Door 10: Russian Mothers' Day
Book: Read a book featuring a character who is a mother.
I nabbed this book when it came out last month because I love the idea of seeing the world through the eyes of different English grandmothers, women of my own generation.
I have two more books by Salley Vickers in my TBR pile, "Cousins" and "The Librarian" but I'm reading this one first because it fits this task and it matches my mood.
Salley Vickers has a remarkable ability to take me inside the heads of thoroughly imagined women, with very different backgrounds and current circumstances, and keep me interested in each of them. There's none of that "Oh dear, do we HAVE to go back to THIS character now?" that I sometimes get when one character is less interesting than the others.
There are some big themes here about being a mother and a grandmother, about being old, about being alone and about being aware on a daily basis of one's mortality but the power of the book is that it doesn't start there. It starts with the people. You feel as though the issues arise only because of who the people are rather than that the people have been created to illuminate the issues.
0
