Book Review: Readings

Mothers & Other Monsters

by Maureen F. McHugh

Small Beer Press, 271 pp., $16 (paper)

"Our children are hostages to the world," a mother stricken with Alzheimer's tells her daughter in the story "Oversite," included in this collection by Maureen F. McHugh. It is this moment of clarity delivered by one permanently in a mental fog that serves as the central concern of this amazingly imaginative and compelling work. The title, which came to McHugh while she was coming to terms with being a stepmother, belies the true nature of these stories. They are not so much about how mothers fail to live up to the perfection that is expected of them, but how we are all somehow trapped by the world around us. The book's opener, "Ancestor Money," tells the story of a woman long dead who travels to China to collect an offering that has been left for her by her granddaughter. A stillborn twin brother, who is jealous when his sister embarks on a new relationship, haunts the narrator of "In the Air." "On Any Given Day" takes the shape of an NPR-style interview, set in the 2020s, with a teenage girl whose choices have made her prematurely mature. All of the protagonists of these tales find themselves struggling to accept the intractable boundaries that life has drawn around them, all portrayed from within surprising, inventive settings.

Perhaps the two most striking tales in this collection are "The Lincoln Train" and "Oversite," wherein well-intentioned women – the younger daughter of a slaveholding family during Reconstruction in the former and a woman who has tracking chips implanted into her daughter and demented mother in the latter – are faced with how their choices look from the outside. McHugh, in a way, pulls her punches with these two stories, choosing to fade to black just as her heroines realize how their behavior has stretched the boundaries of ethics, that they are not the hostages. Rather, they are the captors. McHugh has a keen sense of when to get out and let the effect of what she has written sink in – no small feat in a literary world of overwritten fiction.