Another Song About the King

Rating:
Summary: All about the shoes!
Review: Mimi never tires of telling her daughter, Silvie that she is named for the king, Elvis. She once dated the king. Mimi has big ideas and intentions, but finds herself stuck in the role of mother and housewife. This is not where she wanted to be. She loves the spotlight, dressing up in her high heels and swirling around in dresses.

Silvie is dowdy by Mimi's comparison, comfortable hiding from the spotlight. Mimi is disappointed that Silvie is not more 'out there', not more like her.

Silvie moves town to get out from under Mimi's shoes, but is driven back to her mother's side when she discovers that she has cancer. It is truly heartbreaking for Silvie to see her mother who was larger than life, slowly disintegrating before her eyes.

This is a good book about mother-daughter relationships, but it was really nothing new. It's all about people finding each other before they are separated forever.

Rating:
Summary: Resolution of mother-daughter relationship
Review: Most mothers and daughters have bumps or strains in their relationships, but Silvie has grown up under the "guiding hand" of an extremely narcissistic mother, whose claim to fame is her purported date (or is it dates) with Elvis. In fact, she confides to her daughter that Silvie is meant to be an anagram of Elvis. The Elvis-date story, in its various permutations, surfaces at several points in the story, and provides the basis for Silvie's mother's ever-present discontent with her suburban life.

As Silvie grows up in her mother's bizarre household, she attempts to break away; ultimately, she moves to New York. When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Silvie's world is turned upside down, as she tries to reconcile her relationship with her mother and find out the "truths" and "whys" about her and her mother's life.

I don't usually cry when I read books, but the tears flowed around the end.

Rating:
Summary: Resolution of mother-daughter relationship
Review: Most mothers and daughters have bumps or strains in their relationships, but Silvie has grown up under the "guiding hand" of an extremely narcissistic mother, whose claim to fame is her purported date (or is it dates) with Elvis. In fact, she confides to her daughter that Silvie is meant to be an anagram of Elvis. The Elvis-date story, in its various permutations, surfaces at several points in the story, and provides the basis for Silvie's mother's ever-present discontent with her suburban life.

As Silvie grows up in her mother's bizarre household, she attempts to break away; ultimately, she moves to New York. When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Silvie's world is turned upside down, as she tries to reconcile her relationship with her mother and find out the "truths" and "whys" about her and her mother's life.

I don't usually cry when I read books, but the tears flowed around the end.

Rating:
Summary: poignant
Review: Silvie's mother Mimi once had a date with Elvis -- in fact, Silvie's name is a loose anagram of Elvis in tribute. Mimi is gregarious and extroverted and pained that her daughter is not the same.

The story goes back and forth from present-day New York, where Silvie lives, works and has met a man named Scotty while her mother has cancer, to snippets of Silvie's childhood when Mimi caused some excitement, not always to the delight of her children and husband.

The love-hate relationship told in retrospect is very touching...

Rating:
Summary: a wrenching exploration of a mother-daughter relationship
Review: With compassion, insight and elegance, Kathryn Stern's wonderful debut novel, "Another Song about the King," traces the tensions and fissures between a repressed but talented mother and her daughter, whose own life's experiences sadly reflect the disappointments, resentments and fears felt by her mother. Stern paints a vivid picture of Simone, whose mothering skills mirror the venomous pressures and arid emotional wasteland of her own childhood. Simone is so repressive and begruding of her daughter's right to a life that, at times, it appears that she could not be more deliberate in her emotional abuse. Silvie, in turn, at a very early age, deliberately withdraws from her mother and builds such an anguished anger and sense of disappointment with her circumstances that she refuses to call her mother any other name than Mimi.

The central conceit of the novel turns around Simone's teen-age "relationship" with Elvis Presley, a "date" whose scope is never completely determined but whose impact on the dissatisfied Simone grows and distorts her own ability to live as a functional adult. Simone's discontent is the central fact of her life. "For a long time, I liked being married, the routine, the security. But then it was the late sixties...and there I was in the suburbs, just planning a week of dinner and making them." The adult daughter, Silvie (whose own name, incidentally, is a semi-anagram of Elvis), understood "her discontent, the discontent of all women caught between the work of staying home and raising children and the larger work of the world."

Stern's masterful talent of characterization reveals itself fully through Silvie, a sensitive and inquisitive child who bears the brunt of her mother's smoldering fury. How should a child respond to a parent who insists the child develop her talents, but once expressed, elicits a competitive anger from the very adult she yearns to please? Silvie decides to withdraw, to finish in second place, to acquiesce to her mother. This tremendously affecting character pushes her sadness "down into that tight little bead no one could see, filling the space with emptiness, nothingness...I feared I lacked a self."

"Another Song" is not just about the evolving relationship between a mother and her daughter. This deeply reflective novel also treats the issues of insanity, suicide, depression, divorce, existential anguish and terminal illness. Never forgotten is the humanity of the central characters, and that compassion animates Stern's ability to make even a Simone a character about whom we care. This author, with a sure and sensitive hand, understands the quest all children, regardless of age, have to understand and forgive their parents.