It’s a rare moment when my cat is not sitting on me, but this won’t last so I thought I’d write a quick post about the excellent book I read last week who;e I still have free movement of both my arms!
I read Susan Rieger’s novel Like Mother, Like Mother, a book I first noticed when I was wandering around an Indigo store during the Christmas break. I got it from the library and picked it up from my pile, unsure of whether I would like it or not, but it sucked me in and kept me hooked until the very last, very satisfying page. It tells the story of three generations of Pereira women, beginning with Lila, the youngest of three children growing up in Detroit in the 1960s in the care of an abusive father and a mother who has been committed to a mental institution. Lila grows up to become a strong, independent female reporter, then executive editor of the newspaper for which she works. To outsiders, she appears to be a success story, but she knows she’s always been lacking in the motherhood department. As a mother of three daughters, she never worried about her two oldest, Stella and Ava, born so close together that they were practically twins, and nicknamed “the Starbirds”. But her youngest daughter Grace, born so much later than the others, has always been a concern for Lila. She left the parenting responsibilities to her husband Joe, who filled the role beautifully, but it wasn’t the same as having a mother who would attend PTA meetings and graduations and eat dinner with the family regularly. When Grace eventually publishes a bestselling novel loosely based on her experiences growing up with a distant mother, she realizes how little she actually knows about her, and she goes on a quest to find out the truth that lies below the stories she and Lila have been told. This book was fantastic! I don’t want to give anything away, since part of the fun was digging into and peeling back the complex layers of family relationships and experiences slowly, one layer at a time, until the characters, and you the reader, finally reach the core. Oh, here comes my cat, so I better end now, but I’ll close by saying, “Read this book!”
Bye for now… Julie
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