Have you ever heard a woman say to her child that, no matter how old her offspring gets, she will always be its mother?
This novel plumbs the depths and mysteries of motherhood. It places our heroine in a world where mothers vanish inexplicably, a world where people don’t remember how or when they arrived or who were the first settlers. The townfolk don’t know why their women disappear and are singularly lacking in the interest to find out. It is a place suspended in time, without history or future.
The people of this town are curious about the outside world, which they refer to as “elsewhere”, but not enough to go exploring it. They welcome outsiders (referred to always as “strangers”) before turning against them because foreigners simply don’t understand who they are.
Then one woman decides she’s simply not going to fade away as other mothers do. She absconds to the outside world and thus her journey begins.
But Vera’s sojourn starts when she gets her own child, Iris. The remarkable enigma that is motherhood is shown as a bonding ritual. New mothers gather together to compare notes about their children, to give advice, to speak of their child’s idiosyncrasies. It is a mystery that men can’t share and the males don’t try.
The town is both like and unlike other places. They eat, drink, sleep, marry and give birth. The boys grow up and pair up with girls who are eager to become mothers and secretly fearful about it. But they live high among the clouds and the dampness is something that seeps into every corner of their lives, that they welcome into their world. It lends them lightness and weight as it surrounds their tiny world.
Vera’s escape to the outside expands her horizons. She sees the strangers there as being people and comes to accept how they are distant from each other yet gently come together time after time, year after year. She notices with curiosity and then with delight the wonder that are changing seasons—she, a woman from a world where the seasons never change.
Her ultimate decision to return to her home brings her full circle, not to acceptance but to a realization that she is no longer the same as when she first lived there. She has become a stranger and makes a horrifying realization about the stranger Ruth who was run off in a fashion like something out of a horror flick.
The book is a fascinating allegory of the journey motherhood imposes on women. Their bodies become alien to themselves and others; at the same time, a woman becomes deeply present in her own flesh as she never is at other moments. In the end, the enigma both connects women to and divides them from their children. Perhaps motherhood is itself a foreign country, one that nobody can understand until they are part of it.
This novel plumbs the depths and mysteries of motherhood. It places our heroine in a world where mothers vanish inexplicably, a world where people don’t remember how or when they arrived or who were the first settlers. The townfolk don’t know why their women disappear and are singularly lacking in the interest to find out. It is a place suspended in time, without history or future.
The people of this town are curious about the outside world, which they refer to as “elsewhere”, but not enough to go exploring it. They welcome outsiders (referred to always as “strangers”) before turning against them because foreigners simply don’t understand who they are.
Then one woman decides she’s simply not going to fade away as other mothers do. She absconds to the outside world and thus her journey begins.
But Vera’s sojourn starts when she gets her own child, Iris. The remarkable enigma that is motherhood is shown as a bonding ritual. New mothers gather together to compare notes about their children, to give advice, to speak of their child’s idiosyncrasies. It is a mystery that men can’t share and the males don’t try.
The town is both like and unlike other places. They eat, drink, sleep, marry and give birth. The boys grow up and pair up with girls who are eager to become mothers and secretly fearful about it. But they live high among the clouds and the dampness is something that seeps into every corner of their lives, that they welcome into their world. It lends them lightness and weight as it surrounds their tiny world.
Vera’s escape to the outside expands her horizons. She sees the strangers there as being people and comes to accept how they are distant from each other yet gently come together time after time, year after year. She notices with curiosity and then with delight the wonder that are changing seasons—she, a woman from a world where the seasons never change.
Her ultimate decision to return to her home brings her full circle, not to acceptance but to a realization that she is no longer the same as when she first lived there. She has become a stranger and makes a horrifying realization about the stranger Ruth who was run off in a fashion like something out of a horror flick.
The book is a fascinating allegory of the journey motherhood imposes on women. Their bodies become alien to themselves and others; at the same time, a woman becomes deeply present in her own flesh as she never is at other moments. In the end, the enigma both connects women to and divides them from their children. Perhaps motherhood is itself a foreign country, one that nobody can understand until they are part of it.