Things We Didn't Say, Kristina Riggle's third novel, explores the fecund, complicated morass of personal history and how our stories haunt us even as we try to leave them behind. Narrated in chapters that alternate points of view, Things We Didn't Say introduces Michael, a divorced dad with three school-aged children, Michael's younger, live-in fiancée Casey, and his ex-wife Mallory. As these six people encircle one another, we learn who they are, who they want to be, and the perilous gulf that lies between.
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An award-winning author of three poetry collections, Giménez Smith brings poetic impulse to every syllable of her latest work. At once memoir, a book-length essay, and an epic poem (motherhood as heroic quest), Bring down the Little Birds gathers, weaves, and illuminates the multi-faceted complexities of motherhood. I am tempted to label it a "literary nest" spun from fragments of experience, memory, reflection, imagination, pop culture, literature, and language.
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Thanks to the right mix of message and timing, Planting Dandelions and Radical Homemakers both changed my actions and attitudes for the better. They gave me a new lease on my home life and renewed inspiration to tackle my creative pursuits. What an invaluable gift. These books were just what this mama needed, when I needed them.
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In both collections, the result is that those of us who have traded business suits and drinks with friends for oatmeal-clumped clothes and sippy cups can still find time, however brief, to engage with the beauty of language.
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Turkish author Elif Shafak long espoused the motto: "dreams first, family later... maybe," and her memoir, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within traces her fraught journey from writer to mother to mother-writer. Early in her memoir, Shafak asks readers a question once posed to her: "Do you think a woman could manage motherhood and a career at the same time and equally well?" For many years, Shafak's answer to this question was no. As a successful author and self-proclaimed nomad, Shafak wandered the world, writing and publishing in her beloved Istanbul, in the US and in Europe. But her decision to postpone motherhood and wholeheartedly pursue a career was not without inner turmoil.
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Every day for one year, Nina Sankovitch read an entire book and posted a review on her website -- all while raising four boys. As a mother of just two children, a mother who struggled to find time to read this one book, I was curious to know how Sankovitch did it. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading tells her story.
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