All My Mother's Lovers

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All My Mother's Lovers

All My Mother's Lovers

RRP: £99
Price: £9.9
£9.9 FREE Shipping

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The novel offers readers a nuanced, fully realized protagonist struggling to come to terms with death, her transition to adulthood, and the leap of faith required to let people in. I was reminded of *The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo* when I finished, and I think fans of that book will love this one, too.

We meet the lovers of the title, but don’t ever understand many of the choices Iris makes while in their company. Maggie starts out as an immature and confused young woman who despite believing that she has a strong grip on life, has not accepted herself and blames her mother for her own issues. All My Mother’s Lovers is a beautifully written tale that highlights the intricacies of relationships, especially familial ones. The ensuing road trip takes her over miles of California highways, through strangers' recollections of a second, hidden life (that seems almost impossible to reconcile with the Iris she knew), and a journey through her own fears as she navigates her new relationship. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories podcast and a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also serves as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor for Prairie Schooner.Maggie tells the reader that Lucia is Puerto Rican and Black, that she has had stress and anxiety since Trump's election, and that she was so affected by the Charlottesville tragedy that she had to sleep at her own house rather than Maggie's apartment that night. The unique part of the book is the letters and the audacity of Maggie to take it upon herself to hand-deliver them instead of, well, doing what her mother wanted. With incisive writing and a taut plot, Masad ensures that her book remains gripping and unpredictable as she throws at the reader one inconvenient truth after another. She goes off on this wild goose chase to find the men her mother left letters to, and when she finds them she’s abusive to them. What she’d thought were work trips were often dalliances; what she’d thought was a perfect marriage wasn’t (certainly not by sitcom standards).

I’m giving this book two stars instead of one because it’s competently written, but I pretty much hated it. try reading this out loud):"Years later, Iris would remember the first time Shlomo hurt her being April Fool’s Day, 1977. they seemed like they were really good for each other and i liked how even without taking center stage, their relationship progressed throughout the story.

i usually have a hard time feeling the connection between characters when their relationship has already been established before the book starts, but it worked really well in the case of maggie and lucia. Instead, she hits the road to hand-deliver these mysterious letters and learn more about her mother in the process. She decides, to run from her family, grief, and Shiva duties to personally deliver the letters to the men. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

From Iris’s vantage point, we see her as a young woman married to an abusive rabbi, as a happy new mother with her second husband, and Maggie’s father, Peter. So the conflict at the heart of this book is not about the learning of an uncomfortable truth but how we grapple with the surfacing of new realities about a person we were certain we knew. There are many things for which All My Mother’s Lovers should be praised, not least of which is its cast of dynamic, complicated queer characters whose relationship problems have nothing to do with how they identify.

However, this is the balm that Maggie needs to come to terms with the anger of her mother's death before she was able to evolve into a complete adult and fully formed a friendship with her mother. Just as the story was actually going somewhere and characters started to feel more developed and mature the ending ruined it all. The characters acknowledge their awareness of major news events, really events that are a crisis for those living them.

I pushed my way through this book because as a millennial lesbian, I felt obligated to, but it was a serious struggle. A friend sent it to me and asked that I read it because she enjoyed it and it reminded her of Evelyn Hugo, a book we both adored last year, so when my hold at the library finally came up, I thought I'd give it a shot, fully expecting to adore this book as much as Evelyn. When your character thinks they are in one movie after another - it should be a red flag): "The carpet felt like a pillow under her soles.

When Iris dies in a car crash, Maggie flies home to reckon with a prickly college-age brother, a deflated father nearly catatonic in his grief — with whom Iris always appeared to have a sitcomishly perfect relationship — and the task of interacting with a string of sympathetic strangers, which she finds more than a little annoying. It tells the story of Maggie, who uncovers a series of stories about her mother, who has recently died, that will shake both her understanding of her mother but also herself. Yet Masad is deft and incisive about the sometimes-fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships, around which loaded subtext can seem to twist and twine like Christmas lights. As we go through the story, we watch Maggie evolve from an angsty somewhat immature twenty something to someone who begins to understand the complexity of relationships as she learns about her mother as a person versus her mother as a parent. This mystery, her sadness, and her lasting anger all come together to cause Maggie to forgo sticking around for her mother’s shiva.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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