Mothers and Daughters: From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a captivating family drama

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Nancy Wilson describes the joys that come as mothers and daughters grow as sisters in the Lord, encouraging one another to embrace biblical femininity. Parent memoirs have become so common that we may fail to appreciate the challenge that the novelists Elizabeth McCracken (the author of witty novels and stories and a heartbreaking memoir about a stillborn son) and Lynne Tillman (an edgy, cerebral novelist and critic) took on in their recent books. Generational stories are always a winner for me – I love the exploration of family dynamics, and the focus it puts on characters, especially when I can fully empathise with them.

But no matter how vivid the depictions, a dead mother looms too large in a daughter’s psyche to be contained by them. The Joy Luck Club is made up of four Chinese women who immigrated to San Francisco around the same time.

Each of the four women has a daughter, and as the years pass, each mother tries to pass on their culture and traditions.

With thanks to HQ Digital and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Our three heroines lives are changing, but not always in the way they expect, and never independently of each other’s.The only proposition the narrator is ultimately willing to commit to is that her story is simultaneously fictional and true to life, and even then she qualifies the assertion with the classic liar’s paradox: “The fictional me is unmarried, an only child, childless. But as the story unfolds, and the layers peel back, revealing secrets from deep in the family’s past, it becomes easier to empathise with Martha. Daughters and mothers are frequently spending a greater number of years under one roof as both emerging adults face financial challenges in trying to launch from the nest and older adults are living longer and often being cared for by daughters. This book covers almost all imaginable aspects of the mother-daughter relationship that a reader might wish to explore. She’s found an elegant way to show us those more fraught emotions: a housecleaning scene that evokes— intentionally, I think—the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

In 2019-2020, as Indie’s senior year of high school began, I wanted to catalog the year, to trace, in real time, the moments before she left home for college. Just over two years ago, Naomi’s husband, Colin, and the father of both her daughters, died suddenly leaving her a widow in the Tilsham cottage the family once shared. Willow is sweet but had always been considered to be lacking in many areas by her recently dead father Colin and sister Martha. Years later, after Asha grows up as the daughter of California physicians, she clashes with her white, American-born mother.Whilst there are some emotional issues explored in this story, I thought the ending was uplifting and optimistic. Erica James’ writing appears so effortless, and from the first paragraph, I was drawn into the story. It is disturbing to handle stuff that parents can’t or won’t, to root around in the waste products of parental dysfunction. Giménez Smith illuminates the difficulties of being a mother, an artist, a professor, and daughter of an ailing mother—offering realizations and epiphanies that any parent (or person) will recognize, “I was sandwiched between who I was and who I must be.