Review by Booklist Review
Originally published in France, The Book of Mother received several of the country's prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Françoise Sagan. Protagonist Violaine, who bears the same name as her author, begins the book by reminiscing about her childhood--specifically, the moment when her mother was first sent to a mental hospital. Catherine Cremnitz, otherwise known as Maman, was a tumultuous presence in her children's lives. Moody and dramatic, Maman was incapable of managing a household, but she loved Violaine and her sister with her whole heart. The girls vacillated between fear and passion for her. In the second part, Violaine explores her mother's entire life, from Catherine's birth as a sickly child to the love affairs that dominated her twenties. Finally, Violaine returns to the present and to her mother's current fate. Written like a long personal essay with little dialogue, Huisman's narrative will appeal to readers who are interested in biography and memoir. The European locale and exploration of mental illness may intrigue those who enjoyed Nicola DeRobertis-Theye's The Vietri Project (2021).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Huisman's excellent debut chronicles the life of a charming but volatile Frenchwoman. Catherine, a manic-depressive dancer and mother of two, is as prone to fits of rage and mood swings as she is to expressing her love for her daughters. Violaine, her youngest, recounts events that took place when she was 10, in 1989. Catherine's third marriage has failed, and she intentionally drives her car with Violaine and Violaine's older sister, Elsa, into oncoming traffic on the Champs-Élysées. They all survive, and the girls' father, Antoine, Catherine's second husband, arranges with their grandmother, Jacqueline, to have her committed. Violaine then charts Catherine's bitter relationship with Jacqueline, and Jacqueline's own painful history, having been forced by her parents to marry her rapist, Catherine's father, whom she manages to later leave. Though Catherine has a short leg, she trains at eight to dance just like her mother, and the pair later open rival dance schools. Later, Catherine ends her stable first marriage for the wealthy Antoine. The novel's final section follows Violaine and Elsa, now adults, as they try to carry out Catherine's wishes after her suicide in her Paris apartment. Huisman's storytelling ability is immense: Violaine unfurls the wide-ranging narrative like a raconteur at a party, and develops a kaleidoscopic portrait of Catherine. This thoughtful exploration of familial trauma and love will have readers riveted. Agent: Mark Kessler, Susanna Lea. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT We can never really know our mothers as individuals separate from ourselves, which is Huisman's rationale in calling this portrait of her mother Catherine's life a work of fiction. Still, the text is profoundly autobiographical; Huisman pieces together her narrative from vivid childhood memories as well as her mother's papers. Catherine was born into the working class in postwar France and rose to the haute bourgeoisie by exploiting wealthy men, as they also exploited her. Beautiful and charismatic, she taught ballet despite a childhood bout with polio and hid her limp through sheer will. (Catherine's own imperious mother had run a ballet studio.) Bipolar disorder nearly destroyed Catherine as she self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, took multiple lovers and husbands, and engaged in libertine sex. Yet she (and France's social safety net) ensured that her two daughters were well educated despite their unstable home life. VERDICT In this touching tribute to her eccentric mother's life and death, which also offers a wild view of swinging Paris during the 1960s and 1970s, Huisman is sardonic, furious, and sometimes humorous but always affectionate toward her mother. Her prose seems urgent, pulling the reader along, as if she's trying to outrun her grief. Highly recommended.--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A portrait of a life lived like a swiftly burning candle. Known to her two daughters as "Maman," to herself as "Catherine," and to the world at large by a series of surnames that change with her tumultuous relationships, Catherine Cremnitz survived a lonely and illness-ridden childhood to be faced with even more complex indignities, familial and social, in her adult life. Mercurial, creative, thwarted, and with mental illness simmering beneath the surface, Catherine spins off course after yet another betrayal by a faithless man. The lives of her two daughters could have been counted among the considerable wreckage. The weight of feeling that it is your job to keep your mother alive is not easily shed, but Huisman's narrator, Violaine--Catherine's younger daughter--balances that burden with a recounting of the abandonments, assaults, betrayals, and disappointments which formed the beautiful and impetuous woman she and her sister, Elsa, adored. Violaine's attempt to understand Catherine's essential humanity (or, the Catherine who existed before she was Maman) relies upon the conflicting details shared by Catherine in her effort to convey her own story, but, as Violaine muses, "the truth of a life is the fiction that sustains it." Camhi's translation from the French of Huisman's debut novel conveys Violaine's steady compulsion to understand and explain interspersed with gorgeous details such as the way Catherine's cigarette-singed pillowcases resemble a target shot through by bullets. The names of Huisman's characters will provoke discussion of the novel as autofiction, but the story here is bigger than that. Love hurts; Huisman elegantly examines how and why. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
