Mother Love [Hardcover]

Candace Flynt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1987

Set in Greensboro, North Carolina, Mother Love is the story of three sisters: their shared history, the complex bonds that unite them, and the contradictory relationship that each has with their passionate and difficult mother, who has recently died. Whenever the sisters are together, they tell one another stories about their mother. The stories can be troubling, terrible, or hilarious, but they always bring the sisters closer and reinforce their mother's continuing presence in their lives. Mother Love is a passionate and deeply moving book about womanhood, family feeling, and how we become who we become.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title here is neither sentimental nor ironic, but ambiguous, posing a difficult, complex problem. How do three sisters, young women whose emotional lives seem governed by their motherstill a potent presence though two years deadtruly feel about her, and she about them? Well-mannered, discreet, middle-class Greensboro, N.C., where the novel is set, provided too small a scope for the mother, a woman who was intense, passionate, determined to live her own life. Divorced from her inoffensive husband, married to her long-time lover, she was given to outbursts of caprice, spite and malice to the point of violence and cruelty toward her daughters. Each of them shows the effects: confusions and uncertainties revolving around men, love, child-bearing, personal autonomy. But Katherine will bear a child; Jude will go off to Chapel Hill in search of a new life; Louise will somehow survive an unhappy first love. The resolutions they arrive at are somewhat over-contrived, evasive of the more intransigent realities of conflict between generations. But on the whole, Flynt's third novel (after Sins of Omission grapples handily with treacherous materials and commands the reader's interest and attention.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This wonderful new novel by the author of Sins of Omission ( LJ 10/1/84) centers on three grown sisters and their relationships with one another, with their partners, and with their recently deceased, tyrannical mother. Each sister's story is told separately, then entwined with the others: Katherine, the oldest, who feels a motherly responsibility for her siblings, is finding her way through a perfect marriage; Judith, just a year younger, divorced from her high school sweetheart, and the mother of two babies, is finding her way through the "singles" world; and Louise, the much younger baby sister, just graduating from college and getting over her high school sweetheart, is finding her way into adulthood. While the themes, the Southern setting (Greensboro, North Carolina), and the sisters themselves may seem familiar, the novel comes together as the best sort of "popular fiction." Ann H. Fisher, Radford P. L., Va.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 341 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (May 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374213747
• ISBN-13: 978-0374213749
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,312,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Mother Love, December 30, 2009

By 

D. R. Clark "Daisy" (NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mother Love (Voices of the South) (Paperback)

Arrived within a few days and it was in excellent condition. I am very pleased.