... exquisite and harrowing ... so gorgeously written and deeply insightful, and with a line of narrative tension that never slacks, from the first page to the last, that it’s one you’ll likely read in a single, delicious sitting ... 'Follow your bliss' is a popular catchphrase, but Brodeur shows how much work and humility it takes to keep moving toward joy — doggedly, consistently, observantly ... shows what a good memoir can do, using one person’s singular experience to shed light on a fundamental truth of being human. In this case: maternal love, that most primal and powerful kind ... On that fateful night when the author’s mother tells her, 'You must take this secret to your grave,' the die, it seems, is cast. It is the great gift of this book — and of Brodeur’s life — that she refuses to do so ... Brodeur’s message is poignant and profound: A person need not totally untangle from her family — a group of people with shared DNA that none of us chooses — but neither must she stay unconsciously tethered to them or repeat inherited patterns of relationship. Family holds the ties that bind, but even if you do not wholly reject it, you do not, as Brodeur’s book gloriously proves, have to stay hopelessly, miserably bound.
... manages to be both elegant and trashy at the same time, elevating 40-year-old gossip to an art form. To situate her on the 'Mommie Dearest' scale, Brodeur combines the you’re-not-gonna-believe-this outrage of a Sean Wilsey with the high-test filial devotion of a Mary Karr ... Self-dramatizing tendencies may have been a problem for Malabar, but they work beautifully in Brodeur’s memoir, making a glittering, insightful page-turner of the worst-case scenario of mother-daughter boundary issues.
Wild Game is a memoir, but it reads very much like a novel with a first-person narrator, bringing readers closely into scenes with vivid sensual detail that paints the atmosphere with the adoring eyes of the enthralled daughter the author once was ... what makes this book especially novel-like is how close Brodeur remains to the mindset she was in at the time of the events unfolding. For the first third or so, even as occasional lines hint at the more mature and removed author, the narrative stays close to the Brodeur's inability to see her mother as anything but a wonderful, glamorous, wounded woman who led a hard life and deserves happiness, no matter who might get trampled along the way ... It's not often we get to read about the sexual and romantic lives of people past middle age, since they're so often condemned by popular imagination to sexless existences, but Wild Game, for all its luscious prose and tantalizing elements, is ultimately about the slow and painful process of losing a mother.
Though her mother could make for an easy target, Brodeur never resorts to simplistic judgments, even when describing the multiple ways in which Malabar’s devotion to her paramour exceeded her commitment to her daughter. Brodeur is a deft memoirist, portraying Malabar as a woman traumatized by a violent parent and early tragedy. In this stunning tale of treachery—unsettling yet seductive—we are led through some of the darkest and most alluring corridors of the human heart.
Brodeur’s writing is passionate, sensual, and often deceptively simple. She culls gorgeous details of Cape Cod, with its screeching terns and 'bluefish blitz[es],' its low-tide displays of 'horseshoe crabs coupling' and 'moon snails pushing plow-like across the sandy bottom' of the bay, to make the setting as much a character in this drama as the humans inhabiting it ... Occasionally Brodeur’s omissions, though they kept me turning pages, left me wanting a bit more; toward the end, she refers almost in passing to her 'own checkered history of love affairs and infidelities' as well as to her habit of (self) cutting, and while a line about the latter was enough in a memoir this broad, the former took me a bit by surprise coming so late and minimally ... Too, the writing can veer into cliché...And occasional sentimentality ... But these minor details displeased only because so much of the writing is literary ... Brodeur shows herself a worthy descendant of her family of writers, including a father who worked for The New Yorker. ... Though this memoir is being billed first as a mother-daughter story, what interests me most is how it depicts both the strengths and the frailty of marriage.
It’s easy to forget that Brodeur’s intimate retelling of her formative summers spent on Cape Cod in the 1980s is a work of nonfiction; Malabar comes across like the quintessential lead of any page-turning romance. Brodeur, a book editor for many years, describes her mother colorfully, from the extravagant dinner parties she threw to the glamorous clothes she wore, and offers a striking portrait of a woman chasing happiness with an impossible love ... Brodeur dissects the real-life ramifications of an affair in layered detail. She writes honestly about how being recruited to participate in such a betrayal has impacted her own ability to love and trust as she becomes a partner and a mother herself ... Though the affair is captivating enough to read on its own, Brodeur’s reflections on the impact of our parents create the memoir’s center.
... incandescent ... Brodeur’s scintillating, irresistible memoir that often reads more like compulsive fiction than an autobiographical account of more than 40 years ... There is very little to fault about this unvarnished memoir. But there is one slight reservation. In a somewhat peculiar disclaimer in an author’s note, Brodeur says she has 'changed the names of everyone in the book except for my parents, Malabar and Paul, and myself.' For what purpose? A quick internet search of her name identifies all the other parties in the story. And, in an acknowledgement, she names other names. Since Wild Game appears to be about full disclosure, it seems disingenuous not to be transparent with identities ... Otherwise, Wild Game is a must-read, a peek into a privileged and tarnished life. It is an audacious narrative likely to rivet readers’ attention.
Unlike stories in which 'victims' triumph over their 'perpetrators,' Brodeur resists such neat delineations. Paced like a thriller, the first half of Wild Game exploits the reader’s interest in Brodeur’s scheming mother, who exists at the center of young Adrienne’s world. Further, Brodeur does not require of Malabar either teary repentance or blood sacrifice; in fact, one of the book’s more radical aspects is its surprisingly happy ending ... Brodeur offers one of the most humane looks at a profoundly flawed mother that I have read, and the feats of empathy and generosity it must have taken to do so, given the damage her mother did to her psyche and life, are as impressive as Wild Game’s storytelling prowess.
The title of this fascinating memoir is deliberately ambiguous ... Wild Game is a memoir that reads like a novel. Brodeur’s writing is elegant — she is particularly good at describing the sights, sounds and smells of Cape Cod, with its sand dunes and fishing boats, and its perpetual harvest of clams and lobsters. I was strongly reminded of LP Hartley’s classic novel The Go-Between; both explore the feelings of a child caught in the complicated mesh of an adult love affair ... Wild Game describes — beautifully — the silent anguish of a child trapped in a tangled web of love and betrayal that affects her emotional decisions well into adulthood. 'Happy endings do not apply to everyone,' she writes. 'Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene.'
... fascinating – at times, gruesomely so. I found myself quite mesmerised by Malabar; like some desperate old actress, she’s permanently ready for her closeup ... But Brodeur’s memoir is somehow a lot less gripping than it should be. Why? At first, I thought this was down to her writing. Combine her travel writerly descriptions of Cape Cod with her lusciously precise accounts of her mother’s cooking and what you have is memoir as it might appear in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop: varnished rather than visceral, more complacent than searching ... But there’s also the problem that too much of the action takes place off stage: though we hear about Malabar’s affair, we never really see it. A gauzy veil hangs over Brodeur’s narrative; people’s essence, like their motivation, eludes her ... But how and why did Malabar exert such power over her daughter? For whatever reason, she is not fully able to express how this snare felt – and so I wondered repeatedly why she remained for so long in her clutches; why she did not just abandon her ringside seat at Malabar’s kitchen counter and set about making her own carpaccio, elsewhere.
There are stories about good mothers and bad mothers, attentive and neglectful mothers: and then there’s Adrienne Brodeur’s mother, Malabar, who deserves a book all to herself ... Wild Game, in other words, is a story of child abuse, though it’s marketed (down to the Lolita-ish image of a halter-topped pubescent girl on its cover) as a tale of wayward romance, and the complex 'nature of family'. Make no mistake: it’s infinitely darker than that, though the darkness is tamped down under a polished veneer. The Cordon Bleu recipes and the cocktail rituals of Malabar’s moneyed East Coast set belie a world marked by casual violence and grotesque consumption – of food, of alcohol and of people ... the aggression never quite erupts. This is the deep narrative: on the surface, Brodeur is scrupulously sparing of everyone involved, and especially of her mother ... Wild Game could have been a deadly weapon: instead it’s a supremely civilised, and so necessarily tame, attempt at making sense of the horror at the heart of this particular mother-daughter relationship.
Brodeur’s engrossing memoir examines a family defined by one woman’s all-consuming magnetism ... Wild Game follows Brodeur through adulthood, examining the ripple effects that her relationship with her mother had on Brodeur’s own romances. Brodeur changes the names of those involved except for her parents, acknowledging that the story is not hers alone. However, Brodeur includes clearly identifying details about her well-known stepfather, which some readers may find distracting. An absorbing story of secrets, love, and family.
... potentially appealing to foodies ... Brodeur’s story explores the bond between mother and daughter and the ripple effect a family secret can have when passed among generations. Highly recommended.
This page-turning memoir about an especially fraught mother-daughter relationship from novelist Brodeur...reads like heady beach fiction ... Wealth and social prominence abound against a summertime Cape Cod backdrop ... This layered narrative of deceit, denial, and disillusionment is a surefire bestseller.
