Month: May 2025

The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

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Clover, a quirky, awkward, and introverted 36-year-old, is fine living alone. She observes friendships and romances in films and the uncurtained window of the apartment across the street, but she has little need of them herself. It’s too hard to explain to people that what she knows best is death—death and the dying.

At five, Clover witnessed her kindergarten teacher’s death. Then, only a year later, her parents died in an accident while on vacation while traveling, leaving her to be brought up by her grandfather in New York City. She still lives in his West Village apartment, although he, too, died some years ago while she was traveling. Partly out of guilt at not being there for him, she became a death doula.

I’d never heard of a death doula, but apparently it’s a thing. Clover holds the hands of the dying, listens to their stories, helps them sort out their affairs. We all seek to understand the great mystery of death, don’t we? For Clover, the clues lie in their last words, which she writes in three journals that she has titled “Regrets,” “Advice,” and “Confessions.” She also likes to attend death cafés, where people gather to discuss death and share their experiences. Even there she’s only an observer. Her only real friend is Leo, her elderly black neighbor, who had been her grandfather’s best friend.

Things start to change when she meets Sebastian at a death café. He says he’s afraid of death and asks her to spend time with his dying grandmother. Ninety-one-year-old Claudia turns out to be a firecracker, a former journalist, whose one regret inspires Clover to go in search of the man from Claudia’s past. At the same time, Sebastian keeps turning up and—to her horror—eventually asks her out. When a friendly woman her age moves into the apartment downstairs, Clover tries to avoid having to meet her, but fails. Sylvie’s kindness and normalcy throw Clover’s isolation into relief and begin to wear down her resistance.

This intricate and surprising story manages to sidestep sentimentality and cliché. We are deep in Clover’s point of view as she reflects on her past decisions, her relationships, and the choices she has made. The author has blended these flashbacks into the story beautifully; also Clover’s introspective moments are handled well.  

I found this a lovely story, quiet and deep. Clover’s inexperience with social customs felt unforced and real, as did her compassion for and insight into those who are at the end of their lives. She shares a few tidbits from her three journals; I would love to read more.

Have you ever read a story about a death doula?

How to Love Your Daughter, by Mila Blum

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Translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir

As this short introspective novel opens, Yoella has come from Israel to Groningen in the Netherlands to stand outside her daughter Leah’s home. She does not approach the door. Instead she looks in at a window to see Leah with her husband and two children. It has been ten years since she has seen her beloved daughter, during which men would occasionally call her to say her daughter was safe but hiking in Nepal or some such place without phone connectivity. She has only just learned that it was all a lie. Leah, now 28, has been here all this time.

And because I was watching my daughter and her family without their knowledge, I was vulnerable to witnessing what wasn’t mine to witness.

Such a rift begins to seem impossible as Yoella describes her immense love for baby Leah. We are entirely in her mind, absorbing her memories and insights, with only a rare piece of dialogue or gesture recounted to indicate what Leah and Meir’s perspectives might be.

My love for my baby daughter came easily. Her father was also in love with her; we talked about her every night after she fell asleep, thanked each other for the gift that was our girl. Everything that I had been denied I gave to her, and then some. And she loved me too.
 

In a quiet, mesmerizing voice, Yoella moves back and forth in time, describing Leah’s perfect childhood—a star at school and in her ballet classes—and the tight bond between the two of them. Yoella’s husband Meir is older and busy with his work, yet he, too, adores the child. The two of them seem to have a special understanding.

The fractures appear as she begins to reveal tidbits from her own troubled childhood and the silences in her relationship with Meir. Woven into her thoughts are brief insights about mothers and daughters from the stories she’s reading by authors such as Anne Enright, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro.

I think we are supposed to be in suspense about the cause of their rift until near the end of the book. However, the suffocating nature of this woman’s all-consuming love for her daughter, made me want to run away from her almost from the beginning, and I’m not even related to her. She’s the kind of mother who follows her daughter everywhere, kisses her on the lips even as she’s leaving home at 18, and prefers to cuddle close and sleep in her daughter’s bed rather than her husband’s. She makes me appreciate my own mother’s distance.

The writing is lovely and the chapters very short; Yoella doesn’t linger in any fragment of memory for long. It becomes an interesting psychological portrait, as she reveals—perhaps without meaning to—the way she manipulates Leah, and the lies and evasions she uses to paper over the cracks in her life.

The mother-daughter relationship is an endless source of interesting variations. That this one came to feel to me like a horror story probably says more about me than the book. It certainly made me reflect on my life with my own mother and with my children. There are so many ways we can go wrong, so many ways we can inadvertently injure these vulnerable beings we are responsible for. Yoella says we are all “… survivors, everyone was given either too much or too little, life is always a long journey of healing from childhood.”

What story about mothers and daughters has moved you?

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, by Leonie Swann

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There’s a body in the woodshed at Sunset Hall, Agnes’s home that she’s turned into co-housing for other elderly folks. They include Bernadette who’s blind, wheelchair-bound Winston, flighty Edwina who practices yoga and bakes impossible biscuits, and Marshall who sometimes goes off into la-la land. And of course Hettie the tortoise.

Agnes already has a lot on her plate: finding her false teeth, the occasional ringing in her ears that renders her temporarily deaf, and having to take the stairs when the doorbell rings because the stairlift is broken. The door turns out to be the police to tell them about the fatal shooting of a neighbor, Mildred Puck. The murder may be a solution to one of Agnes’s problems.  To add to the confusion, a new resident arrives: Charlie who has a fabulous wardrobe, a mind as yet untinged with dementia, and a dog named Brexit. Then Marshall brings in his grandson Nathan without prior authorization. The television gets moved to the basement, but not because of the grandson.

A lot of quirky characters, but it’s easy to keep them straight in this fun mystery. The way they have to navigate their disabilities adds a bit of shading to the story, along with a lot of unexpected suspense. I quickly became attached to these pensioners, and their surprisingly shadowy pasts.

I’ve been thinking about a post I read recently by Leigh Stein. She discusses John Truby’s idea that a story should have a designing principle, some way of organising the story as a whole. It can be the way it uses time—such as the film Titanic which unfolds in real time—or the perspective from which it’s told—such as Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski a story of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s granddaughter.

The designing principle is like a plot twist but in the story as a whole, in the story’s premise. In this cosy mystery, the first twist is that the amateur detectives are elderly. We’ve seen that before, from Miss Marple to the Thursday Club mysteries. So the second twist is that almost all of them are disabled in some way that affects the plot. And then the third twist is that they all have unexpected pasts.

I enjoyed this mystery a lot, though it took me a while to work out what rules had been established by the residents for their co-housing situation at Sunset Hall. This is what Ray Rhamey calls an information question rather than a story question. Withholding information about the world of the story creates irritation rather than the suspense we get from true story questions (what’s going to happen next?). Aren’t you wondering why the corpse is in the woodshed? That’s a story question all right. This is a small quibble, and not something that I have to worry about as I chase down the rest of the series.  

Have you read a story where a tortoise plays an important role?

Hush Hush, by Laura Lippman

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I was thrilled when this twelfth book in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series came out in 2015. I decided to save it for a moment when I really needed it, a moment that came this week. Hush Hush is everything I hoped it would be and more. Lippman is in top form, digging into the darkness of family life—and its joys too.

After the death of her baby, Melisandre Harris Dawes was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity (postpartum psychosis). She spent some time in rehab and then moved to South Africa and then England. Her husband Stephen had full custody of the two older girls, Alanna and Ruby. Now, twelve years later, Melisandre has returned to Baltimore to reclaim her daughters—now teenagers—and her reputation.

A stunning woman, imbued with the glamour and confidence of old-style Baltimore wealth, Melisandre expects to impose her will on everyone around her. She has hired a filmmaker to create a documentary about her trial, supposedly to expand public understanding of the verdict. Interviews for this documentary crop up between chapters, adding new insights for the reader. Mindful of her notoriety, she has contacted her old flame, lawyer Tyner Gray, for help.

Through Tyner—Tess’s friend, mentor and husband of her beloved aunt—Tess has been hired by Melisandre to look into her security. It’s not work Tess and her new partner, ex-policeman Sandy Sanchez usually do, but Tess is feeling the financial pinch of being a parent. The interweaving of the investigation with Tess’s home life—deepening relationship with Crow, adoration of their three-year-old daughter Carla Scout, and the inevitable complicated scheduling of their work and day care—furnish an extra level of depth to the story.

The theme of mothers and daughters is one of those universal themes that always draws my attention. The subtheme of questioning what constitutes good parenting adds complexity and further deepens my interest. Both Tess and Melisandre receive anonymous notes criticising their parenting, though most parents (me included) don’t need outside critics in order to question themselves. I’ve been faced with more than one toddler meltdown in a busy grocery store and could thoroughly identify with Tess’s reaction. Carla Scout is not the first three-year-old with Big Feelings whom I’ve encountered.

The mystery itself is satisfyingly twisty. Alanna’s rebellion against, well, everything and Ruby’s tendency to search out secrets and hold them close complicate the story, as does their young stepmother’s struggle to care for her own new baby. Sandy Sanchez adds a gravitas to the story and another point of view. Lippman does a good job of showing how his strengths align with Tess’s. As events escalate, each character adds to the richness of the story.

The story felt especially poignant for me because I left Baltimore a few years ago after a lifetime there. On the trail with Tess, crisscrossing the city, even visiting some of my formerly regular spots left me a little homesick.

I’ve read and enjoyed Lippman’s standalone novels since Hush Hush came out. If you search my blog you’ll find seven other Lippman novels I’ve reviewed. I am still hoping for another Tess story.

What’s your favorite Laura Lippman book? Do you have a favorite spot in Baltimore?