With no little trepidation – we have not been too successful with fiction anthologies of late - I embarked on this collection in honour of Mother’s Day. The first story is “Even the Queen”, by the brilliant Connie Willis (author of The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog); she has masterfully portrayed the complex mother-daughter relationship in this insightful tale of a multi-generational crisis meeting that depicts mother, mothers-in-law, daughters and sisters with clarity, humour and truth.
I felt a renewed optimism for the short story collection, and continued on to the interesting “Lovestory” by James Patrick Kelly, my first acquaintance with his work. More standard fantasy fare, this story deals with the impact on the whole family when the mother of a three-parent family (on a planet where a father, a mother and a Mam are needed to reproduce, birth and raise a child until s/he is a tween and ready to leave home).
A little less engaged but still encouraged, I moved on to the touching and distressing “Jenny” by Melanie Tem (didn’t know her work, either), which explores the affect on a whole family of the death a child, told from the point of view of the dead daughter’s older sister. It wasn’t uplifting but it was powerful and engrossing.
Megan Lindholm’s “A Touch of Lavender” is also told from the first-person point of view of a child, this time the son of a single woman whose love of itinerant-but-up-and-coming musicians (who leave her every time they’re about to make it) means their welfare is put in front of her son’s. Until the day a Skoag (an alien, music-reproducing race) follows Billy home.
For some reason, though I love The Silver Metal Lover, I haven’t really been absorbed by Tanith Lee’s work. “Tiger I”, the tale of a woman who allegedly gives birth to great cats, was all right, but it didn’t grip me the way some of the other stories did.
Mike Resnick (some of whose work I know) and Susan Schwartz (know none) teamed up for “Bibi”, the story of a former-money obsessed, HIV-positive aid worker in Somali who, with Ugandan-born-England-educated Elizabeth, discover that Africa is the motherland because the Mother cares for us all still. I found it a little difficult to get into, but thought provoking and interesting. Almost done!
Kristine Kathryn Rusch submitted “Reflections on Life and Death”, which examines exactly what we’re prepared to do when hard decisions have to be made – in this case, whether or not Sarah should place her aged mother (who abandoned her to the care of Sarah’s grandmother) in a government-run facility, or care for her at home, where one salary doesn’t stretch far enough to cover the needs of three growing children.
Susan Casper (all these writers I don’t know!) wrote the penultimate contribution of what was shaping up to be a better than average collection, wrote “Nine-tenth of the Law”, which is the scary story of what could happen to you if your mother died during surgery and supplanted your husband’s consciousness in his body – Mrs Birnbaum doesn’t quite know when it’s time to leave the building.
The final story, “Mrs Lincoln’s China” by M Shayne Bell, is about a woman rescuing sample dining services of presidential china when rioting (or generalised social upheaval, it isn’t really clear) in Washington results in storming the White House. Eh. It didn’t really speak to me, but that’s the nature of anthologies, and the rest were better than average, with some real standouts. My faith in fiction collections has been restored. - Alex
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