Family dramas make for some of the best reading. These books all tell great stories about daughters who lose their mothers, in completely different ways.
“The Invisible Hour” by Alice Hoffman is unusual in that it’s practically two separate books; the first half is a realistic account about a woman and her young daughter, and the second half turns into a romantic time-travel fantasy.
The story starts in Boston, where teenager Ivy finds herself pregnant and dumped by her boyfriend. She runs away and ends up on a community farm — a cult — whose leader, Joel, is strict and metes out punishment that is severe and cruel.
Joel marries Ivy and accepts her baby, Mia, as his daughter. But in the cult, all kids belong to the community, so they take Mia away from her mom. Ivy thinks, “It wasn’t so hard not to show what you really felt if you practiced, if you closed your eyes and imagined that your daughter was with you even when she was somewhere else, if you let the wind rise all around you, if you only heard the songs of the sparrows in the forest, a place so dark it was easy to get lost even in broad daylight, even if your eyes were open.”
One of the cult’s rules is “No reading novels or attending public school.” If found with a book, the person would have letters branded onto their skin. Joel says, “There is a reason we have no books here. They will divide us. They’ll make us think the world outside can teach you more than you can learn right here. Some writer doesn’t know you better than I do. They can’t tell you how to live your life.”
When Mia discovers the town library, she tells us, “Every time I had gone to town, I’d managed to sneak into the library. I knew there was magic there, and I knew they would do their best to destroy it.” Of course, her love of books gets her into trouble. “They thought I only had a life that I lived here, but I had found other possibilities every time I read a book.”
She’s helped by a kind librarian, who had “heard that books weren’t allowed inside the farm, and didn’t that say just about everything? In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future. … Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around.”
The love of books is the central theme of both halves of the book. Mia says, “Sometimes when you read a book it’s as if you were reading the story of your own life. That was what had happened to me. I woke up when I read the first page. I saw who I was and who I could be.” Finally, she “understood … that once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.”
I’ve read quite a few books by the prolific Isabel Allende. This time, she’s put on her Charles Dickens hat and penned a social commentary about immigration in the form of a novel. “The Wind Knows My Name” is as good as anything she’s ever done.
She begins with a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938. The Third Reich is making so much trouble for the Jews that the family decides to leave the country, but the mother spends hours “trying to get the documents needed to emigrate.” She decides to send her little son ahead, to England, to be safe. The son, Samuel, will eventually make his way to America and will turn up again in the story.
In San Francisco in 2019, Selena works with the Magnolia Project for Refugees and Immigrants, trying to reunite families separated at the border. “Hundreds of children were being held in detention centers because officials hadn’t bothered to keep accurate records, and now their parents couldn’t be located. No one had enough foresight to consider the need for later reunification.” She convinces Frank, a young lawyer, to help her with the legal work required to help immigrant families. “Almost without exception, a child who goes before a judge without the proper legal representation will simply be deported, regardless of the situation they were fleeing in their country and without knowing if their parents are even there to receive them. But when there’s a lawyer present to defend the child and explain their case, they are often granted asylum.”
Frank is assigned to little Anita, 7, separated from her mother Marisol at the border. No records were kept regarding what happened to Marisol, who may have been deported back to El Salvador. “There are hundreds of children like Anita, stuck in limbo because nothing was done to maintain a paper trail connecting them to their parents.” Selena and Frank go to El Salvador to find Anita’s mother.
The intriguing story is part mystery, part love story, part social statement, with complex characters whose lives intertwine. It took a while for me to get into it, but then I couldn’t put it down.
“The Direction of the Wind” by Mansi Shah begins in Ahmedabad, India, in 2019. Sophie’s father has just died. Now her aunts are taking over her life. One of them says, “An unmarried girl her age living by herself would be unthinkable.” At 28, she should have been married by now but never felt she could leave her father alone, and he couldn’t bear to part with her. Her aunts have found her an available suitor and arranged a marriage. “Sophie is damaged goods in the Indian marriage market,” because she is “a now orphaned spinster whose papa allowed her to focus on her education, obtain an accounting degree and pursue a career rather than forcing her to learn the ways of the kitchen and management of servants.”
Her mother died when Sophie was 6. “The man thing Sophie recalls about her mummy is that although she never set foot in the country, she loved France. That was why Sophie ended up with her French name.” She overhears her aunts say her mother ran away. … Wait, what? She’s not dead? Sophie finds a small box of her father’s treasured possessions that include letters from her mother, from Paris. She’s been alive all this time?
Sophie goes to Paris to look for her. At this point, we get her mother Nita’s story in Paris. We learn why she left and what happened to her, as well as what happens to Sophie, including some surprises. It’s part love story, part adventure, and part “stranger in a strange land.”
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.