Sometimes Mine

By Martha Moody
Riverhead Books

Genie Toledo, the best cardiologist in Ohio, is in the midst of an eleven-year passionate love affair with Mike Crabbe, a married basketball coach residing in another state. Their love affair has survived the initial hiccups of insecurity, jealousy, and possessiveness. After a decade of physical and emotional closeness they have settled into this arrangement, perfectly understanding and respecting each others boundaries, and traveling to meet each other every Thursday. A series of events, including Mike’s diagnosis of prostrate cancer place Genie in the middle of Mike’s family affairs. She eventually has to confront Mike’s wife Karen and her children and reveal the secret affair.

In Sometimes Mine, Martha Moody unravels the struggles of Genie Toledo: professional, single mother of a college aged daughter, trying to balance her professional and personal life. The author describes how a tragedy in her personal life makes Genie come out of the emotional shell she has woven around her, which results in her repairing the mother-daughter relationship.

Does Mike’s wife accept the relationship? The children’s reaction to the “other woman” in their father’s life makes this book an interesting read. Moody narrates the story from the “mistress” perspective, which is different from the usual approach. The author, without becoming melodramatic, describes the intricate relationship between the two women in Mike’s life—each dominating certain aspects of his life. Towards the end of the story we can see a bond developing between Genie and Karen, both seeking support and reassurance from each other.

Review by Sunitha Jayan

Starting from Scratch: A Novel with Recipes

By Susan Gilbert-Collins

Touchstone

In Starting from Scratch, Olivia Tschetter successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and lost her mother all in one day. The youngest of four siblings, Olivia moves back home to be with her father, to run away from her responsibilities at school, and to grieve. Her connection to her mother, who was an incredible cook, is food. At first, she uses food as a way to shove her pain aside, but it eventually becomes one of the ways she gets past her grief.

This is the simplest way to describe a book that is both straightforward and layered at the same time, particularly when revealing those layers would give away all the best parts. Let me just say that it’s easy to enjoy this book on a superficial level—it’s well-written, the characters are easy to relate to, and it’s a quick read—but there are also moments that can be appreciated more deeply.

For example, when Olivia unexpectedly starts with an old friend of her mother’s, Winnie, she stumbles into a minefield of sorts as Winnie reveals secrets Olivia’s family has kept from her. It turns out that Winnie is estranged from her own daughter, and the parallels between the way Olivia is suffering and the way Winnie and her own daughter deal with their own issues are quite compelling. It all reminds the reader that life-changing moments are universal, and that even if we deal with things in our own way, we don’t have to deal with them alone.

Another thing I must point out (again, without giving too much away) is the way this novel pulls off having both food and abuse as its subject matter. It sounds completely absurd, yet Starting from Scratch does it in a beautifully poignant way.

Food is almost like this family’s own language; it’s the way they communicate with each other, for better or worse. As Olivia works to finish the cooking newsletter her mother was working on when she died, the reader is taken through Olivia’s mourning and her reaction to the secrets she’s learned from Winnie. Meanwhile, the way women and their families deal with abuse is at the very heart of this story. Surprisingly, one thing does not take away from the other or make the abuse seem trivial.

In short, Starting from Scratch is a pleasant surprise. I found myself laughing out loud at some parts, and weeping at others. The story sucks you in and it’s over all too soon. By the end, I felt like I was a part of this family, and I wanted desperately to find out what happens to all of them beyond the point at which the story ends.

Review by frau sally benz

The Things We Carry

Directed by Ian McCrudden
Lono Entertainment



The Things We Carry tells the story of two sisters coping with the death of their drug-addicted mother Sunny (Alexis Rhee). After leaving her mother and sister Eve (Catherine Kresge) to travel the globe, Emmie (Alyssa Lobit) returns home upon news of her mother’s death. The sisters are forced to confront both Sunny’s drug-addicted friends and each other while searching for a mysterious package.

The film is loosely based on the real-life experiences of sisters Athena and Alyssa Lobit; Athena produced the film, while Alyssa wrote the script and stars as Emmie. As Eve and Emmie, Kresge and Lobit execute their roles with a muted intensity that speaks to the internal struggles of their characters. Lobit’s nuanced turn as the rebellious Emmie presents a woman whose antagonistic exterior hides a sensitive interior. The rest of the cast's performances are largely forgettable, as the other characters are merely meant to serve as catalysts to Emmie and Eve’s introspection and confrontation.

The Things We Carry alternates between scenes from Emmie’s memory and the sisters' present-day reunion, illustrating how they reached the point of estrangement. These vignettes are artfully articulated, as visual cues from the present (such as an image of a jacket or a yellow cab) serve as links to Emmie’s past. Flashback sequences on film tend to come off as confusing or campy, so it’s a testament to Ian McCrudden’s direction and Alyssa Lobit’s writing that the flashbacks are so effective at enhancing the storytelling and building narrative tension.

The film is saturated in yellows and browns, and features unnaturally bright lighting that emphasizes Emmie's discomfort in returning to her hometown. These blown-out images are placed in counterpoint to the beautiful violin and bass compositions of Timo Chen, whose score ebbs and flows, entering moments of reflection and heightened emotion and serving as an aural bridge between remembered past and lived present.

What is perhaps most impressive about the film is its complete lack of didacticism. Emmie may feel morally superior to her mother, but the film does not necessarily agree. The Things We Carry does not make moral judgments about any of the characters' actions; though the film centers on the detrimental effects of Sunny’s drug use, she is not presented as merely a drug addict—she is also a mother, a wife, and a friend. Ultimately the film is not without its flaws, but The Things We Carry survives on its earnestness and engrossing narrative structure.

Review by Joanna Chlebus

Bitch is the New Black

By Helena Andrews
Harper Collins

I don’t believe bitch is the new Black any more than I believe that thirty is the new twenty. As our most recent racial shenanigans have reminded us, Black is still its same ol’ Black self. And anybody who engages in the same shamtastic behaviors at thirty as she did at twenty is just plain trifling. That said, I think y’all should check out Helena Andrews recently published memoir Bitch Is the New Black.

We know good and well that it ain’t easy out here on single Black women. And the Tyler Perryization of Black women’s lives has made it possible for the likes of Steve Harvey and every other jackleg Black relationship expert to capitalize on our story but us. Since Black women are always represented as loud, sassy, and inappropriate, our silence has been deafening. It’s high time that we get bell hooks with it, and start talking back. Helena Andrews has done that masterfully.

Hers is a delicious Black girl story, one that hits so many familiar notes that you are transported episodically to different moments of your own life to recall how you handled a similar situation—family conflicts between your mom, your grandmother and your aunties; your first cheating lover; a pregnancy scare; a ridiculously stressful and uninteresting first job; your first encounter with the domestic abuse of a loved one; your love affair with The Cosby Show. And yet, Helena Andrew’s story is also all her own—unique, self-contained, and filled with the kinds of idiosyncrasies that remind us we are not the same, no matter how many two-dimensional portraits of ourselves we encounter daily.

Here we learn what it is like to be a Black girl reared by a lesbian mother, in a family that associates same-sex love with pedophilia. We encounter a bohemian Black girlhood, one associated with movement, not because of poverty or military life, but because of her mother’s need for new surroundings. For the adult Helena, this translates to a life of literally walking the walk. She doesn’t drive and has no interest in learning, even after two muggings. And when she isn’t walking it out, homegirl Helena is talking it out, in classic Black woman fashion, with an endless string of refreshingly familiar girlfriends and colorful female characters.

The text is, of course, not without its hiccups. But then, neither is the path of a professional Black woman approaching thirty. There are moments when the transition from e-chat speak to text are choppy and disorienting. That’s a technical issue. There is, however, also the sense that while Andrews grew up with a lesbian mother, she wants us to be very clear that she’s as straight as they come, whatever that means. There are, thus, endless recourses to referring to the most mundane of things as being “so gay,” or as in a chapter called "Trannygate," referring to a transchick as “the she-man... name unnecessary.” Uh, not cool.

Andrews certainly didn’t need to get didactic with it, but her own childhood put her in a unique position to represent queer folk humanely and heterosexual dating in ways that might have avoided such strident heterosexism. That said, I know now in a very real way how much courage it takes to let others into your life—particularly among sisters who can sometimes be the worst critics among us—and so I refuse to be overly critical of this book. I don’t promise that you’ll like everything in it. You might even dislike the author, given her self-professed bitch tendencies. But what she has proved is that our stories matter—and if you don’t like hers, write your own.

This is a book for every Black woman who’s ever needed to read, hear, feel, breathe another sista’s story, a book for every girl who’s ever dealt with inappropriate sexual conversations from a mother who’s trying to be hip, an ex-dude with stalker tendencies, or a dead end relationship that kept you pinned down because the sex made your toes curl. And while Andrews has her admittedly bitch moments in this book, she does not shy away from admitting the vulnerability that informs those moments, or from brutal, gut-wrenching honesty in general, even when it means discussing the suicide of a close Black girlfriend in a culture where strongblackwomen just don’t do that.

When I heard about this book last Fall, its title caused me to approach it with the same skepticism with which I approach Tyler Perry movies. I didn’t need to have anyone else calling me a bitch just because I’m educated, especially not a sista. Unlike TP, however, this text does not disappoint. When you read Bitch Is the New Black, you will know that there’s another Black chick out there, who’s slogging through it, who’s working it out, perhaps very differently from you, but who ultimately gets it.

Review by Crunk Feminist Collective

Letter to My Daughter

By George Bishop
Random House

I admit that I am influenced by book titles in my choice of books to read. In that sense, Letter to My Daughter was somewhat off putting for me. I was expecting a somewhat predictable story of a mother writing a letter to her daughter. Fortunately, I overcame my reticence, and upon reading the first couple of paragraphs I found myself immersed in a riveting story.

The novel begins in present day Baton Rouge, Louisiana; a mother (Laura) has started writing a letter to her daughter Elizabeth to alleviate her anxiety and worry. Her teenage daughter has just left the house after yet another argument with her mother In her letter, Laura has decided to tell her daughter about her own troubled adolescent years and share secrets about her past she had previously been unable to confide.

As we read Laura's letter, we travel back in time to the late '60s. Laura’s parents are conservative Southern Baptists who don’t approve of her relationship with Tim, a Cajun boy from the other side of town. Laura continues to see Tim against her parents wishes until one fateful day when Laura’s life is changed irrevocably. At the risk of giving too much of the plot away, the novel touches on themes of prejudice, young love and sexuality, the Vietnam War, mother-daughter relationships, and the challenges of being both a teenager and a parent in an increasingly complex world.

You don’t have to be a parent or a teenager to relate to this story. Once I started reading Letter to My Daughter, I found it difficult to put it down and ended up reading it in just two sittings. Don’t be put off by the title of this book as I was; the author has created an unforgettable story that will stay with you for days after you turn the last page.

Review by Gita Tewari

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

By Jane Satterfield
Demeter Press

The poet and essayist Jane Satterfield writes a hauntingly discontinuous prose-poem about a sort of exile. To those of us with dual citizenship—or, perhaps, to those for whom home is two places, neither tidily reconcilable with the other—Daughters of Empire speaks poignantly to the longing for connection between past and present, mother and daughter, literary inspiration, and career frustration.

The author here teases us with the possibility of a conventional narrative of exile: what will happen when a woman who spent most of her formative years in the United States becomes pregnant and has a child while being cast aside by a prospective employer and emotionally abandoned by a narcissistic and controlling husband? Will she find in this land of her birth and ancestry an escape from the soul-deadening labor of fixed-term teaching in American institutions, and instead find joy in teaching Larkin and Plath and Heaney and Hughes to students who understand and appreciate the value of being taught by a working poet? Will she find in the geography of her own imagination the spiritual bond to the Brontë sisters that she seeks?

Our relationship to place is similarly discontinuous, and home, whatever that means, is an ongoing negotiation. Satterfield’s narrator is unstuck in time, just as she is unstuck geographically, so we get poetically rich spots of memory: “I stand on Charlotte Brontë’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick,” she tells us on the first page—either a vertiginous reaction to this confrontation with her nineteenth-century literary forbearer, or perhaps a bit of first-trimester nausea. And then suddenly it’s several years earlier, and she’s a different sort of exile, not quite fitting in to this group of students or that literary community brought together in American college towns. And then she’s a punk, a Johnny Rotten, but with much more ambivalent feelings towards Queen and country.

And then she’s in Corby, a “piss hole in the dead heart of England” where she was born, traveling with her mother through a reconstruction of her own ancestry and her mother’s shared dual sense of place. But then, heartbreakingly, she’s starving emotionally and perhaps physically as a mother estranged from her husband, whose Fulbright Exchange, in the mid-1990s, was in part responsible for this year in England which serves as a potent but unstable center of this narrative.

Because of the evocative power of her memory and the clarity of her language, she draws the reader willingly into this vortex. And yet, she resists closure. Does she find career fulfillment? Can she bridge the imaginative/historical gaps and construct a satisfactory home? Can she free herself from this dreadful relationship? The memoir asks instead that we participate in her desires, in her lyrical remembrance, in her evocative moments that shuttle back and forth through time, woven together by her search for identity, for her discovery of home.

Review by Rick Taylor

Delivery

By Betty Jane Hegerat
Oolichan Books

The latest novel from Canadian author Betty Jane Hegerat, Delivery is a story about the bonds that attach mother, daughter, and granddaughter. It’s about the stark choices that women have to make when facing an unanticipated pregnancy and an abrupt mid-life transition. It’s also a story about women learning what really matters to them.

The novel is written from the point of view of Lynn, a woman in her mid-forties, and of Heather, Lynn’s twenty-year-old daughter. At the center of the story is Beegee, Heather’s new baby whom she had planned to place for adoption. The story begins after Heather has brought Beegee home from the hospital, against the advice of the social worker. Heather has been caring for Beegee for two weeks and it now seems possible that she wants to keep her baby. Making what seems to be an almost spur-of-the-moment decision, Heather tells Lynn she’s decided on adoption after all. She instructs Lynn to deliver Beegee to the eagerly awaiting adoptive parents, but Lynn, who carries her own burdensome secret about an unplanned pregnancy many years before, cannot bring herself to complete this errand. Instead, she loads Beegee into a laundry basket, puts her in her car, and bolts.

Driving from Calgary to a small island off Canada’s west coast, Lynn makes for the cabin owned by her ex-husband’s friend, Einar. This is the place where she and her family used to spend their vacations. It’s also a place that she dislikes for its sunless forest, constant rain, and the memories of her failed marriage it evokes. Over the course of the novel, we’re introduced to Jack (Lynn’s former husband who left her two years previously for a younger woman), Marty (Lynn’s son and Heather’s brother), and Einar (who carries a torch for Lynn). We also meet the compelling Hannah, Einar’s neighbor and the mother of an ever-expanding brood of children, with whom Lynn forms a surprising bond.

Hegerat writes with fine and dazzling precision, a keen attention to language, and provides a beautiful rendering of both Lynn and Heather’s interior voices. She shifts easily from present to past and back to present, managing to show how the weight of previous experiences flicker into consciousness to inform and shape the current moments of her characters’ lives. She manages to give us real and very ordinary female characters who nevertheless shimmer on the page.

Delivery might be described “a quiet novel” in that the action is relatively small and domestic; it builds slowly and steadily to a final revelatory moment. Yet the novel maintains momentum because Hegerat makes us understand and care deeply about the people she writes about. We want to know what happens to Lynn, Heather, and Beegee. We also understand that the decisions they make will have repercussions far beyond the few days contained within the confines of the story that Hegerat tells. A finely crafted novel with great emotional depth and resonance, Delivery is an immensely satisfying read.

Review by Elaine Beale

The Last River Child

By Lori Ann Bloomfield
Second Story Press

The Last River Child is the story of a town caught up in a legend: they believe there are children possessed by the spirit of the river meant to bring misfortune to everything around them. Everyone is taught to stay away from the river, but a young girl named Peg feels drawn to the river and refuses to believe the story. She becomes an outcast and whenever something goes wrong in the town, it’s blamed on her.

The book begins with the story of Rose, Peg’s mother, who grows up alienated from her family and peers. Her story is told in a few chapters, and then continues with Peg’s own childhood. Her life is full of strange coincidences and unfortunate occurrences, including a meteor hitting the town on the day of her baptism and her mother’s death on the day World War I is declared. The town is affected by the war in all the ways you might expect, but in that time, Peg finds friendship in a boy from a neighboring town and by becoming pen pals with her sister’s husband.

While the story itself is an interesting one, what makes this book compelling are the relationships between the characters. Peg’s mother, Rose, has a bad relationship with her family and is also an outcast in the town she grew up in. As soon as she gets the chance, she takes matters into her own hands, moves away and marries a man with whom she develops a close relationship. When they have children, their relationship becomes strained. Peg’s father resents her and her sister, Sarah, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with him later in the novel as he becomes more aware of his treatment of his daughters and wife.

I can’t discuss the relationships in this book without touching on Peg’s relationship with Sarah. Because of her label as a "river child," Peg grows up spending most of her time by herself because her sister Sarah values her friendships more than the relationship with Peg. They grow up alongside each other, but not really together. When circumstances force them to spend several months alone together, their relationship is put to the test. It’s strengthened at first, but then expectedly splinters.

The one criticism I have of this otherwise great book is the lack of relationships between women. Rose resented her mother, Peg and Sarah aren’t close, Sarah’s more interested in her desire to be with her best friend’s brother than in strengthening the relationship with her best friend, and the only meaningful relationships Peg forms are with men. I was admittedly quite happy to see Peg become friends with anybody by that point in the novel, but it would have been nice to have one healthy relationship between women somewhere in the book.

Despite this, I really did enjoy The Last River Child. It was satisfying to see Peg gain more confidence and take control of her life, just as Rose had done so many years earlier. While the book lacked strong relationships between women, it certainly didn’t lack strong female characters.

Review by frau sally benz