AMERICAN ENDING by Mary Kay Zuravleff

Feisty and curious Yelena wonders how life will turn out for her: an American ending of hope and promise, or the endless heartache of a Russian one? Born in a Pennsylvania coal mining town to Russian immigrants at the turn of the century, Yelena learns quickly that women hold the families of her community together. When she’s forced to quit school to care for her younger relatives, Yelena realizes how the customs of the Old Believers, whether tied to alcohol or domestic abuse, leave women little compensation for their gritty self-preservation in the throes of poverty, illness, and living with the tragic consequences of their husbands, sons, and fathers working in the coal mines. Zuravleff’s novel is cinematic in its detailed and atmospheric depiction of daily life and its struggles—the damp ash ever present, the stringy stews, the muddy hill they must all walk up to their shoddy houses on the side of an Appalachian Mountain. But all is not doom and gloom. Yelena looks forward to the day she will escape her lot. Where women have the right to vote. Where her husband and future son will not have to work in the mines, and her daughter will one day go to school. A historical coming-of-age story of the immigrant’s experience you will not forget. 

Favorite line(s): While his ankle healed, Pa got paid to work on the church. He said the cracker-box plans must have come from a Sears & Roebuck catalog. Saints Mary and Anne was twice as tall and long as our church would be, maybe because Polish, Irish, and Italian Catholics all had to fit in there. That church also had a bell tower and arched windows, glowing with stained glass. Father Dmitri said ours came plain because they didn’t know Orthodox. He finagled extra bricks to add an entry hall at the front and a cupola on top, and with the men’s help, he got the shell up within weeks, a miracle Kostia and I witnessed after school on Friday, because Ma promised us a nickel apiece if we brought Pa home sober on payday.

FRANK: SONNETS by Diane Seuss

I loved this collection of sonnets that read like mini but complete stories on every page. Full of wonder and a poet’s eye for the frank and miraculous on the subjects of parenthood, poverty, loss, AIDS, addiction, and the business of suffering in life and literature. Seuss searches for the “nonfussy definition/of the Sublime. And if she can’t “feel it, what some call beauty. I can see it, I swear, the conifers and fat bees, ferns like church fans and then the sea, its flatness as if pressed by stones like witches were, the dark sand ridged by tides, strewn with body parts, claws, the stranded mesoglea of the moon jellyfish, transparent blob, brainless, enlightened in its clarity.” Beauty on every page.

Favorite line(s): Poverty, like a sonnet, is a good teacher. The kind that raps your knuckles with a ruler but not the kind that throws a dictionary across the room and hits you in the brain with all the words that ever were. Boxed father buried deep are still fathers, teacher says. Do without the. Without and. Without hot dogs in your baked beans. A sonnet is a mother. Every word a silver dollar. Shit in one hand, she says. Wish in another.

DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF: Heidi Julavits (audio book)

Nothing is scarier to think about for a mother with grown children than how naïve and unequipped you were to nurture and meld a tiny being into something resembling a happy and responsible human. What lunacy. How is this even allowed? Julavits captures this complicated feeling with humor and grace while stumbling like the rest of us through the mayhem of raising two young children while saying goodbye to the part of life that only had to worry about herself. With a nod to the nautical—Julavits buys a sailboat and teaches her children about navigating in and around the islands off the coast of Maine where they live. But it’s her son who Julavits hones her motherly sites on as he turns his gaze from mom to his peers. Amid the Trump presidency and the #metoo movement, the author wonders, in several of the essays, if she is raising a son who will one day behave the same way. That’s the scary part of parenting and the best—mothering as an act of courage. Who am I raising, and what will he/she love? And how the hell do I do it so the seams don’t show?