Cora Sledge, the more-than-unlikely heroine of Leslie Larson’s Breaking Out of Bedlam, is overweight, decommissioned by a wide variety of pills she really shouldn’t have in the first place, and disoriented. This is the condition her grown children discover her in right before deciding to move her out of her home and into an assisted living facility, “The Palisades.”

Among Cora’s primary objections to the place: she is not allowed to smoke at will and her access to pills is now restricted. She has plenty of other complaints about being ousted from her own home and into this strange land of disease and incontinence. Despite herself, she begins writing in the journal her granddaughter, Emma, has given her, recording her frustrations with both her present and her past. She also records her unexpected liaisons – the gossipy women with whom she feels at odds from day one; the male attendee who helps with her breathing treatments (and smuggles in cigarettes for her) who is, appearance to the contrary, “that way”; and Vitus, the mysterious, well-mannered man she finds herself attracted to.

These entanglements, which Cora never anticipated making, inspire some of her forays into the past. She begins tilling down to the heart of her own story, recording things she hasn’t been able to say, hasn’t been able to face before.

As we learn of Cora’s past, we plainly see the dynamics which have contributed to her rather abrasive personality. By the same token, her story reveals the progression of a woman who was determined to never give in despite the pressure, at times overwhelming, which seemed to call for her resignation. We see a woman who faced what so many women silently did growing up when she did: a sense of being cut off from her own personal power, needing to rely on her connections with the men in her life to ensure a positive outcome for herself. She takes measures she isn’t proud of, she commits to a relationship which does not excite her (which makes her feel panicked, even, as she considers how it will determine the whole spread of her life to come), she silences the dreams she’s carried as a girl in the name of ascertaining a future for her children and herself.

The real story of Breaking Out of Bedlam is Cora’s bravery in facing and forgiving herself. She brings a spunky, irreverent spirit to the theme of late-in-life reflection on the past. To me, her voice seemed to make a journey as Cora herself did – in the beginning of this novel, I disliked her voice, finding it aggressive to the point of crude and lacking in warmth. As Cora journals, making the confessions she feels necessary to herself, those aggressive, crude qualities, while not vanishing, become endearing.

Shaye Areheart Books, 2009
Review by Mayra David

This is a story that spans time, cultures, continents, even worlds. But for all that, its essence lies in the story of the Leahy family tragedy: Meave Leahy has lost her twin. It’s this tragedy that has since simultaneously driven and held her back in all aspects of her small life in Betheny, New York.

It’s been many years since Meave Leahy has been to visit her parents’ home in Castine, Maine. In fact she hasn’t been back since escaping to college, soon after losing her sister. Though we get everything from Meave’s perspective, she offers no clues to what happened to her twin nine years ago. It’s as if she doesn’t even allow herself the merest complete thought on the topic of Moira. Here, Therese Walsh creates true tension in the reader. There’s a sense, in the beginning, that the story might be beyond the details of the loss of Moira, that this may be a story about how the twin who was left behind finds a way to move on. But then slowly, and clearly against the will of Meave herself, we realize that this story is about taking a long, painful look backwards.

In fact, it’s not just about looking backwards, but almost physically reliving the past. The book’s premise is based in part on the possibility of a magical antique keris (javanese dagger) acting as a bridge not only into the depths of Meave’s repressed memories, but into the spirit world. This sudden turn in the story is softened by the introduction of the Leahy twins as already having an almost magical connection with each other. It’s a common notion that twins share intense bonds, but here it is shown as a concrete skill the sisters have developed; sensing physical and emotional pain, “seeing” each other from afar, and when necessary, “blocking” their minds from each other to gain privacy.

Still, this is where it gets a little dicey for the book. After ensconcing the reader in one genre (family drama), the story takes a turn into legends about ancient javanese weapon-making. Of course this requires that the fantastical plot bend be backed up by both historic facts and javanese legends involving dream worlds, spiritual energy, and superstition. The kind of stuff fantasy films a la Tomb Raider are made of.

Thankfully, Walsh keeps the story from becoming tacky by keeping the heart of the story where it belongs: between Meave and Moira Leahy. Their relationship is honest, touching, and painful. In short: real. In fact their complex story is so compelling, one must often fight the urge to simply read the chapters where Walsh moves the story back in time, when the girls were still together. Fantasy, mystery, historic fiction, family drama, romance. If anything, there is almost too much story here. But the book is well written, fast paced, and has enough depth to carry it all.

The Permanent Press, July 2010
Review by Rhianon E. Huot

When I received Georgeann Packard’s “Fall Asleep Forgetting” in all it’s tree green colored gloriousness and noted on the inside jacket that not only does Packard write, but she’s a photographer and a graphic designer as well, I looked forward to the read. I should have remembered what mothers everywhere tote as sage advice, “Never judge a book by it’s cover.”

Never have I appreciated Hemingway’s thorough character portrayals as much as when I read this book. Like them or hate them, his characters give us a clear depiction of what life is like for a woman, a hero, an anti-hero, a misogynist or a broken down war veteran within the context of his written scene. Packard’s characters are card board cutouts of her thoughts, two dimensional and reeking with her own opinions. She might as well be whispering a subliminal message to us while we read: “This is how you’re supposed to feel. This is what you’re supposed to think.”

Just when I thought there was some deeper rhyme or reason to this book, Packard would pull the rug out from under me by evoking every obnoxious cliché you can think of. She uses blue to represent sadness, despondency. She gives us a transvestite named “Cherry,” who brushes off other’s maltreatment by realizing that some people are just “simple.” Even a wild-child who detests wearing shirts or shoes walks across the overly predictable pages.

There is no discernable reasoning to the layout of “Fall Asleep Forgetting.” The book is divided into sections marked by black and white photographs that lack enough contrast to discern up from down. Under the photographs Packard has phrases. These phrases are just as random as the division, some are from the bible, others appear to have come from nowhere at all and say things like, “I am alone only to the degree that I separate myself from the natural world.” Surely I’m just not getting it, I initially told myself. Are these abrupt endings and starts a way to mark the passing of time, a way to delineate characters stories and interactions from each other? Perhaps they are separated based on the bits of one characters journal, which is sprinkled throughout the book. Surely these phrases all add up to something that has an overall motif, a meaning. No, none of this logic seems to rule the book.

Increasingly as the work progresses, it turns into erotica, thinly veiled as something deeper. Packard finds a way to mention the breasts of each female character, as often as possible, in nearly every scene. Marked with cliché adjectives like “plush,” “soft,” and “warm,” Packard distracts from any real story telling with terribly unbelievable sex scenes between a married couple and another young woman. As you navigate the book, it becomes hard to help but wondering if her female characters don’t represent some form of wish fulfillment on her part.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse Packard has a character pass gas at a restaurant and then proclaim to the proprietor, “And that, dear Rose, is the best thing on your menu.” Later, during a scene with a married couple, a woman whispers into her husband’s ear, “You cook like you make love, my sweet, with a charming disrespect for recipe.” Really, this is too much. Let me save you the trouble of ever having to put this book down in annoyance. You will never have to put it down, if you don’t first, pick it up.

Bold Strokes Books, 2009

Review by Mayra David

A warning: the cover of the book posits: “Imagine if you could choose your parents…and your sex!” In fact, the author did not imagine any such thing. The narrator, Spanky, is a Floating Soul that has been “dripped” out of The Known into the Land of Forgetting in order to find parents and be born. Only, instead of choosing, Spanky is fated to particular parents, whom he finds easily enough because he has been dripped in their immediate vicinity. Then, at some point or other, he realizes he’s a boy.

Still, I was happy to suspend my disbelief and dive into a story about a boy soul that finds he will be born a girl. Truthfully, I was expecting something to unfold that ultimately did not. A look at the inner struggles of transgendered persons perhaps. Or an imagining of what brings about our sexual orientations. Instead, Henderson goes down a more familiar route: an after-school-special type story about unplanned pregnancy for Spanky’s parents, Rick and Nina.

It is with the unplanned preganancy that the story really starts, as it begs the question: Can we do this alone? Suddenly, this young couple finds itself in need of support, and where support is lacking among blood relations, Henderson does a good job of showing how human nature will then reach out to find it, even from an unlikely source. Slowly, we see Rick’s reserve toward Nina’s gay friends melt. He accepts their help and friendship, and returns it, for his own sake instead of Nina’s.

One big weakness of the book is the narrating voice. Not satisfied with either conventional first-person or omniscient narrators, Henderson tries, unsuccessfully, to merge the two – a first person narrative with an omniscient point of view. Though he is not omnipresent, he is conveniently omniscient anyway. “Whoa Doggies! What did I miss? I scan back in time. …”? And he provides no wisdom from The Known – unless “I need an XX and an XY to get the job done” counts as insight. Less Floating Soul, more Alien Kid among earthlings.

The issue of two XX’s or two XY’s being together is touched upon briefly, when Spanky tries to understand homosexuality and theorizes:

“The Land of Forgetting is about reproduction and getting born. I wonder if it’s possible for a soul to get the wrong body. [...] The Known can’t make mistakes. Can it?”

This should have been the crux of the whole book, but after seamlessly introducing it into the story, Henderson steers clear of it, opting for a conventional narrative about young people who find each other through their struggles. In doing that, she deflects from the philosophical reflection her own characters seems to demand.

These characters seem boringly familiar: The musician son at odds with his insurance salesman father. The daughter who is her father’s ‘pumpkin’ no-matter-what. But then again, there are lessons Henderson wishes to impart here – lessons best received from familiar people. Their thoughts and circumstances are all relatable. Except in one instance: Before Spanky’s parents meet, his mother, the 21 year old actress, is in love with the gay costume designer named Pablo, and refuses to realize he is gay even after he has her dress as a boy and takes her with him to a club called ‘Chaps’. Really, I can only suspend my disbelief so much.

MTV Books, 2008
Review by Mary Senior Harwood

The title sets the tone for this novel. Who really likes the leftovers? Don’t we all want to have first pick, the turkey fresh from the oven?

The leftovers in this book are two best friends, Blair and Ardith, two fifteen year old girls from very different – yet in some ways eerily similar – families. Blair’s mother is a successful attorney who is vying for a judgeship at all costs. She seems blinded to the fact that her ambition has ruined her marriage and set her daughter up for physical abuse. Blair’s father is no better. When he isn’t working, he’s seeing his mistress. Blair gets only the leftovers of her parent’s attention.

Ardith’s family has no rules. And no morals. Ardith, the only one who seems to notice or care, locks herself in her bedroom as protection from sexual abuse by her father and brother. Because of her family, she is scorned by Blair’s mother as a “bad influence” and Blair is forbidden to see her. Ardith is the societal leftover in the story.

The girls take turns narrating the arc of the story. As the book opens, it is clear they are telling this story to someone, but you don’t know who until much later in the book. Their narration swings between a first person past account, I did this, she said that, to a more unusual second person present narration that indicates how each girl distances herself from her own life. It is the introspective version of the royal we.

A third girl, Della, plays a major role in their story. Blair’s mother “encourages” her to befriend the much younger Della, who is a twelve year old in a 16 year old’s body. Della’s family is rich and influential and Blair’s mother believes the friendship will help her ascent to the bench. Della becomes a pawn to Blair and Ardith, who believe they had to set Della up to trap Ardith’s brother and show the world what a scum he is. But did they really set Della up? All they did was not protect her from him. Was she anymore set up than the girl in the very first pages of the book who is forced to give a bathroom full of boys oral sex? Weren’t they parroting their own parent’s behavior? How much blame is there from the things undone?

The book is small but powerful. If I were reading this when my daughter was 15, I would be horrified. It is a cautionary tale without a fairy tale ending.

Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2008
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

Characters like Angelique don’t like to settle down. The story moves best when she’s on the move. Trapped inside a cold farmhouse, with an unkind stepfather of questionable morals and by turns a doting and neglectful mother, and the ghosts of fetal pigs dead from hog cholera and butchered for meat regardless, adolescent Angelique feels the pull of a stranger’s flirtations and gets on the road.

In the bath before her departure, Angelique shivers with fear. “Fear was white not a pale yellow, a bright white, the color of all the talk of what happens to girls alone on the road” (11). In this we get a sense of what’s to come. We get a sense that this will be the story told between the leaving and the ditch runaway girls get found in. For who doesn’t want to know how girls disappear if only so ours don’t?

Dickinson introduces us to great characters, fresh and interesting people saying things and doing things we haven’t heard or seen before. Of the first driver who picks her up (with two small boys who turn out not to be his sons in the backseat) she asks, “Do they look like you or your wife?” Then surmises silently with discomfort, “In this little world of the Cutlass, I was his wife, no matter if he wasn’t in the least bit attractive to me” (47). Other minor characters include a bouncer who tries to rape her and robs her instead and a lesbian truck driver in love with a lot lizard along her run.

Queerness in the book is fluid and unselfconscious, adding to the significance of the title and ongoing motif of half—people and animals and environments as comprised of more than one element. In Half Girl we meet “half fags” and “half animals” and no situation is ever as clear as it seems.

We are led to believe this is the story of a girl who runs away and comes home again, not unscathed. But it isn’t exactly. What it really is is the story of boy (half fag) meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl (or rather she finds him when she’s ready to) again. That it’s a love story is not immediately clear. If your expectations or voyeurism or thirst to see a young girl get destroyed are sullied, bully for you—plenty of bad things happen to her. Whether we’re pulling for her or not from the beginning, toward the end we get a sense that she might just be okay.

My only real complaint comes when Angelique faces her biggest challenge, a half-coma state in a hospital bed. While the dexterity with which Dickinson moves in and out of internal scenes and memories and the external world of the hospital is admirable, we never really feel like Angelique won’t pull through. And knowing this, this interim, lying-down time in the book seems to drag a bit long. Angelique the silent patient remarks once that everybody smells of dirt. Perhaps she is smelling the earth they’re pulling over themselves in the bed of their potentially early graves, but never once do we give up on her.

The Permanent Press, 2008
Review by Mayra David

Abruptly and without warning the reader finds themselves in the middle of Tildy’s crisis. A fitting start, since Tildy herself is blindsided by the death of her marriage to Ray. In Tildy’s behaviour following this event, Robin Messing expresses a beautiful sentiment: the need to record our past; the need to preserve the intangible but important parts of our lives, when they have been destroyed or taken away from us. So Tildy begins to speak into a microphone to verbalize her memories, or rather, her take them. The whole point, after all, is that Ray must have seen things differently.

The language Messing uses is very esoteric, the things Tildy sees are things only she could see. Because of this, the “sessions” with her recorder feel more like a confession, like she is telling her stories in a darkened booth. Small and quiet, secure and secret. The act, like the stories, is holy and illicit all at the same time. She is open and lets it all out, but the setting she sets is so intimate that the reader feels almost like they have been entrusted with the guilty emotional and sexual secrets of a grown woman and a young child.

This story shuttles between two times in the life of the protagonist, Tildy. While in her present situation she is dealing with the loss of her marriage, she is emotionally pulled back to the time around the dissolution of her parent’s marriage. Though the switches from one time to another, from one narrative perspective to another, do sometimes feel abrupt, they are never disruptive to the flow of the story. In both stages, Tildy is introspective and lonely. There is a real person here: this child will lead to this adult. It’s a great feat for an author to accomplish and a wonderful thing for a reader to find in a book.

Still, like listening to a friend drone on about their own problems, the episodic format of recounting experiences and the relentlessness of this emotional scouring the main character is put through, can get a bit tedious sometimes. Trying to keep up with her esoteric musings, we wonder if our advice to both Tildy and to the author shouldn’t just be: lighten up and give us a break. Let go of the drama for a while! Yes, it’s healthy sometimes to wallow in misery, but sometimes the healthier option is to go for a jog through Central Park. It would have given the book some much needed levity. But when the language is interesting and the stories are absorbing, we listen anyway. Tildy’s voice ultimately does succeed in keeping our full attention, and makes us stay with her while she waits for catharsis. Which is, after all, the whole point of any drama.

Bold Strokes Books, 2009
Review by Hannah Eason

Violet London is a New York stage actress scheduled to leave on the morning train for her role in a Hollywood production; Moxie Vallette is a buxom singer at the speakeasy where Violet and friends celebrate the night. From her exchanges with her friends—who are riotous from the moment they plop drunken onto the page—we gather that Violet is openly gay and sexually frank. Moxie, on the other hand, is a home-gardened Nebraska girl who considers herself focused, big-star-bound and … straight. Moxie is beckoned to a table occupied by Violet; her compatriot of tight wit and profoundly loose legs, Wilhelmina (Wil); and their queer-as-Violet friend Julian. Moxie is then beckoned to celebrate the night with them.

It launches with a glass of champagne. Before daybreak, Moxie has witnessed the proper preparation of absinthe, semi-public sex, and a performer nicknamed and adulated for party-tricks performed via his rectum.

While the night doesn’t culminate in tawdry sex between Violet and Moxie, Moxie later finds her memories so juggled from the night’s alcohol that she convinces herself it did. Central to this conclusion is a lover’s note she finds from Violet, in Violet’s hotel room, where Moxie awakens (disrobed) in Violet’s bed. In a diversion from Violet’s unsettled ways and Moxie’s heterosexuality, the two begin a cross-country letter-writing campaign that grows more enamored and sexual by the missive.

Thanks to Violet’s promotion of various show-biz opportunities for Moxie, the two are soon planning a reunion in California—this plan short-sheeted only by Violet showing up to surprise the grain of her ever-preoccupied thoughts in New York. New plan: they’ll take the train to Hollywood, where Moxie will have her first major audience, together.

Here’s the problem: Moxie’s agent—Cotton McCann—perceives between his ingénue and Ms. London a chemistry that only an appliance could ignore, and he determines that his client’s career won’t be thwarted by some predator lesbian. He will accompany the two on the train. So will Wil. So will Moxie’s roommate Irene, who is promised her own boost into Hollywood glitz if she’ll help Cotton run interference.

The group’s journey by train is chock full of physical comedy that makes yet another display case for the characters’ bawdy wits; it also invokes the situational foils of chaste rom-coms of yore. The contrast between this folksier genre and The Seduction of Moxie, with its potty-mouthed characters in varying stages of queerdom and/or promiscuity, is nothing short of hilarious.

While this novel excels in jocular dialogue—a sort of Juno for the Hoover-generation, lesbian set—there are weaknesses in the narrative. Where Moody should trust her characters’ intellect and humor to convey their meaning, she often interprets them for the reader. Sentences such as “Moxie let the fast-paced, witty mood wash over her, flush with the revelation that the banter was even more enjoyable when you were a direct participant,” have a halting effect on the book’s smart, manic pace. Moody’s blunt depictions of her characters’ thoughts and intentions also have the tendency to rely on repetitious phrases which seem mismatched with the flair she brings to quip-speak.

Sometimes the characters’ voices, perhaps owing to an across-the-board allotment of intelligence and will among all the book’s headliners, tend to mimic each other. However, sometimes Moody gets is just right, as in the case of Moxie’s Bambi-eyed roommate Irene, whose phraseology is pure driven snow in comparison to the crowd.

Ms. Moody’s novel succeeds in many of its apparent aims. The reader can easily relate to Moxie’s then Irene’s enchantment with Violet & co. The sexual tension between Moxie and Violet is as palpable as it’s meant to be. To the reader’s delight, the majority of it is forged against the backdrop of their train-travel antics. Also, the ‘30s are charmingly evoked in the inclusion of certain celebrities before they were stars, women such as Ginger Rogers and Bette Davis. This pattern is set into action with a temperamental clash of Violet London with none other than Dorothy Parker of the Algonquin Round Table. While Ms. Parker is presented as the bane of Violet’s otherwise celebratory evening (they bicker over Parker’s criticism of a performance of Violet’s), one could easily imagine Violet drinking with the woman famed for such beauts as her use of the word “horticulture” in the aphorism “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”.

The Seduction of Moxie is enjoyable in its own right, though the ending makes for a sped-up conclusion that doesn’t explain a seemingly sharp change in the career-mindset of a major character.

Given Colette Moody’s skill for dialogue and saucy/slapstick comedy, which stands in contrast to an underwhelming narrative, one can see how her talents could make a painless transition to screenwriting. While the needless interpretations are frustrating, there are also gems worthy of long spells of laughter, such as this quote from Cotton McCann:

“Moxie, I see you as the daughter I could have had, if my filthy slattern of a wife hadn’t destroyed our marriage as well as my brother’s by rutting with my whore of a sister-in-law.”

And, with a little imagination, one can decode the following commentary from a letter Violet sends to Moxie as representative of the book’s cheeky tone on whole:

“Goodness, there has been a great deal of ass-talk in this letter. I would apologize for it, but upon rereading, those seem to be the best parts.”

Indeed.

Shaye Areheart Books, August 2007

Review by Hannah Eason

Gwendolyn Gross certainly knows how to stage a fight. In her third novel, The Other Mother from Shaye Areheart Books, she pits Thea, a stay-at-home mother of three against Amanda, mother of a newborn daughter and editor at a major children’s book publisher. While this pairing could’ve easily lead to a recitation of the same-old arguments we’ve heard countless times about mothers working outside the home, Gross manages to refresh the subject in the subtlety of her writing. As the author presents each new battle-line, she simultaneously begins weaving it into those with which we’re already familiar until we’re left with not just a tapestry, but a tangle.

When pregnant Amanda and her husband, Aaron, move into the childhood home of Thea’s friend, the strain and mutual fascination between the women begins. The fence which divvies couldn’t be any more warranted – Thea appears to be Amanda’s polar opposite. Another claim-to-kudos for Gross is that the differences between the women are unwound with restraint, embittered patterns never racing ahead of the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back progress of two neighbors who want to get along. Their distaste for one another’s lifestyle mingles with their quieter curiosity about and even admiration for one another.

The novel is symbolic, to the hilt. It works here. We first see warring mindsets camped into separate houses which allow them their distance. Then, we’re introduced to the seemingly endless turmoil of the skies which brings the two families together, at first softly, as Thea checks on Amanda and offer her storm-time rations, then more dramatically. In one of the novel’s more imposing shifts, Amanda’s physical and psychological sense of safety is compromised as a bad storm whips a tree onto her house. This constitutes an especially violent shock as it comes shortly after baby Malena is born, in a period of time when Amanda and her husband are yet adjusting to compromise in the delicate routines of their inner lives.

Thea and her husband, Caius, welcome Amanda, Aaron and Malena into their home. Despite minor stresses, they navigate the proximity with grace, with patience. Then comes the time for Amanda to go back to work; she begins her search for childcare. For Thea, who feels the intrusion on her routine as poignantly as Amanda feels displaced within hers, this call for childcare combines with her own confusion, tiredness and nostalgia and produces what sounds, at its outset, to be a spontaneous offer (page 132): “So, I could do it.” As she becomes Malena’s nanny, the neighbors’ lives braid together all the more tightly. Thos minor stresses which have been dismissed pile up until they culminate in lonesome if linked break-downs within the women’s lives.

As a case-study of modern motherhood, The Other Mother works. As a piece of literature perched atop that incendiary topic, it works better. The literary devices aren’t invisible, nor do they need to be. They draw one’s attention to the art of the portrayal in such a way that the issue at hand can be fleshed out without becoming heavy-handed. Thea and Amanda’s relationship is tracked accurately, no leaps in logic. The novel is chock full of suburban physical sacraments which beautifully transform the characters’ inner lives into the flesh. There are stolen front-porch pumpkins, an epidemic of killed rodents showing up on the neighbors’ lawns, childish fits made to look civil by virtue of being typed on sheets or postcards. In these ways, The Other Mother has cross-appeal to the senses and can be read and reread with various focal points in mind.

That said, the beginning of the novel is crowded with metaphors, to the extent that it’s a turn-off. In several cases, the metaphors are not only too frequent but clumsy, failing to reach for any meaningful undertone but committing the error of comparing for comparison’s sake. We also see metaphors which stick out so blatantly that they interrupt the reader’s emersion in the story. On page 57, for instance: “She pointed toward her house, her arm a single solider in a yellow raincoat . . . ” In some cases, I found her metaphors to be what Stacy London and Clinton Kelly from TLC’s What Not to Wear would term “matchy-matchy”. In fashion, this indicates too obvious of a pattern with no trust in the subtleties; this applies to Gross’s metaphors as well. On page 159, we find the following: “I was glad it was her and not someone who would’ve deposited the coin of my naiveté in her piggy bank for future expenditure.” The gratuitous nature of some of these parallels is disappointing specifically in light of her talent – of which there is plenty.

In terms of her comparisons, her language, her scenery and so on, when she steers clear of the overt, she is nothing shy of fantastic. Her capture of childhood language is pitch-perfect, never crossing into the territory of trying too hard for it. There’s a scene beginning on page 123 in which Thea’s son Oliver throws a last-minute demand for cookies for school on his mother, his head-strong sister Iris and Amanda watching. Working against expectations, Gross allows the scene to build and build in an ecstatic sort of silliness which efficiently showcases these characters at their most admirable. Gross’s handle on physical description is first-class, many of her descriptions as unexpected as they are interpretive of mood. On page 167, for example, we’re treated to “the chilly burned blue sky”. From page 41 comes one of my personal favorite descriptions from the book, one which shows how apropos her sense of metaphor can be: “It was a matter of a few degrees, like everything else, like the zone of fertility, like the waking of yeast, short sleeves to sweater.”

While I would like to have seen better use of the subtlety-in-metaphor of which Gwendolyn Gross is more than capable, and much earlier, I found The Other Mother to be a significant and well-executed novel from an author I imagine we’ll continue to read for quite some time.

A Different type of Woman

Before immigrating from Beijing to Canada, Yan Li worked as an instructor, translator and journalist. In her latest novel, ‘Lily in the Snow’, it is obvious that these early life experiences have inspired her writing. The novel focuses on the life of a young mother named Lily, who has left her native China to live in Canada. Upon her arrival, Canada unfolds like a roll of duck canvas before her and her son, who is referred to only as “Baby”. The culture feels formless to her; there is no oppressive government forcing cultural or social policy upon its people. Instead, what greets Lily is a university where she can enroll without anyone asking invasive questions, a community of Chinese people who for various reasons have also taken-up residence in Canada, and an unrelenting Christian Church that is trying to convert as many new immigrants as possible.

Li’s depiction of Lily, as she struggles to reinvent herself in this world, is almost hyper-real. Lily is a young woman and an experienced journalist, but she finds that her advanced education is worth little in her new country. Her job options include working as a maid in a private home, a maid in a hotel, a factory worker, or a secretary in a failing lawyer’s office. In addition, Lily’s critical and overbearing mother soon follows her, in part to see if Lily’s life is really better and, in part, to find herself. Together, the two of them embark on a life together.

Along the way, we meet other women who underscore the life that Lily does not want for herself – Mrs. Rice, who spends her days teaching the word of God and visiting those whom she might be able to convert; Camellia, who is often beaten by her husband, but who will not divorce him due to pressure from the church; and a woman Lily calls “Madam Jewelry”, who speaks in tongues and finds that this conflicts with church teachings.

In the end, all of these women, even Lily’s mother, are characters who are unable to write their own scripts. Lily doesn’t want to become like any of them. Yan Li’s depiction of Lily’s life is so well done that readers immediately feel like they know Lily and the other women of her community. Through them, the stories of women we all know, regardless of ethnicity, are given voice. ‘Lily in the Snow’ is a lyrical, funny and real snapshot of the strength and commitment that is required to become a fully self-aware and individualized woman.

Yan Li is the director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo and the coordinator of the Chinese Language Program at Renison University College, both of which are located in Ontario, Canada. Li’s other published works include her first novel written in English, ‘Daughters of the Red Land’ and her other novels – ‘Married to the West Wind’, ‘Red Duckweed’, and ‘The Lambs of Mapleton’ – all of which are written in Chinese.