An intimate and compelling novel about a mother and daughter, about loss and what can and can t be salvaged from loss, and about the different forms resilience can take.
Delorie leaves the battleground of her parents small-town home for the big city, another 19-year-old with dreams of what her life might be. But life turns out to have plans of a very different kind, including unwed motherhood. Del's response is to renounce her right to her daughter, and her right to indulge in sentiment over her fate. She lives her emotional life by proxy, investing what feelings she allows herself in Detroit news stories on cable TV. She can handle drama, if it s half a continent away.
Many years later, Del s daughter, Amber, now twenty-five, struggles with her imprecise origins – a missing father, a mother who she grew up thinking was her sister – and with constructing an emotional life. In the face of Del's apparent indifference toward her, Amber tries to establish her own right to exist. She keeps a small horde of souvenirs that stand in for the people and events in her life, and builds a mobile from them as a representation of herself.
The novel is tempered with a sense of optimism, and with many flashes of humour. There isn t one right way to love, nor one right way to live. People make their own way as best they can, and those in their lives must simply come to terms.
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