THE FASHION ORPHANS, a sweet and poignant story of sisterhood that's about malignant motherhood instead

THE FASHION ORPHANS
RANDY SUSAN MEYERS & M.J. ROSE
Blue Box Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Two estranged sisters find that forgiveness never goes out of style when they inherit their mother’s vintage jackets, purses… and pearls of wisdom

Estranged half-sisters Gabrielle Winslow and Lulu Quattro have only two things in common: mounds of debt and coils of unresolved enmity toward Bette Bradford, their controlling and imperious recently deceased mother.

Gabrielle, the firstborn, was raised in relative luxury on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. Now, at fifty-five, her life as a Broadway costume designer married to a heralded Broadway producer has exploded in divorce.

Lulu, who spent half her childhood under the tutelage of her working-class Brooklyn grandparents, is a grieving widow at forty-eight. With her two sons grown, her life feels reduced to her work at the Ditmas Park bakery owned by her late husband’s family.

The two sisters arrive for the reading of their mother’s will, expecting to divide a sizable inheritance, pay off their debts, and then again turn their backs on each other.

But to their shock, what they have been left is their mother’s secret walk-in closet jammed with high-end current and vintage designer clothes and accessories— most from Chanel.

Contemplating the scale of their mother’s self-indulgence, the sisters can’t help but wonder if Lauren Weisberger had it wrong: because it seems, in fact, that the devil wore Chanel. But as they being to explore their mother’s collection, meet and fall in love with her group of warm, wonderful friends, and magically find inspiring messages tucked away in her treasures — it seems as though their mother is advising Lulu and Gabrielle from the beyond — helping them rediscover themselves and restore their relationship with each other.

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My Review: I have a personal connection to this story, in that this could be my family. My sisters are a lot older than me, and our mother was the same kind of borderline personality that the dead woman was. After our mother's death, there wasn't anything left except stuff...lots and lots of stuff...and there's a long, long history of unkindness, rancor, and just plain nastiness all over our "family." I was very curious to see how things would play out fictionally.

It's not like I wasn't expecting the happily ever after...I was...but I was simultaneously frustrated and amused at how these deeply estranged siblings navigated this emotional passage without either death threats or theft taking place.

What drew me to the read was that sense of familiarity, of fellow feeling, for the characters. It was a fun way to work through my own bad past. And in the end, while I wanted the story to end the way it did, I was...curiously detached. Neither Lulu nor Gabrielle ever cohered to me, never took on the full volume of characterhood. The real character here was their horrible mother! She emerged in all her shallow, self-centered, controlling awfulness. If you've never seen The Little Mermaid, you won't know this reference, but this old baggage out-Ursula'd Ursula!

I was drawn in by the deep Chanel lore on display here, and found myself grateful for the Fire tablet's ability to browse the web. There's a lot I didn't know, and a lot I half-knew, about Chanel, so being able to check references and to see aesthetics I was ignorant about helped me to *get* this read. The sisters "playing dress-up" in Mama's clothes was a hoot. But in the end, that's just what it felt like: Playing a game in which Mama would, in the end, step in to decide who wins. (Or her lawyer, in this case, who must approve any plan for the huge collection of Chanel artifacts to be disposed of.)

So there's me, all irked with "Mother" Bette being her borderline-personality tantrummy self...there's the source of my sour, not-quite-four star rating. I was certainly drawn in by the collaborators' ability to merge their prose into one authorial voice. It shows that they're different people mostly in the hilarious older women who formed Bette's coterie of ladies-who-lunch, and Lulu's adult sons. These very, very different types didn't emerge from one brain! But they each contributed to the sense of rightness and reality that the story definitely has.

The obvious comparables to this story are Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada (actually, Author Weisberger, she wore and collected Chanel), but those aren't direct cognates. Bushnell's book and its offshoots are about navigating complications unique to upper-class modern life; Weisberger's bildungsroman takes a greenhorn into adulthood wearing amazing shoes. Here we have what happens when the Bushnell women, now mothers of another Weisberger generation, have to deal with their own mothers' deaths.

It *is* in a tradition, then, but it is *not* something you've read a dozen times already. It's the next step, it's the Bushnell women's ascent to cronehood, it's the education of the adults in the arts of being elders. It works fine. It isn't quite as full-bodied as I expected it to be, since the real main character turns out to be the dead mother; but it was more than worth my time to read. I'll venture to say that it's worth yours, too.

BLUE-SKINNED GODS, one of my favorite 2021 demonstrations of social progress

BLUE-SKINNED GODS
S.J. SINDU
Soho Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST BISEXUAL FICTION! Winners announced 11 June 2022.
GBH's virtual book club, BEYOND THE PAGE, features Author Sindu discussing this story and answering audience questions FREE Register at the link for tonight's 7p EST event!

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on—father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin—starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A child is fed a diet of lies by his parents and all the adults around him. They seek many things from their lies, and he seeks only his truth.

Come for the writing, stay for the story...the sentences are lovely things, shining and glowing with the light of inspiration. The story's the one we all need to hear at this juncture, the one about the abuse of religion in service of religiosity and greed. The cost to this genuinely beautiful soul, Kalki, is so huge...the relationships he can not save are all built on the sand of lies.

What makes this story so extraordinarily resonant is that we're all surrounded by lies all day every day. Yes, it's true, Kalki's lies are costly to those he's lying to...not being a god and still trying to heal people is wrong...but he told the truth he had been sold all his life by the liars he was raised by and among. Kalki, unlike all the rest of us, has the weight of the literal world on him, has expectations of miracles mounded on him. That's his excuse for buying into the lies he's surrounded by. What's yours? What's mine?

The questions that this brutally honest look in the mirror of a story raises are urgently in need of everyone's answers, delivered with the honesty and the anger that Kalki uses as he does the absolutely unthinkable, the unbelievably god-like thing and takes control of his life: He forgives.

Being able to forgive is, I honestly believe, the single most important quality in a healthy person's happiness. I see it in stark relief as this novel winds its coils around my heart. Kalki, wronged on every level, betrayed and abandoned on every side, used and abused and ripped off...he forgives. And that is the most beautiful thing available for a mortal to do, to give. Come and be healed: Read BLUE-SKINNED GODS.

CHOUETTE, a surrealist novel with an amazing tale to tell

CHOUETTE
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco Press
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis
Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.

Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

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My Review: You can't find my interest in the Cult of Mother with a scanning electron microscope. I dislike the smugness of Mothers who define themselves by the fruits of their uterus. I am routinely revolted and infuriated by the seemingly inevitable bad, lazy, underinvolved fathers these Noble Mothers are saddled with. (Who chose him? Could it just possibly be you, your behavior, your expectations are at fault, Mother?)

Why in the hell did I ask for, then read this book?!

Because we're not on the rails leading to Vaginaville by way of Labor Creek, that's why. This book posits a half-owl, half-human baby born of lesbian bestiality committed in a dream. (Not a spoiler, that's literally the first page of the read.)

I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.

You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.
                                                    * * *
As for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek; and on the day that you are born—on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box—I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.

But there you will be, and you will be of me.

Right there, that voice makes my readar ping like it's locked onto an approaching asteroid. This? This is weird trip and I am here to take it.

What doesn't make me coo with delight is the rather stark presentation of her husband and his family. I did, however, get many evil-hearted chuckles at their expense:

My mother-in-law sees right over me. She is six feet tall and never looks down. She looks out toward the horizon instead, with an expression on her face as if she is thinking the same thought all the time, and that thought has something to do with the pioneer spirit.

Still, the way Author Oshetsky treats the poor bewildered father of this owl-baby is the reason I don't give this book five stars, why I won't be mentioning it for my annual six-stars-of-five "this book...it merged itself into me"; women get to whinge about male writers treating them as cardboard cutouts, so I have done the same.

Chouette's birth, her entry into a world not meant or designed for her, is a trauma; her mother is the only one who champions her. Naturally enough; she's got the owl-baby she expected. No one around her took her seriously when she told them, "this baby is half-owl," because who in their right mind would? Then...Chouette.

From that point on, the beautiful language...the beautiful Satanic Second Person language...goes into the full monty crazytime of a human woman raising an owl-baby, a creature she simply isn't like, but she keeps slugging. She does what mothers across the globe have always done: She learns, adapts, improvises. She makes do and she feeds, raises her child, meeting her owl-baby's needs for raw meat, for training in how to catch prey; she tussles with her owl-baby to accomplish the simplest of daily tasks.

In the teeth of a word-gale of opposition and resistance from her dog-person husband ("When it comes to our little girl, can't is a dirty word"). And I don't mean "man who likes dogs," I mean she thinks her husband...all of the rest of us not her and Chouette, in fact...are like dogs.

She does not intend a compliment in it.

The rest of the narrative is a rehash of The Yellow Wallpaper meets Gaslight. The horrors build in frequency as the reviled dog-person father succeeds in making his Charlotte into a dog-baby. Then comes the day the dog-family meets Charlotte...and she reverts to Chouette. Violently. Horribly. The dog-person father comes to a bloody end; Chouette and mother go on the lam; but, as it inevitably must, Time has her way with us:

She is strong. She is monstrously individual. She is sister to the Titans. She is Ozymandias before the fall. She is the bird of omen, dark and foul; she is blood-wed; she is Strix; she is harbinger of war and bringer of death and slughterer of armies, oh, my Polyphonte!—

She is the girl I raised her to be.

And that she is. This bizarre extended metaphorical trip through the awful, consuming process of being a mother ends as it must...in defeat, in triumph, in the hollowness of being finally ready...for the task, the life, just ended. The awful emptiness of realizing: Now it's just me I worry about, care for, be with. Now it's not You, it's just me.

All the stars I've rated this book are for that single, cruel, agonizing, slow-moving catastrophe of a realization.

SHELTER, my General Fiction vote for the Goodreads Choice Awards

SHELTER
JUNG YUN
Picador
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future.

A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?

My Review: I voted for this in the 2016 Goodreads choice awards because it was the most interesting novel I'd read among the choices. It wasn't an easy read. I disliked everyone except Ethan Cho, the four-year-old, and given time I'm sure I'd've disliked him too.

What price family? I didn't have a close or happy family. My own parents weren't like the Chos, they were chaotic rather than cruel and cold. But what made the book interesting for me is the way Kyung tries to stop the vicious cycle of chill and distance, and fails again and again. His wife is just as guilty of emotional dysfunction as he is.

When this screwed-up couple is, in simple human decency, required to house the traumatized parents after their luxurious and hollow world cracks wide open, the fun truly begins. Think the set-up's dark? Wait until the parents move in!

The ending is a raggedy-looking bow tied on the fanny of the story which I didn't for one second believe came from any strand in the story itself. I'd still suggest reading it.

WANTED: ELEVATOR MAN by Joseph G. Peterson review live today at Entropy Magazine!

Rating: 3.5* of five

My latest review, WANTED: ELEVATOR MAN by Joseph G. Peterson, is live today at Entropy Magazine. Thanks, Switchgrass Books of Northern Illinois University Press, for sending me the review copy!

Perhaps the most representative quote is also the centerpiece of the story:

He felt entombed and stifled and desperately craved oxygen. He vainly raised the question: Why have you forsaken me?

'Call my mother,' he yelled. He had meant to say: I'm dying. Please call a priest.

The shadowy Presence, who had been in a panic, rushed over to him and, disregarding the fact that it was live, pushed the cable aside.

'You're alive,' the Presence said in breathless tones. 'Mamma's here to help.'

The elevator continued to descend, creating a vacuum. Barnes gasped for breath.

'Breathe in, breathe out,' the Presence urged. She tapped his pulse rapidly with two fingers. 'Come on, you can do it. One, two, three. Breathe in. Mamma's here to help.' ... In his delirium he thought that indeed his mother was here to help. However, in all of Barnes's twenty-nine years of so-called living, his mother had never come so comfortingly close as this.

This is quality reading. Seek it out.