Every Day Is Mother's Day [Paperback]

Hilary Mantel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2000

Stephen King meets Muriel Spark in Hilary Mantel's first novel.

Evelyn Axona-medium by trade-and her half-wit daughter Muriel have become a social problem. Barricaded in their once-respectable house, they live amid festering rubbish, unhealthy smells-and secrets. They completely baffle Isabel Field, the social worker assigned to help them. But Isabel is only the most recent in a long line of people that find the Axons impossible. Meanwhile, Isabel has her own problems: a married lover, Colin. He is a history teacher to unresponsive children and father to a passel of his own horrible kids. With all this to worry about, how can Isabel even begin to understand what is going on in the Axon household? When Evelyn finally moves to def Muriel, and Muriel, in turn, acts to protect herself, the results are by turns hilarious and terrifying.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

American readers know English writer Mantel as the author of The Giant, O'Brien, A Place of Greater Safety and other critically hailed novels. This work, a twisted romp through the lives of long-time widow Evelyn Axon and her mentally handicapped middle-aged daughter, Muriel, was her debut novel, originally published in the U.K. in 1985. The peculiar dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship, and the complications arising from assorted meddlers, offset the disarmingly chipper narrative tone and well-appointed language. Evelyn lives with Muriel in a once respectable but now dilapidated house in a tony neighborhood, and she doesn't take kindly to social workers' insistent, condescending interest in her daughter. While Evelyn and a revolving door of social workers--including young and inexperienced Isabel Field--believe Muriel to be severely impaired, she's actually crafty and manipulative, like her mother. Much of the novel's dark humor lies in Muriel's outrageous thought processes, for while she cannot function "normally," her mind is far from simple. Evelyn, who practices the art of the s?ance, is also thrilling to watch as she defends herself against her daughter and the various spirits who taunt her with mysterious household mishaps. When elderly Mrs. Sidney visits Evelyn, hoping to make contact with the late Mr. Sidney, a series of coincidental events convinces Evelyn that Mrs. Sidney's daughter, Florence, is responsible for the social workers' increasing surveillance. Other complications occur through Florence's married brother, Colin, whose contemplated affair with a young woman in his evening writing class involves him in the Axon family circus. Mantel proves that even early on she was an excellent prose stylist and storyteller, expert at threading quirky characterization with black humor and a somewhat macabre imagination. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A rundown, and possibly haunted, Victorian house takes center stage in these back-to-back black comedies, written by British novelist Mantel (The Giant, O'Brien) with a distinct Rendellian flavor. In the first story, set in the mid-Seventies, Evelyn Axon, a terrorized, guilt-ridden widow, lives with her dull-witted daughter, Muriel. Into their lives comes the nettlesome social service bureaucracy, primarily in the person of Isabel Field, the last in a long series of social workers assigned to their case. Isabel has problems of her own, though, the main one being a stagnating affair with Colin Sydney, a married man she has met in an evening class on creative writing. Muriel has been encouraged to participate in weekly workshops for the mentally handicapped at the local community center, but she eludes both her mother and her case workers and manages to get herself pregnant. All these lives intersect at the novel's bizarre conclusion, as Evelyn dies, Muriel is institutionalized, and Colin Sydney's family take up residence in the Axons' house. The second novel opens ten years later as Muriel is caught up in the Eighties trend to deinstitutionalize the mentally challenged. Out on the streets once more, she knowingly adopts multiple personas with the misguided intention of exacting revenge on those she believes have wronged her, principally Isabel Field and Colin Sydney. Slowly, all these entangled lives begin to come undone. Like her fellow Brits Rose Tremain and Penelope Fitzgerald, Mantel continually produces novels that chart fresh terrain and derive from a wellspring of creative imagination. These two early novels herald the promise of the rich and varied literary career that followed. Recommended for most public libraries.
-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition (March 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805062726
• ISBN-13: 978-0805062724
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,943,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hilary Mantel is the author of nine previous novels, including A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. She lives in England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliantly Creepy Book, November 13, 2001

By 

Maria-Therese Vasquez (Queens, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Every Day Is Mother's Day (Paperback)

Don't be misled by the title: Every Day Is Mother's Day isn't an Erma Bombek type look at motherhood or a feminist polemic--it's the best "ghost story" I've ever read. It's sad, funny, macabre, and disturbing. I've read only one other book (Fludd) by this author so far, but she's already near the top of my list of favorite writers--maybe she'll be on yours, too.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A creepily satisfying read, April 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Every Day is Mother's Day (Hardcover)

People who have enjoyed Mantel's more gentle, humane novels like Experiment in Love or Change Of Climate might be surprised by the black comedy of this one. But I became weirdly fascinated in the characters, the occasionally chilling plot, the astringent prose and the biting humor from the outset. Immediately after I finished this book, I plunged into its sequel, Vacant Posession. But I don't recommend reading them when you're home alone at night. Mantel's decription of madness is so convincing, I briefly feared for my own sanity for a minute or two while reading it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Anger and fear, she thought. Fight and flight.", August 31, 2010

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Every Day Is Mother's Day (Paperback)

Mantel's unusual tale is intriguing, a contrast between the seemingly normal lives of neighbors on a quiet street, most unaware that an odd mother and daughter exist in quite another world, one where spirits inhabit the rooms as well as the residents. In 1970ss England, Evelyn Axon and her mentally-challenged daughter, Muriel, are an unusual pair. A medium, the widowed Evelyn is haunted by the spirits she calls upon for clients, her rambling, decaying house filled with the uninvited. The sly, observant Muriel, no longer a child, takes great pains to outwit Evelyn, who berates her daughter cruelly and often. Not surprising that the ungainly, uncommunicative Muriel is the predictable product of her bizarre environment. The hammering of various social welfare workers is met with silence from within, the Axon's recoiling from unwanted intrusion.

Isabel Field, the current social worker assigned the Axon's, is troubled by her inability to help this pair, judging her own efforts inadequate. But Isabel gets distracted by a short affair with married schoolteacher Colin Sidney, whose unhappy wife, Sylvia, can barely control the three children who fill her days with chaos, let alone track the movements of a boring husband. In a vague connection, Colin's unmarried sister, Florence, lives next door to Evelyn and Muriel, her tentative overtures of friendship quickly rebuffed. Coping with the disappointments of an unhappy marriage and the scant rewards of an illicit relationship, Isabel and the Sidney provide the face of everyday life as most of us experience it, Muriel and Evelyn the unpredictable, both victims and conspirators in a bureaucratic social network meant to help those in need.

Mantel explores both the light and the dark side of human existence, the mental aberration bred of dysfunction, the accidental exposure of a nightmare in the midst of a quiet neighborhood, where incipient tragedy festers in dark corners and the scent of decay is pervasive. The blundering Colin Sidney, the well-meaning Isabel and the helpful neighbor, Florence, are caught up in a contretemps with unforeseeable consequences as the tortured daughter of an unstable woman finds herself at the mercy of an unfamiliar world, institutionalized by a system that swallows the needy whole. Out of sight, out of mind, or is she? Luan Gaines/2010.