Your Mouth Is Lovely - Softcover

Richler, Nancy

3.72

338 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443423874 ISBN 13: 9781443423878

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013

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Your Mouth Is Lovely is a grand and glorious novel, greeted with ecstatic reviews in Canada and on the international scene. The story of a family caught between the rich yet rigid traditions of the past and the unfamiliar and often frightening ways of a society poised on the precipice of change, Your Mouth Is Lovely centers around Miriam, a young Jewish woman caught in the 1905 Russian Revolution. The kind of book that simply won’t be put down, this is literary fiction at its very best.

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About the Author:

NANCY RICHLER’s short fiction has been published in various American and Canadian literary journals, including Room of One’s Own, the New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Another Chicago Magazine and the Journey Prize Stories anthology. Her first novel, Throwaway Angels, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel. Her second novel, Your Mouth Is Lovely, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and Italy’s Adei-Wizo literary prize. The book has been translated into seven languages. The Imposter Bride was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Born in Montreal, Nancy Richler lived for many years in Vancouver. She passed away in January 2018.

From Publishers Weekly:

Like a doomed love affair, the Russian Revolution proceeds according to its own inexorable logic in this haunting U.S. debut by Canadian Richler (Throw Away Angels). Within hours of Miriam Lev's birth into a swampy shtetl in prerevolutionary Minsk, her mother dispatches her to a wet nurse and drowns herself. Six years later, Miriam is halfheartedly reclaimed by her father, Aaron, "the Stutterer," newly married to the young seamstress Tsila. With her grotesque facial birthmark and a disposition "sour as spoiled milk," Tsila fulfills the job requirements for wicked stepmother. But this remarkably complex character educates Miriam "to be a human being among human beings" and instills in her the urge to escape ("Nice is somewhere else"). She also binds Miriam to her own family, especially to her rebellious sister Bayla, now scandalously cohabitating with the agitator Leib in Kiev. Convinced that poverty, pogroms and mounting political unrest are making Russia uninhabitable, Tsila decides they'll emigrate to Argentina. But late in 1904, just months before the outbreak of revolution, she sends Miriam to Kiev to find Bayla a quest that leads to a Siberian political prison. Weaving together political and cultural history, magical realism and the resigned mordancy of Jewish humor, Richler has created a world that seems totally inhabited, but poised to self-destruct. Too many tangential incidents and indistinguishable minor characters crowd the novel, but in Tsila, Bayla and especially in Miriam, Richler has created unforgettable, deeply nuanced characters, freethinking dreamers whose revolutionary activities feel both historically inevitable and mysteriously personal.
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