Parveen is like most young women her age—graduating college, but not sure what she wants to do with her degree in medical anthropology. Until she reads a memoir, written by a man who goes to Afghanistan and after a traumatic incident that left a woman dead from giving birth, founds and funds a women’s health center in a small isolated village. Parveen is Afghan-American and ... Read More...
If You Want to Make God Laugh: A Novel
Delilah hasn’t been home in forty years, but when she arrives on her family’s farm in South Africa it’s to find her sister Ruth drunk on the couch and getting ready to sell the place. The sisters are polar opposites. Literally. Delilah left the family at 17 to become a nun and when that didn’t happen devoted herself to working in an orphanage in Zaire. Ruth became famous as a ... Read More...
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Petrona used to live on a farm in Colombia, with her nine brothers and her sister. Then the paramilitary showed up, burned down their house and their fields, and took her father and her three oldest brothers. Now, she, her mother, three of her brothers and her sister live in shack in the slums of Bogotá. At 13 she is sent to work as a maid for the Santiagos, a wealthy family in ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: Mother Country
Nadia’s life is not an easy one. She works not one, but two jobs—as a home attendant for an elderly man and as a nanny for a little girl. It’s necessary because she lives in Brooklyn while her daughter Larissa is still back in Ukraine. They’ve been separated for six years. Lonely years for Nadia as a non-English speaker, looked upon with distrust by the other Ukrainians she ... Read More...
Mothers’ Week: The Island of Sea Women
This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day so this week my reviews are focused on three books with very different perspectives on motherhood. Each offered something important in its own way and reminded me how, like so much of what women do, it is impossible to fit the role of mother into one finite slot. Off the coast of Korea’s mainland is an island called Jeju. There was ... Read More...
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
The Yoo family—Pak, Young, and their daughter Mary, have pinned all their American hopes and all their money on their new business. It’s a hyperbaric chamber that is supposed to help cure or improve all kinds of medical issues. Angie Kim’s new novel, Miracle Creek, begins while a session is in progress. In the chamber are two children with severe autism, one parent, and Matt, a ... Read More...
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