Mother Land: A Novel

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I thought the alternating chapters between Rachel and her mother in law worked really well and helped me keep turning the pages. This is so different from typical beach reads, but I think taking on vacation will make everyday more enjoyable. A] tender tale of two women who are lost and alone, but who eventually become allies and each other’s biggest champions. Rachel and Swati’s] credible learning from each other make this a worthy tale of bridging a cultural divide.

Starting out as a novelist – with Waldo, published in 1967 – Theroux then began publishing short stories, travel books, yet more novels, and more and more, dozens and dozens of books, including fiction and non-fiction which often blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction. Mother” – she is never named, her family of origin and pre-marital life sketched so lightly as to suggest a wilful, defiant incuriosity – is almost without redeeming features: spiteful, devious, petty, mean, treacherous. Mother Land is a minutely remembered description of a childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. She is a Puerto Rican Jewish American who lives in Mumbai with her Kolkata-born husband, and her perspective informs her latest novel.

I want to thank William Morrow for allowing me to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest opinion. Let me also clear that “𝙎𝙡𝙪𝙢𝙙𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙚” DOES NOT DEFINE INDIA WHICH IS MADE BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR. Mother/land gives breath to the immigrant’s bittersweet songs about what is gained with migration and what is lost, what can be recovered and what will remain out of reach.

Franqui, herself an American woman living in Mumbai with her Indian husband, takes a risk by alternating between Rachel’s perspective and Swati’s each time she starts a new chapter. Joi passes on hard-won knowledge that has taken years to learn: the complexity of your identity is just who you are - it's okay to be both, neither, or multiple things at once - instead of fighting it, feeling 'neither' is a strength and a state of mind that you can revel in. His thick eyebrows meet over the bridge of his nose, making him look like a prince out of an Ottoman miniature. On the grass of No-man’s Land, fat rabbits ate and strolled about as if they’d never been hunted and nothing could disturb them. Mother/Land is restoring the world through the retelling of patterns passed woman to woman like songs to lips.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). Still, it was a bit incongruous to think that a closeted woman like Swati would suddenly lust madly for her best friend’s son - she just touching 60 and the son being in his early 30s, I assume. Little did I know that I was on the threshold of a rabbithole of a really gripping, well written, perfect-for-quarantine novel! Savageau retells and re-imagines creation stories, revealing a landscape of trees, ponds, rivers and mountains rich in meaning for Abenaki people, and weaves traditional, personal and family stories, with stories of colonization and resistance.