Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

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The school receptionist, moody and blunt towards many of the parents, but especially towards Julia.

Such a healthy, benign declaration, no? Well, coming from Mother, not so much ... you see, Mother Land is full of statements that aren't to be taken at face value. Here, she is calling attention to her ability as a master manipulator. We'll explore specifically the role of fruit in that sorry, crazed world, but for now, I thought it worked as a good opening line. A strange book, it made me feel slightly uneasy - like listening in to a conversation I shouldn’t have been privy to.I have known the confusion and pain of moving. We moved my senior year in high school. I always joke that it took me ten years to recover from the devastation but it’s hardly a joke. My life changed and derailed in mysterious and beautiful ways that I still feel 25 years later. And then, later in life as a newly married woman, I moved again with my husband and our three kiddos. From a city to the country, from the sea to the mountains, away from family and friends. It wasn’t to a foreign land as described in this book, but to me it might as well have been.

When her mother abruptly decides to stop taking care of her children, working mother Julia Johnstone is forced to take a much more active role in their lives and education. She becomes friends with working-class Liz and stay-at-home dad Kevin Brady, and finds herself interacting with the local mother group, including their shallow and acerbic leader, Amanda. Julia is constantly overwhelmed by aspects of parenthood, and receives no support from her perpetually-absent husband Paul. Working at a PR firm at the start of the series, Julia eventually quits and starts her own PR business. Paul’s mother, who takes more looking after than the children do. She appears in both Christmas specials.

Mother Land

It is easy to be afraid. Everyone stays where they are because they do not know what will happen to them when they go to a new place. But they are still the same. They can do more than they think.” It feels like a love letter to a misunderstood city with its lush descriptions of food, people, and culture. She also dives into the complexities of marriage, friendship and family. What it means to be a woman and have courage to speak up and ask for what you want. To look inside yourself for your needs. The acerbic and selfish leader of the "Alpha Mums", obsessed with compliments on her youthful appearance and energy. Extremely image-conscious, she pretends her marriage is perfect, but her husband Johnny treats her dismissively, and they divorce in the second series. She has two children, Manus and Georgie. A story of friendship and self-discovery told from the point of view of alternating characters, Rachel and Swarti. We follow two different personal journeys, a native to the country of India and a foreigner who through different circumstances have been thrown together. premise > book: The premise about 2 women carrying immense but incredibly unique cultural differences and colliding and this collide being conflicting and educational and beautiful and one-of-a-kind fascinating for the other and them (hopefully; presumably) accepting each other’s differences was more interesting than the way the author actually ended up carrying it out:

Heartfelt and honest, Ananda Lima’s debut poetry collection Mother/land is at once a song of motherhood, a lament for home, and a meditation on the immigrant struggle to find true belonging in the U.S. As an immigrant from Brazil and parent of an American-born son, Lima uses her poems to reflect on both grief over her personal experiences and the fierce, self-sacrificial love for her child that brought her through those difficulties. Franqui doesn’t demonize either Indian customs or American ones. Yes, Swati inserts herself into Rachel’s life in Mumbai, but she’s accepting when Rachel drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and associates with male friends. When Rachel calls Swati by her first name and not an honorific for mother-in-law, Swati holds her tongue: when Swati was a young bride, she could never have gotten away with any of these things, nor would she ever even have thought of doing them in the first place. This realization is what convinces Swati to divorce her husband, Vinod, after forty years. I’ve been reading a lot of character driven stories this month and I am getting kind of bored of them. So unfortunately I may have read this one at the wrong time. If you have any good plot driven stories, please let me know! Mother Land by Leah Franqui follows Rachel as she adjusts to living with her new husband in Mumbai. Just as she’s barely getting acclimated to this new country and way of life her mother in law shows up saying she’s just left her husband and she’s here to stay forever. To say these two women butt heads is an understatement. There’s a clash of cultures and personalities.To those in her Cape Cod town, Mother is an exemplar of piety, frugality, and hard work. To her husband and seven children, she is the selfish, petty tyrant of Mother Land. She excels at playing her offspring against each other. Her favorite, Angela, died in childbirth; only Angela really understands her, she tells the others. The others include the officious lawyer, Fred; the uproarious professor, Floyd; a pair of inseparable sisters whose devotion to Mother has consumed their lives; and JP, the narrator, a successful writer whose work she disparages. As she lives well past the age of 100, her brood struggles with and among themselves to shed her viselike hold on them. One thing I'd like to be honest with you that as I'm from India, Portuguese language I'm not familiar with but I enjoyed the book so heartily.