sorana_necula_reset

Mia Fredrickson is a prize-winning poet in her 50s, a university lecturer, and mother to a budding actress. For 30 years she has also been wife to Boris, an established neuroscientist and "rat-man" who one fine day announces that he wants a pause in their relations. The pause is French, has significant breasts and an excellent mind. Mia tumbles into madness and a hospital that diagnoses brief psychotic disorder. It is an "ugly disintegration". When she emerges, she takes herself away from the family home in Brooklyn to the Minnesota prairies where she grew up. Her mother still lives here, now in sheltered accommodation, and shares her days with four other octogenarian widows – tough-minded, energetic if variously ailing crones. Mia nicknames this group "the five swans". Next door to the house Mia has rented, a young mother and her two tots eke out a life punctuated by a largely absent husband's bullying screams. Together with the seven pubescent g...

The Printmaker’s Daughter  is the story of Oei, the daughter of Hokusai, the famous printmaker. (You probably know him from the near-ubiquitous  The Great Wave .) The homely and awkward daughter of his second wife, Oei learns the art of painting from her father, becoming his helper and protege and rejecting traditional roles for women. But even as she bucks norms, Oei remains dutifully bound to her father and the tense relationship that happens when the student begins to surpass the master. And against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Edo Japan, the isolated country can no longer keep the rest of the world out. As I began to read  The Printmaker’s Daughter , I will admit to a bit of hesitation. Perhaps it’s just because the only other piece of historical fiction set in Japan I’ve read is  Memoirs of Geisha , which has its problematic elements, or because we talked about white Canadian women writing about other cultures in my children’s and young adult literature...