<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: This is an amazing novel!
Review: "My Mother's Island" is a powerful exploration of the mother-daughter dynamic. Marnie Mueller's prose is beautiful, her characters unforgettable and her story riveting. I could not put this book down as I followed Sarah unraveling the mystery of her relationship with her mother while in the process of losing her. This book is a gem.
Rating:
Summary: This is an amazing novel!
Review: "My Mother's Island" is a powerful exploration of the mother-daughter dynamic. Marnie Mueller's prose is beautiful, her characters unforgettable and her story riveting. I could not put this book down as I followed Sarah unraveling the mystery of her relationship with her mother while in the process of losing her. This book is a gem.
Rating:
Summary: Grace and Courage
Review: Coming to terms with the death of a parent is difficult enough, but when that parent--Sarah's mother, in this case--is the source of profound psychological trauma and pain, the road to understanding must be both rocky and rewarding for a daughter.
The story that unfolds here is rich with secrets that are revealed in a fascinating mix of present-day events in Puerto Rico (the island of the title, where Sarah goes to care for her dying mother) and flashbacks to Sarah's complicated childhood with her unconventional parents. The combination is riveting, and we come to admire and love this young woman for her courage and insight. Even her deep fears and anger don't keep her from doing what she ultimately decides is the right thing to do. Sarah's journey of reconciliation and healing is the reader's journey, too, and we're with her every step of the way.
Rating:
Summary: A Story of Human Depths, Beautifully Told
Review: I have just finished reading My Mother's Island, by Marnie Mueller, and I am still rocked by the experience. The mother-daughter relationship is, as we all know, layered with emotions of all kinds, feelings that persist throughout our lives whether or not we feel we were well-mothered, indeed, even if we had no mother growing up, as I did not. As a mother (and recent grandmother) myself, who has written books about being a mother, I was brought back in this beautifully written and profoundly felt novel to my own daughterhood. It is a novel about two women and their love/hate relationship, about a mother dying and a daughter surviving,about an abusive mother whose daughter nevertheless attends her dying with dedication, friendship if never a sentimental kind of love. But this is not a depressing or upsetting novel - except in the sense that we are upset in our ordinary vision of things by stories that part the veil of what Virginia Woolf called "the cotton wool of daily life," enabling us to experience "moments of being," when we become conscious of the reality of things behind appearances. Reading Mueller's story of a mother's dying, a daughter's need to relive and once again reconcile with her past, and in the end experience a kind of rebirth - I was jolted and riveted, turning pages to find out how it would all end, yet at the same time wanting to go slowly in order to savor the language and the insights. The descriptions of the present - a small house in Puerto Rico - and the past - the narrator's childhood - (a chilling scene remains in my mind of the daughter as a little girl hiding from her mother in a haystack) - as well as the daughter's home in New York City, a kind of beacon of peace and sanity in her mind from where her psychoanalyst husband talks to her by phone, - all are lush, detailed and vivid. I have already had two dreams about the novel as it opens up my own memories. It is one of those books that sinks down into you. I have always loved Marnie Mueller's work, but this novel brings her capacities for observation of the human soul to an even deeper level than in part work.
Rating:
Summary: "Island" inspires: harrowing, wrenching and absorbing
Review: In her previous novel, "The Climate of the Countrty," the talented and wise Marnie Mueller treats the issue of conscientious people struggling to remain intact amdist social cruelty and isolative prejudice. "My Mother's Island" brilliantly continues Mueller's honorable efforts to understand how pain, rejection and loss influence good people who find themselves placed in intolerable circumstances. Unlike "Climate," which deals with social oppression, "Island" treats the most intimate and personal of circumstances: an adult daughter called to comfort a mother stricken with inoperable cancer. As if that were not torment enough, the adult daughter, Sara Ellis, introspectively relives her troubled childhood, and those recollections and memories trigger anger, guilt and betrayal. The brilliance of this absorbing, painful and absolutely believable novel lies in the interplay between Sara and her mother Reba -- between the past and present, between pain and possibility. "My Mother's Island" flows between a twin series of cross-cutting vignettes, one which treats Sara's witnessing and attempting to mnediate they symptoms of her mother's cancer, while the other series focuses on the childhood traumas Sara experienced. Now an expatriate living in Puerto Rico, Sara's mother Reba unknowingly triggers a warring set of emotions in her daughter. We observe Sara weaving between compassion and icy anger, between the conflicting needs of a child yearning for a parent's acceptance and an adult child striving for authentic independence. Mueller provides no easy answers to the profound questions Sara ponders; indeed, it is the compressed and frightening nature of her visit that forces Sara to relive a lifetime of emotional turmoil. The author provides an impressive resolution to this profound quandry. Marnie Mueller not only skillfully dissects the themes of terminal illness, personal transcendence and interpresonal conflict, she does so with a set of characters who provoke our identification and sympathy. The two protagonists, Sara and Reba, are an emotional dichotomy. Both must confront identical issues of anger, disappointment, betrayal and rejection. How the two become alive to one another while answering their own private questions is another exceptionally strong aspect of the writing. The community which surrounds Sara and Reba in Puerto Rico is lovingly etched; Sara's compaion Lydia is especially impressive. Readers should not anticipate a "feel-good" novel when approaching "My Mother's Island." This raw, painful and moving work is a testament to the impact of realistic writing and the power of two strong chracters squeezing truth from pain and undersanding from hurt. Marnie Mueller, whose own life itself reflects a deep respect for political idealism, has much to teach us. Her redemptive novel is inspiring, compelling and necessary.
Rating:
Summary: "Island" inspires: harrowing, wrenching and absorbing
Review: In her previous novel, "The Climate of the Countrty," the talented and wise Marnie Mueller treats the issue of conscientious people struggling to remain intact amdist social cruelty and isolative prejudice. "My Mother's Island" brilliantly continues Mueller's honorable efforts to understand how pain, rejection and loss influence good people who find themselves placed in intolerable circumstances. Unlike "Climate," which deals with social oppression, "Island" treats the most intimate and personal of circumstances: an adult daughter called to comfort a mother stricken with inoperable cancer. As if that were not torment enough, the adult daughter, Sara Ellis, introspectively relives her troubled childhood, and those recollections and memories trigger anger, guilt and betrayal. The brilliance of this absorbing, painful and absolutely believable novel lies in the interplay between Sara and her mother Reba -- between the past and present, between pain and possibility. "My Mother's Island" flows between a twin series of cross-cutting vignettes, one which treats Sara's witnessing and attempting to mnediate they symptoms of her mother's cancer, while the other series focuses on the childhood traumas Sara experienced. Now an expatriate living in Puerto Rico, Sara's mother Reba unknowingly triggers a warring set of emotions in her daughter. We observe Sara weaving between compassion and icy anger, between the conflicting needs of a child yearning for a parent's acceptance and an adult child striving for authentic independence. Mueller provides no easy answers to the profound questions Sara ponders; indeed, it is the compressed and frightening nature of her visit that forces Sara to relive a lifetime of emotional turmoil. The author provides an impressive resolution to this profound quandry. Marnie Mueller not only skillfully dissects the themes of terminal illness, personal transcendence and interpresonal conflict, she does so with a set of characters who provoke our identification and sympathy. The two protagonists, Sara and Reba, are an emotional dichotomy. Both must confront identical issues of anger, disappointment, betrayal and rejection. How the two become alive to one another while answering their own private questions is another exceptionally strong aspect of the writing. The community which surrounds Sara and Reba in Puerto Rico is lovingly etched; Sara's compaion Lydia is especially impressive. Readers should not anticipate a "feel-good" novel when approaching "My Mother's Island." This raw, painful and moving work is a testament to the impact of realistic writing and the power of two strong chracters squeezing truth from pain and undersanding from hurt. Marnie Mueller, whose own life itself reflects a deep respect for political idealism, has much to teach us. Her redemptive novel is inspiring, compelling and necessary.
Rating: 
Summary: SAVE A TREE, SAVE YOUR TIME
Review: This book is so badly written I had trouble giving it even one star. The "narrator" has no style--she tells us unrelated, self-serving facts and we wonder why. Where is she heading? And really, who cares? I had hoped to find a book that probed the relationship between a mother and daughter. Instead, I found a waste of paper. I finally gave myself permission to quit grinding my teeth, close the book, and throw it away. After the tree and me, no one else should have to suffer.
Rating:
Summary: SAVE A TREE, SAVE YOUR TIME
Review: This book is so badly written I had trouble giving it even one star. The "narrator" has no style--she tells us unrelated, self-serving facts and we wonder why. Where is she heading? And really, who cares? I had hoped to find a book that probed the relationship between a mother and daughter. Instead, I found a waste of paper. I finally gave myself permission to quit grinding my teeth, close the book, and throw it away. After the tree and me, no one else should have to suffer.
Rating:
Summary: SAVE A TREE, SAVE YOUR TIME
Review: This book is so badly written I had trouble giving it even one star. The "narrator" has no style--she tells us unrelated, self-serving facts and we wonder why. Where is she heading? And really, who cares? I had hoped to find a book that probed the relationship between a mother and daughter. Instead, I found a waste of paper. I finally gave myself permission to quit grinding my teeth, close the book, and throw it away. After the tree and me, no one else should have to suffer.
<< 1 >>
|
