My Mother's Island - Hardcover

Mueller, Marnie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1880684829 ISBN 13: 9781880684825

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 2002

Synopsis

In Marnie Mueller's My Mother's Island, Sarah Ellis must tend to her dying mother, Reba. This moving story of subterranean conflict between a mother and her only child explores the tension between duty and commitment-how to honor one's parents even when one feels damaged by them. With sorrow, rage, empathy, and touches of humor, the story reaches its irrevocable conclusion in a death scene where Sarah is shocked to find a simple truth that has always evaded her.

This novel is played out against the lush ambiance of the Caribbean and the embracing involvement of the people of the working class Puerto Rican community where Sarah's parents settled twenty years earlier. Sarah, who has always taken care of her mother's needs, has steeled herself to single-handedly provide support to her dying mother, but gradually allows other to help her-Lydia Rentas, the girlfriend of a local heroin user and the foster mother of a child whose own mother has AIDS; Estela, a neighbor across the street, whose carport is overflowing with orchids; Inez, whose four-year-old daughter has become the granddaughter Sarah has never provided her mother; Pearl, a former sports writer who is Reba's bridge partner; and Dr. Gold, a New Yorker who thirty years earlier married a Puerto Rican and has taken on Latino attitudes toward the process of dying. With their support, Sarah comes to terms with her mother and with her own past.
"My Mother's Island is a daughter's death watch: loving, angry, remorseful, and profoundly revealing of our lives as adult children. Marnie Mueller's honest and unsentimental novel helped me fathom the meaning of my own mother's recent death and should similarly serve other readers in negotiating the strong currents and unpredictable eddies of this milestone of primary loss."-Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone.

About this title

About the Author:

Marnie Mueller was born in Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp, described in her second novel, The Climate of the Country. Her first novel, Green Fires, based on her Peace Corps experience in Ecuador, won the American Book Award, was a B&N "Discovery" choice, and a NYPL's Best Books for the Teen Age choice.

From Publishers Weekly:

A woman returns to Puerto Rico to help her terminally ill mother through her final days in Mueller's third novel, a gritty yet graceful book that unflinchingly looks at the reality of losing a parent. The story opens with Sarah Ellis leaving her job and husband in New York to join her mother, Reba, as abdominal cancer begins its final march through Reba's battered body. But Sarah is hardly an angel of mercy in a series of flashbacks, Mueller reveals both Reba's deep-seated cruelty toward her daughter and Sarah's hatred for her mother, a revulsion offset to some extent by Sarah's respect for the devotion to social activism that Reba shared with her late husband, Scott. Some of the passages describing the family history are a bit mawkish and pedestrian, but the second half of this book turns absolutely riveting as Mueller delves into Sarah's fear, love and loathing while Reba stubbornly tries to hang onto her dignity as she awaits a final visit from her son-in-law, Roberto, a psychologist who is all too aware of the manipulation dominating the mother-daughter relationship. The account of the final days is especially gut-wrenching, as Sarah is finally forced to call in a nurse and a family friend to help her through her mother's brutal last hours. As a novel, this is a lovely but painful account of a difficult journey two women must take together to bring their problematic relationship to a close. On a deeper level, Mueller has crafted an exceptional book about the spirituality of death and dying that gets inside the reality of losing a parent with an intimacy and depth that no self-help treatise can hope to match. Agent, Liza Dawson. (Mar.)Forecast: Readers searching for texts on death and dying will find this novel especially compelling, but general readers will also appreciate Mueller's craftsmanship and insight. A blurb from Wally Lamb should help draw browsers. Five-city author tour.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1880684829
• ISBN 13: 9781880684825
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238