is, how he prepared for and committed the attacks, and the trial afterwards. It also highlights a few of the students who were murdered, exploring their families and their stories. It’s masterfully done and very compelling but oh is it so hard to read while your own little baby sleeps in his crib.

A Book I Should Have Loved On Paper That Never Really Clicked For Me: Intimacies

This seemed like very much a “me” book! Young woman coming of age, really into the idea of language as a concept and what it reveals and what it hides, ambiguous relationships. But it failed to hook me and felt like it was relying on its refusal to provide answers to suggest a deeper profundity than what was actually present.

November 5, 2020

Book 258: Paint It Black

“She felt like old people who forgot what shoes were for, each gesture calling meaning into question—unbuttoning a button, breathing. Movement slowed to half-speed, quarter speed, as if the air had thickened. She could take nothing for granted, her hand on her shirt, her ability to keep the floor underfoot.”

Dates read: August 29- September 3, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Although most people, when asked what kind of baby they’re hoping for, will say “a healthy one”, I suspect most actually have a gender preference. I think a lot of people hope for the same as themselves…if you’re a lady, it’s probably easier to think about raising a girl, and vice versa. And I think others think about the ease of raising. I’ve heard that girls are “easier” until they hit the teenage years, and then boys are. And then there’s the idea that while girls “leave” your family eventually to start their own, boys are always a part of their parents’ family.

It’s this last, I think, that often drives the stereotypical tension between wives and mothers-in-law. But there’s a difference between the usual case of being a bit possessive of one’s little boy, and emotional enmeshment that’s unhealthy. In Janet Fitch’s Paint It Black, Josie Tyrell is intimidated by her boyfriend Michael’s mother Meredith. She hears his stories of the way Meredith kept him close to her after his parents got divorced when he was a child, and the world he grew up in as the son of a leading concert pianist who traveled the world is wildly different than the one she grew up in and ran away from, on the wrong side of the tracks in an industrial city in southern California. They meet in Los Angeles, where Josie’s working as an art model after dropping out of high school, and Michael goes to escape the Harvard education he never really wanted. They fall in love, rent a house together…and then Michael commits suicide.

His death comes at the very beginning of the novel, and over the course of its 400 pages we get the story of his relationship with Josie, and with his mother, as well as the two women’s gradually intensifying connection after he’s gone. It’s tempting for Josie to play along with what Meredith wants, to give in to the ease and glamour of being a replacement for Michael. But there’s a sense of a fly being drawn into a spider’s web. Paint It Black is a study of grief, and the ways even the ones we think we share everything with remain mysterious to us, and the power of narcissists to prey on the vulnerable.

Clearly the relationships between mothers and daughters are something Janet Fitch finds compelling, as it was the focus of her big hit White Oleander and is explored in its own way here, with Josie becoming a kind of surrogate daughter to Meredith, who upgrades her from Michael’s girlfriend to his fiancee for an air of legitimacy. The terms of this particular relationship, ostensibly between adults although with Meredith holding all the money and most of the obvious power, is an unusual one, and I thought Fitch wrote Josie’s grief well enough that we could understand and empathize with how she becomes ensnarled in it. Speaking of writing, it’s really the star of this book. I was constantly tabbing passages to come back to, that captured a feeling in an interesting and new way. It’s lush and rich and evocative.

It could have used some editing, though. The book’s biggest issue is that it’s simply too long for the amount of material it actually has. It feels like it drags in the middle because it’s just Josie mourning, and drinking, and taking pills, and being unable to help herself from being in contact with Meredith even though she knows she shouldn’t be. And while I did very much enjoy the writing, it did at times feel circuitous and self-indulgent. The characters are not as well-developed or interesting as those in White Oleander, so if you’re picking up this because you loved that, be prepared for a less fully realized novel. It’s got merit, and if it seems interesting to you it’s not a waste of your time to pick it up, but it’s not a must-read.

One year ago, I was reading: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Two years ago, I was reading: In Defense of Food

Three years ago, I was reading: La Belle Sauvage

Four years ago, I was reading: The Queen of the Night

Five years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

September 17, 2020

Book 251: The Pleasing Hour

“They had forgotten me, and I felt snug and warm in my blanket of incomprehension. I had always wanted to go to France to learn the language, but instead I’d come and lost my own. Finally I was free of the need to explain anything to anyone.”

Dates read: July 24-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

It can be difficult to see your own family objectively. Many families have a level of dysfunction that seems normal from the inside, but if you were to see someone else’s family doing the same thing would seem maladaptive. That doesn’t necessarily mean the people in that family are unhappy, though. No one’s family is perfect, and if it’s not one weird pattern of behavior, it’s another. Finding a balance where personality quirks are able to be negotiated and worked out with each other is the important thing.

The Trivot family, living on a houseboat in Paris, looks happy from the outside in Lily King’s debut novel The Pleasing Hour. A beautiful mother, Nicole, a successful father, Marc, and three fundamentally good children: lovely teenage Odile, high-spirited Lola, and serious Guillame. Every year, there’s a new jeune fille who works as an au pair, helping with the kids and around the house, and this year, it’s 19 year-old American Rosie. Usually, the young women in her position are studying at the Sorbonne, perfecting already skilled French, enjoying a social life untethered to the “real world” they’ll return to at the end of the year. But Rosie is different. She’s clumsy with the language, not attending school, and spends most of her off-duty time in her small bedroom. What drove her to France was not an appetite for adventure, but escape from a situation she couldn’t face.

Not long before she arrived, Rosie had a child, and gave him up to the older sister who basically raised her. She’s still working through that experience when she comes into the Trivot household, where the glossy surface conceals plenty of problems underneath: haughty Nicole and sheepish Marc are disconnected, and the kids each have their own struggles. Rosie becomes more integrated into their lives, finding some sense of security, before a trip to Spain unsettles everything.

One of the major themes of the book, and one that really resonated with me, is language: the power of fluency and the way it can both bring people together when it’s shared and isolate them when it’s not. Rosie arrives speaking poor French, setting her apart from the family, and even as her proficiency increases to the point where she feels comfortable speaking it in most situations and to everyone else in the household, she fears Nicole’s ability to make her feel wrong. Nicole herself tries to bury the Provencal accent that marks her as a non-native Parisian. And the way Rosie sees herself and is seen by the Trivots shifts when they go to Spain and she has the most command of Spanish. Anyone who’s ever tried to learn a language, or gone someplace where they didn’t speak the primary one well, knows how isolating it can be when you don’t understand it, how frustrating it can be to sort-of understand, but be unable to clearly make yourself understood, the thrill of being able to communicate.

While I found that particular thematic element of the book compelling, as a whole I’ll admit it was just okay for me. It is a debut, and though it’s the promising kind (King’s prose is strong, and she shows flashes of brilliance of characterization), it doesn’t seem quite sure of what exactly it’s trying to say or do as a whole. We get in-depth looks at the family’s children, and go back in time to learn about Nicole’s parents and childhood, but get no insight into her as an adult or into Marc at all. The plot meanders, and important threads of narrative, like Rosie’s emotional processing of her pregnancy and surrender of her child, didn’t feel like they went anywhere. It’s not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not particularly good either. If what you’ve read makes you interested, you won’t be wasting your time in picking up the book, but you won’t really be missing out on anything if you don’t.

One year ago, I was reading: Empire Falls

Two years ago, I was reading: The Luminaries

Three years ago, I was reading: Duel with the Devil

Four years ago, I was reading: Neon Green

April 25, 2019

Book 178: Stay With Me

“I loved Yejide from the very first moment. No doubt about that. But there are things even love can’t do. Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces under your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”

Dates read: September 19-22, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Sometimes it seems like there are two kinds of long-married couples: those who genuinely love and appreciate each other, and those who seem to have just decided that they’re sticking to it because of stubbornness, mutual resentment, “for the children”, or any variety of reasons that aren’t love. When I read stories about couples who’ve been married for decades, I find myself wondering which group that pair falls in. Are the latter something we should be celebrating, honestly? I’ve known people who got married only to find out later that the person they thought they were swearing forever to isn’t who they’ve ended up with. Ending a marriage, even one that’s gone sour, sounds like it’s an agonizing decision, and I can’t help but think that the social pressure to not make that decision keeps people together who might be better off apart.

What exactly it means to be married, and married well, is at the heart of Ayobami Adebayo‘s Stay With Me. When we first meet Yejide, we learn that technically, she’s had a long marriage. She’s lived apart from her husband, Akin, for many years, but she receives an invitation to attend his father’s funeral as his guest that sends her on a reminisce about their past, and how their separation came to be. They met at university in Nigeria, and though they were both seeing other people at the time, quickly fell in love and got married. Their marriage was happy, except that even after several years, they were childless. Though Akin and Yejide were a modern couple, his parents were traditional, and if their first-born son couldn’t produce an heir for the family with his wife, they had a solution: a second wife.

This is the first in a series of what come to be deep, deep cracks in Akin and Yejide’s relationship. Yejide is desperate to keep her husband to herself, and knows that in order to do that, she must somehow become pregnant…which she does. The plot has several twists and turns, and while I’m usually not especially fussed about spoilers, this is one of the cases where I feel like letting the plot unfold as you read is important. Though the book is relatively short (under 300 pages), Adebayo deals with some powerful themes: love, marriage, mental health, trust, family, sex, and what it means to be a parent.

This is a debut novel, and in some ways, it shows. Some of the plot twists seemed to be a little too difficult to believe, and it sometimes felt that they were being deployed too quickly, with too little time for each to really settle and resonate before the next one came along. And while I appreciated the way she paralleled the upheavals and tensions of the central marriage alongside the political turmoil roiling Nigeria during the lives of the characters, references to it often felt shoehorned in. I felt like the book should have been longer, which could have ameliorated both issues by letting the plot breathe a bit.

At the end of the day, though, this is the kind of debut which makes me really excited for the author’s follow-up(s). Yejide is a fantastic character…she’s not always likable, and often makes poor choices, but remains sympathetic throughout. The perspective we get into her childhood informs the person she comes to be, and I wish we’d gotten a bit more of this with Akin. We get some, but he’s less well-developed than she is and I think the book could have been even stronger if we’d gotten more of his perspective. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed this book and look forward to following Adeyabo’s career. I would recommend it, but maybe not to everyone. I think it’ll appeal most to readers who enjoy character-based domestic dramas and don’t mind if they occasionally trend towards the implausible in their plotting.

Tell me, blog friends…what do you think are good reasons for ending a marriage, if any?

One year ago, I was reading: Rosemary’s Baby

Two years ago, I was reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Three years ago, I was reading: The President’s Club

September 28, 2017

Book 96: The Mothers

“Anna was fifty-eight, a wife and mother, a stalwart of the community. She had built a solid life. But that wasn’t all of her. I’m not one person, Anna thought, none of us is. All the secret feelings I’ve kept inside- they are all the different people I am.”

Dates read: October 8-10, 2016

Rating: 4/10

There are few things in the world that are as simultaneously alluring and terrifying as motherhood. For me personally, I am both on the one hand wanting to be a mom and raise children and watch them grow up, and on the other completely overwhelmed at the thought of the expense, and the responsibility, and the idea that I might get it wrong. Maybe I’m being naive, but I imagine many other women feel the same way. Some of them go on to have kids, some don’t, and there’s something anti-feminist about it, but it seems undeniable that wrestling with the decision whether or not to have children is fundamental to a female experience of the world.

Rod Jones’ The Mothers is set in Australia over the course of several generations. It begins with Alma, who gets pregnant young and rushes into marriage with a man she barely knows. By the time their second child is a toddler, the couple is estranged, and when her husband brings home his paramour, Alma flees. She has nowhere to go, but is taken in by a young man about her age and his mother, who he still lives with. The two eventually conceive a child of their own, but he doesn’t want to marry her and cuts off his support of their daughter, Molly, abruptly during her youth. Broke and desperate, Alma sends Molly to live in an orphanage for a time, but eventually reclaims her…and her father makes a surprise reappearance in her life. Molly grows up and makes a good marriage of her own, but finds herself unable to get pregnant.

Meanwhile, Anna is a teenage mother sent a religious home for unwed mothers, where she is convinced to give up her baby son for adoption despite her desperate desire to keep him. That son is adopted by Molly and named David, and spoiled as Molly tries to work through her own complicated childhood legacy. David, in turn, grows up to get his girlfriend Caroline pregnant, and even though he stays with her, he doesn’t exactly do right by her. When David’s older and has established his family, he wants to meet his birth mother, and she has complicated feelings about a reunion.

This book is hard to write about because there’s not a lot there. The themes he riffs on, of the difficult choices women have to make around motherhood and the way mothers raise their children playing out in how they deal with their own parenthood, aren’t new, and he doesn’t do anything special with them. It does strike me as strange that this book was written by a man…the emotional costs of motherhood seem like a topic much more germane to a female experience. Not that it’s written poorly or with a hamhanded treatment of the subject…it’s fine if completely unremarkable, for the most part, but it made me wonder about Jones’ own feelings about his mother. Was he raised in an environment where he became particularly empathetic towards women’s stories, or does he have a more complicated relationship with mother figures in his life that he’s trying to work out? Psych 101-ing someone based on one piece of writing is a completely futile endeavor, but his subject and treatment of it are unusual enough that it elicits the question, anyway.

Tell me, blog friends…do you think our childhood relationship with our parents resonates throughout our lives?

One year ago, I was reading: The Circle

December 1, 2016

Book 53: We Need To Talk About Kevin

“I’m no longer sure whether I rued our first child before he was even born. It’s hard for me to reconstruct that period without contaminating the memories with the outsized regret of later years, a regret that bursts the constraints of time and gushes into the period when Kevin wasn’t there yet to wish away.”

Dates read: May 14-18, 2016

Rating: 10/10

Columbine happened when I was in the eighth grade. I remember how it rocked all of us (the students, our parents, the teachers) in the small town I grew up in, the kind of place (like Littleton, Colorado, probably once thought) where it seemed like bad things just didn’t happen. There was a brief security craze, where we had to have our backpacks searched on our way into school every day for a few weeks or a month or so, but eventually that died down and normality more or less resumed. I know that Dylan Klebold’s mother recently wrote a book about her experience with her son before the shooting and what happened afterwards. I’ve read some good reviews, even, but I can’t find much interest in actually picking it up. It seems too raw, too real. Fifteen years later, but it’s still too soon somehow.

But I was interested in picking up Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, a fictionalized account of a mother’s life before and after her son perpetrated a hideous act of school violence. There’s just something about real life actual tragedy that’s harder to read about, even if it’s much less graphic than a fictionalized account. I’ve read one book about a sexual assault survivor’s experience (Alice Sebold’s Lucky, which was mandatory reading for a college class or else I likely would never have thought about reading it), but several novels about the same kind of thing without blinking an eye. Fiction, it would seem (at least for me) draws a veil between the reader and the story recounted that insulates it a little, even when the book is about things (like rape) that are horrifyingly commonplace and may well have been inspired by an author’s own experience.

In We Need To Talk About Kevin, main character Eva Khatchourian isn’t a very good mother. She would (and does) admit that freely. She never had a burning need or desire to be a mother; she was mostly content with her marriage to Franklin Plaskett, their life in New York City, and her position as founder and CEO of A Wing And A Prayer, a series of backpack travel guides. But all her friends were having kids, and Franklin really wanted one, and she’d been feeling like her life needed a bit extra spark for a while, so she agrees to have a child. It’s rough from the start: she chafes at the restrictions foisted upon her as a pregnant woman, she has a long and difficult labor, and when Kevin is finally born, he refuses to nurse or even drink her breast milk from a bottle. She suffers from post-natal depression, and when Kevin proves to be difficult at best throughout his entire childhood, she fails to bond with him. Not only that, but as he grows up, she comes to see malice behind nearly all of his actions and regard him with suspicion and fear. Just before his sixteenth birthday, he kills a teacher and several classmates at school. So she was right about him all along…wasn’t she?

Eva, whose story is told by Shriver as a series of letters from her to Franklin a year or two after Kevin’s school rampage, is a classic unreliable narrator. While she’s unafraid of presenting herself in a negative light or admitting fault, she’s also our only source of information about Kevin. The incidents she relates about his conduct are often unsettling and worrisome…but they’re hand-selected, by a woman who has had all her worst thoughts about her offspring confirmed by what he did. But while there were plenty of people Kevin alienated throughout his life besides his mother (a succession of childhood nannies, kids in his play groups, school classmates), Kevin did have people in his corner, most significantly his father, as well as a high school teacher who ended up among his victims.

The question the novel raises and never answers (but gives you lots of food for thought in both directions along the way) is the age old one: nature or nurture? Kevin was difficult from the moment he was born, but if he’d been able to bond with his mother, would he have been just plain difficult, instead of a murderer? Eva herself is prickly and sometimes, even often, unlikeable. Maybe he just takes after his mother that way. How much does Kevin’s pushing back against her result from her aloofness and reserve from him? On the other hand, if he is truly evil, like she sees him and his own murders tend to indicate, what could she have done to change that? Eva and Franklin cared, were present, took an active interest in him and his life. There are a lot of kids who don’t even have that. I found myself changing opinions as I read, sympathizing with Eva, then Kevin, back and forth. Shriver doesn’t let either of them off the hook, nor should she. There’s plenty of culpability to go around. This sucked me in and haunted me after it was done. I’m sure I’ll continue to think about it in the future. It’s disturbing subject matter, but it’s phenomenally well-written and I highly recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…nature or nurture?

One year ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men

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