While caring for her Japanese mother, an unnamed narrator, preoccupied with her mother's garden, embarks on a torrid affair with an arborist equally fascinated by it and as she becomes obsessed with the awakening of her own body, she begins to see her mother's illness as part of a natural order.
Mockett's prose is beautiful, and she handles the book's heavy themes of illness and isolation perfectly, occasionally leavening them with humor ... This is a wonderful novel, wise and sensitive, and a stunning reflection on how we reinvent ourselves when we're left with no other choice.
Bold, erotic ... This could have been a novel solely about the unfair amount of work that disproportionately fell upon many women during the pandemic, the care-giving while also doing economic labor. But Mockett has something far more sly in mind.
