Mother’s Day Roundup

My mother lives by the motto “There’s no such thing as too many books.” You can usually find her nose-deep in a battered paperback, sitting in our dog Chester’s favorite armchair, which he has graciously allowed her to use in exchange for a belly rub. Now that I’m in college, I’ve hijacked her philosophy as a convenient excuse for my double-stacked dorm room bookshelves and the multiple E. M. Forster novels hiding somewhere in my bed. Thanks, Mom.

As Mother’s Day rolls around again, I suggest you all get her what she really wants: books, books, and more books! Here are eight Mother’s Day picks:

– Jordan Castelloe, Blog Intern

1. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende

Heather Lende’s new memoir is a meditation on mothers, daughters, community, and faith.  After a near-fatal accident, Lende has to depend on her family ties and the tight-knit community of Haines, Alaska, for support and compassion.  The title comes from her mother’s last words of advice to the author. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs is a magnificent book informed by Lende’s gift for illuminating the ordinary.

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2. Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

“My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.”  So begins this resonant new novel by Tayari Jones, which centers around James Witherspoon’s two families–one public, and one private–and his two teenage daughters who meet and forge an unlikely friendship.  A tale of love, secrets, and betrayal unfolds against the backdrop of 1980′s suburban Atlanta, and at the heart of it all are two girls struggling to imagine themselves as women–just not as their mothers.

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3. Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt

How well do we know the people we love? In Caroline Leavitt’s new novel Pictures of You, a fatal car crash raises questions about love, loss, redemption and forgiveness.  Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy stretch of highway. Only one of them survives. Haunted by guilt, Isabelle finds herself drawn to the grief-stricken husband and son that the other woman left behind.

4. Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants is the perfect gift for your favorite gardener or botanist or, in my mother’s case, armchair gardener. My mom’s been talking about planting an herb garden for eleven years running. If anything, I think this book might defer the herb garden indefinitely. Amy Stewart’s A-Z compendium of ill-behaved plants (a leaf that triggered a war! a vine that strangles! a shrub that paralyzes!) is so much fun to read that my mother might never get around to planting that parsley.

5. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

Lee Smith is renowned for her resilient women characters, and Mrs. Darcy is no exception–these stories are peopled with wives and mothers, young and old, English teachers and truck-stop waitresses, who refuse to let the world keep them down. Her characters are ordinary folks, but her nuanced style and tightly-plotted stories bring out the extraordinary in all of us.

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6. Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman

In her New York Times bestselling memoir, Ilene Beckerman uses her changing wardrobe to tell the story of her life in Manhattan during the 1940′s and ’50′s.  She navigates marriage, divorce, and motherhood with good humor and fabulous clothes. This pithy book is packed with brightly colored illustrations and fashion-inspired anecdotes–some of them comical, and some of them poignant. Love, Loss, and What I Wore is a celebration of love, life, and womanhood.

7. The Woman I Kept to Myself by Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez’s new collection of poems centers around her personal experience. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, she explores cultural crosscurrents with eloquence and wit. Her poems show a journey towards self-discovery–of finding, through writing, the woman she kept to herself. Julia Alvarez take on personal subjects like love, death, marriage, divorce, and faith, and turns them into universal discoveries to which every woman can relate.

8. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow

Heidi Durrow’s bestselling novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction for its searing depiction of a biracial girl’s coming-of-age in 1980′s America. Rachel is born of a Danish woman and a black G.I. A terrible accident on a Chicago rooftop forces  her to move in with her African-American grandmother and, for the first time, confront challenges of race and identity in a strictly black-and-white world. As she struggles to find a place for herself, Rachel must also unravel the mystery of her mother’s tragic accident.

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Tags: Amy Stewart, Caroline Leavitt, Heather Lende, Lee Smith, Mother's Day, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Pictures of You, Silver Sparrow, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, Tayari Jones, Wicked Plants