Mother Land: A Novel

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For a moment I glimpse a gangly boy with close- cropped hair running beneath the linden trees, heading with great urgency for the pier. She is the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the 2018 Vella Chapbook Prize), Tropicália (Newfound, forthcoming, winner of the 2020 Newfound Prose Prize) and Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press - INCH micro-chapbook series).

Rachel had been convinced that, 'Dhruv would make her happy, he would make her life something stable, something solid. We follow two different personal journeys, a native to the country of India and a foreigner who through different circumstances have been thrown together.

Islanders used to get about on horse, mule and donkey; kerosene lamps illuminated the majority of homes, and water was brought from the numerous fountains scattered about the village. Leah Franqui had me in awe for much of the book - her rendering of India, especially Mumbai, was so nuanced and perceptive. A description of a family “enmeshed in perpetual contention”, the plot is slight but sufficient for Theroux’s purposes.

At this, Brenner beamed, his already-wide face stretched further across the thick bones of his skull.Anyone picking up this novel expecting an easy read should be warned it is painful, sometimes harrowing reading, and will trip up a reader coming to it with conventional expectations. She’d summoned him to her craft room where the climbing clematis she’d worked on for weeks had been replaced by a tangle of stargazer lilies with curving stamens. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland. Though he pulls no punches about the sufferings of his family, he eschews the “victim” posturing familiar in emigrant stories, mentioning in passing, for example, that some of his Turkish neighbours were expelled from Lesvos (Midilli) by the Greek government in 1955.

I enjoyed the story and the writing although the character of Rachel seemed a bit immature and whiny and not always likeable. Mother Land, despite its author’s fondness for an anthropological stance, does not allow us to see: but perhaps it never could. This technique allows the author to illustrate the significant gap between Swati’s worldview and Rachel’s, though a reader who shares Swati’s Marwari heritage — and, to be clear, this reader does not — may not find all of Swati’s inner monologues entirely plausible. Despite the inviting plot, however, some of the passages that describe Rachel’s and Swati’s thoughts and rumination drag, as they do not always serve to impart wisdom or advance the narrative.

I had fun watching Swarti takes risks to break through her cultural norms to give herself a better life. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

From this childhood where one might wear a dress of fall grass, cut ankles on witchgrass, and peer into a refrigerator to delineate a hummingbird from a moth; in the land of mothers, grandmothers, and their later lineal offspring, we come to terms with crossroads and swallows, rivers and oceans, and they lead us back home from which we began—the Motherland. This may be one of the best literary depictions of New England to date, certainly the finest one to challenge whatever is new and English about the place. Suddenly these two strong-willed women from such very different backgrounds, who see life so differently, are alone together in a home that each is determined to run in her own way—a situation that ultimately brings into question the very things in their lives that had seemed perfect and permanent.And it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, another travel book. While we can only send physical copies to addresses within the US, reviewers and educators outside the US are welcome to request an e-galley (PDF). A couple working as chauffeurs have been accused of stealing millions from the founder of Tin House Books. Flora climbed the porch steps, took the knife from him, and tossed it over the rail, into the bushes.