Reviews

Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless

Stephen Osborne
Tags

Betsy Warland's new book is Blood-root: Tracing the Untelling of Motherless (Second Story), an unnecessarily clunky title for such a strong and wonderful book. There are encounters in this book between mother and daughter and daughter and father that will move you as much as anything else you read this year. Warland presents the narrative of her encounters with her mother, who is in decline, in tiny episodes that offer glimpses into a life without descending into mere vignettes: we are carried in and out of a difficult fading from (and a continuous revision of—her mother has die disconcerting habit of rewriting the past) a life that itself seems to have been a fading away, and a refusal.

No items found.

Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Reviews
Michael Hayward

Songs of battle

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

Essays
Anik See

The Crush and the Rush and the Roar

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

Reviews
KELSEA O'CONNOR

Pride and prejudice meets Diana Wynne Jones

Review of "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L. Polk