FanFare

"A new mother who fears she's going through a frightening and exhilarating transformation leans into the feral side of motherhood" in Rachel Yoder's bloody, unsettling novel, Nightbitch. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on Apr 9, 2022 - 5 comments

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, is the deeply unsettling story of how Frida Liu's bad parenting day turns into a court-mandated year in an experimental rehabilitation program for bad mothers. But this program is...different. Total surveillance. Public self-criticism. And dolls, sentient AI beings, to detect a mother's "stress, fear, ingratitude, deception, boredom, ambivalence...how often she makes eye contact, the quality and authenticity of her emotions." Say it with me: I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good. Again, please. AGAIN. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on Mar 3, 2022 - 6 comments

L.A. Times: " “Darkness” is a collage of forms, what [author Claire Vaye Watkins] calls “pack rat fiction.” The first chapter is a postnatal depression questionnaire filled out with discursive irony. Letters written in the early 1970s by Claire’s mother, Martha, are allotted throughout, in reverse chronological order. The novel’s backbone is the story of Claire heading to Reno for a book event and taking nearly a year to get high and screw around and dip in hot springs and drop in on her grandma and shack up with two women in a junk-box cabin before she reunites with her husband and daughter, only to swear off convention for good." Excerpt, from Lit Hub.
posted by MonkeyToes on Nov 10, 2021 - 1 comment