The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling conundrum: What damage do we do in the blindness of love? Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she's never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years. At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman's quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance
A lively, vivid translation ... In Blum’s prose, the often invisible chores of caregiving are loaded with mystery and portent ... Its intrigues and revelations are dramatic enough to be wholly satisfying. Its final pages had me holding my breath, desperate to find out if Yoella will be condemned to a life without her daughter, or if she will be pardoned.
The thread tightens only to suddenly find more slack; Yoella can’t seem to figure out what happened any sooner than we readers can, and this becomes the other project of Blum’s novel and Yoella’s propulsive, painful story: how do we love fully and yet fail at loving? For all its uncanny unanswerability, this is a firmly earthbound, often beautiful, and wholly soul-stirring contemplation of parental love and the effortful, lifelong desire to see beyond the gauze of our own perceptions.
Bit by bit Blum’s novel reveals itself to be a dissection of misapplied maternal love in one particular instance, in which emotions and impulses contradict themselves and turn inside out. Part detective story, part morality tale, this is a disturbing story of being damaged and damaging ... Deft, claustrophobic.
