Motherless Daughters (51 page)

 

Kidd, Sue Monk.
The Secret Life of Bees
(2004). Motherless since age four, fourteen-year-old Lily Owen runs away from her abusive father to search for clues about her mother’s past. Taking her beloved nanny Rosaleen along on her quest, she lands in the home of the Boatwright sisters, three elderly beekeepers, who take her in. Set in 1960s South Carolina against a backdrop of racism and social tension.

 

Kincaid, Jamaica.
The Autobiography of My Mother
(1995). Seventy-year-old Xuela Richardson, whose mother died giving birth to her, narrates the story of her life on the island of Dominica in the West Indies, including the abuse she suffered as a child, her marriage to a European doctor, and her deliberate decision to remain childless.

 

Kingsolver, Barbara.
Animal Dreams
(1990). Codi Noline returns to her Arizona hometown after her sister’s death to care for their ailing father. Once there, she must face his reticence, a devastating secret from her motherless adolescence, and the cloudy memory of her mother’s death.

 

Livesey, Margot.
Eva Moves the Furniture
(2001). Young Eva McEwen, raised by a father and aunt in a small Scottish town after her mother dies, is periodically visited by two ghostly “companions,” a woman and girl that only she can see. The story follows Eva through nursing school and into adulthood, in the postwar years, until the significance of her visitors becomes clear.

 

McAll, Alexander.
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
series. (1998-2005). Precious Rambotswe, who lost her mother in a fatal train accident as a baby, opens Botswana’s first private detective agency, specializing in domestic dramas, while encountering a few of her own.

 

McGowan, Heather.
Schooling
(2002). Thirteen-year-old Catrine Evans moves with her father from Maine to England to attend boarding school after her mother dies. Scapegoated by her class-conscious schoolmates, she develops a relationship with her chemistry teacher, Mr. Gilbert. Written in an experimental style.

 

Minot, Eliza.
The Tiny One
(2000). Eight-year-old Via Revere, the youngest child in a large Catholic family, narrates the aftermath of her mother’s sudden death, from a sensitive child’s point of view.

Minot, Susan.
Monkeys
(1986). Seven siblings in an established New England family mourn the death of their mother in an auto accident in this slender, semiautobiographical first novel.

 

Morris, Mary.
The Night Sky
(1997). Ivy Slovak, the single mother of a newborn son, is haunted by memories of her own mother, who abandoned seven-year-old Ivy but took her younger sister.

 

Nahai, Gina.
Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
(1999). Lili’s father sends her from Iran to a boarding school in Los Angeles after her beautiful, mysterious mother—“Roxana the Angel”—sprouts wings and flies off their Teheran balcony one night, disappearing for the next thirteen years. This is also a story, tinged with magical realism, of the Persian diaspora to the United States.

 

Oates, Joyce Carol.
I’ll Take You There
(2002). Blamed for her mother’s death, raised by stern grandparents, Anellia enrolls in an upstate New York university in the 1960s, where she joins in a sorority, has an interracial relationship, and eventually leaves to become a writer. An intellectual coming-of-age story.

 

Pera, Pia.
Lo’s Diary.
(1999) This controversial book offers an alternative point of view to Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita.
In this version, the motherless Lolita is precocious, manipulative, and self-serving. Translated from the Italian.

 

Picoult, Jodi.
Harvesting the Heart
(1995). Paige was only five when her mother left. Now a young mother with a newborn son, she doubts her maternal capacity and sets out to find the mother who abandoned her long ago.

 

Pietrzyk, Leslie.
A Year and a Day.
(1994). Fifteen-year-old Alice, living with an eccentric great-aunt and a secretive older brother, comes to terms with her single mother’s unexpected suicide. Set in 1975 small-town Iowa.

 

Quindlen, Anna.
One True Thing
(1994). Ellen Gulden leaves her fast-track career in Manhattan to return home and care for her cancer-stricken mother. Then she’s accused of helping her mother die. Made into a 1998 film with Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger.

 

Resnick, Rachel.
Go West Young F*cked Up Chick
(2000). Twenty-something Brown University graduate Rebecca Roth moves to the glitz and chaos of Los Angeles to escape the memory of her mother’s suicide.

Robinson, Marilynne.
Housekeeping
(1981). Sisters Ruthie and Lucille are raised by a series of eccentric female relatives, including the unconventional Aunt Sylvie, in 1950s Idaho, after their mother dies by suicide. Made into a 1987 movie starring Christine Lahti.

 

Rossi, Agnes.
The Houseguest
(2000). Six-year-old Maura learns that her mother has died of tuberculosis and her father, soon to leave Ireland for New Jersey, doesn’t want to raise her. He starts a new life in America, while Maura grows up first with two stern aunts, and then in an Irish boarding school. Loosely based on events from the author’s mother’s life.

 

Schumacher, Julie.
The Body is Water
(1999). Twenty-eight-year-old Jane Haus, pregnant and unmarried, returns to her family’s beach house to confront truths about her mother’s life and death, and make peace with her father and sister.

 

Schwarz, Christina.
Drowning Ruth.
(2000). Ruth is raised from age three by an aunt and war-wounded father after her mother drowns under mysterious circumstances. A tale of psychological suspense set in Wisconsin against the backdrop of post-World War I America and the flu epidemic that followed.

 

Shields, Carol.
The Stone Diaries
(1993). The life story of Daisy Stone Goodwill, motherless since birth, and her descendents spans almost the entire twentieth century. An epic narrative of an ordinary yet inspiring life.

 

Smiley, Jane.
A Thousand Acres
(1991). Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Three sisters, now adults, encounter the long-term effects of early mother loss and childhood abuse in this modern version of King Lear, set on the Iowa prairie. Made into a 1997 film starring Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

 

Straight, Susan.
I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
(1992). Fourteen-year-old, pregnant Marietta Cook leaves tiny Pine Gardens, South Carolina, to seek her fortune in Charleston after her mother dies. The story traces her life from 1959 to 1983.

 

Tan, Amy.
The Joy Luck Club
(1989). After her mother dies, Jing-Mei (“June”) succumbs to her father’s pressure to take her mother’s seat in a weekly Mah jongg game, dubbed “The Joy Luck Club” by its members. From the three other Chinese women, her mother’s best friends, she learns the secrets of her mother’s—and everyone else’s—life in China and the
United States. Made into a 1993 film starring Ming-Na Wen and Tamlyn Tomita.

 

Walker, Alice.
The Color Purple
(1982). Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Celie, motherless since fourteen, is raped by her father, separated from her beloved sister, and married off to the abusive Mister, who needs her to care for his motherless children. But when the flamboyant Shug Avery arrives in town, Celie’s options expand. Written in the African-American vernacular of the turn-of-the-century American South. Made into a 1985 film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

 

Weiner, Jennifer.
In Her Shoes
(2002). Older sister Rose is a successful, though frumpy, attorney. Younger sister Maggie is a gorgeous, self-centered underachiever. Their manic-depressive mother committed suicide when they were children. After a major falling out, the sisters are brought back together when their maternal grandmother reappears in their lives after a twenty-year absence. Made into a 2005 film starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley MacLaine.

 

Williams, Joy.
The Quick and the Dead
(2002). Three high school girls, motherless for various reasons, meet and pass an idle summer in Arizona in this quirky, insightful book.

 

Winspear, Jacqueline. The
Maisie Dobbs
series (2003-2005). Thirteen-year-old Maisie loses her mother and is sent to work as a maid for a wealthy London family in the 1920s. Ten years later, after attending Cambridge and working as a nurse during World War I, she opens a detective agency, through which she encounters mysteries in the present and ghosts from her past.

Baskin, Nora Raleigh.
What Every Girl (Except Me) Knows
(2002). A sensitive and insightful motherless twelve-year-old grows up with her father and brother in upstate New York, and tries to piece together facts about her mother’s mysterious death when she was a child. Ages 11 and up.

 

Berry, Liz.
Mel
(1993). Seventeen-year-old Melody is the daughter of a mentally ill mother in England. Driven almost to the brink of suicide herself, Melody gets a chance to reinvent her life when her mother is institutionalized. Ages 14 and up.

Birdsall, Jeanne.
The Penderwicks
(2005). Four lively motherless sisters, ages four through twelve, and their widowed, botanist father rent a summer cottage on the grounds of a New England estate. They soon meet the adventurous boy and his cold, distant, status-obsessed mother who live there. Ages 9 and up.

 

Brisson, Pat.
Sky Memories
(1991). Emily is ten when her single mother is diagnosed with cancer. The child poignantly narrates the story of the next ten months, leading up to her mother’s death. Ages 8 and up.

 

Cook, Karin.
What Girls Learn
(1997). Twelve-year-old Tilden, eleven-year-old Elizabeth, and their mother relocate to Atlanta to live with the mother’s boyfriend. Soon after the move, the girls’ mother is diagnosed with breast cancer and dies. Ages 12 and up.

 

Creech, Sharon.
Walk Two Moons
(1994). Winner of the 1995 Newbery Medal. Salamanca Tree Hiddle is thirteen when she takes a road trip with her grandparents to Lewiston, Idaho, to look for the mother who disappeared. On the way, she draws from her Native American ancestry to weave a story that helps her cope with what she learns. Ages 11 and up.

 

DiCamillo, Kate.
Because of Winn-Dixie
(2000). Ten-year-old Opal was only three when her mother left. Now, with her newly adopted dog Winn-Dixie by her side, Opal finds the courage to ask her father about what happened. Made into a 2005 movie with Jeff Daniels and Cicely Tyson. Ages 8 and up.

 

Farmer, Nancy.
A Girl Named Disaster
(1996). Winner of the 1997 Newbery Medal. Nhamo, an eleven-year-old motherless girl in Mozambique, flees her Shona village to find her father in Zimbabwe, a perilous journey that takes her a year to complete and forces her to rely on survival skills she didn’t know she had. Ages 10 and up.

 

Hermes, Patricia.
You Shouldn’t Have to Say Goodbye
(1982). Thirteen-year-old Sarah, a gymnast, is having an uneventful year at school until her mother is diagnosed with cancer. In the remaining months they have together, Sarah’s mother tries to prepare her daughter for her death. Ages 9 and up.

 

Johnston, Julie.
In Spite of Killer Bees
(2002). Aggie, Jeannie, and Helen Quade, ages fourteen to twenty-two, are orphans who receive an inheritance from a grandfather they never knew. To receive it, however, they have
to live in his dilapidated house with an eccentric great-aunt and learn how to work through their conflicts. Ages 12 and up.

 

Kimmel, Elizabeth Cody.
In the Stone Circle
(2001). A motherless girl and her widowed father move into a 16th-century Welsh house for the summer. They’re joined by a family struggling to cope with a divorce, and a mysterious young female ghost who needs their help. Ages 9 and up.

 

Kline, Christina Baker.
Sweet Water
(1993). Cassie, a twenty-five-year-old artist who was only three when she lost her mother under mysterious circumstances, inherits a house in rural Tennessee near her mother’s family. The story is told in alternating chapters by Cassie and her maternal grandmother, who knows the details of the mother’s tragic death. Ages 13 and up.

 

Leonard, Alison.
Tina’s Chance
(1988). Tina sets out to discover the truth about the mother who died when she was two. From her Aunt Louise, a lesbian, she discovers that her mother died of a disease she has a 50 percent chance of inheriting. Ages 13 and up.

 

MacLachlan, Patricia.
Sarah, Plain and Tall
(reprinted 1987). Jacob and Anna, two motherless children on the Midwestern prairie, meet a potential new stepmother when their father places an advertisement in a New England newspaper, looking for a bride. Made into a 1991 TV movie with Glenn Close as Sarah. Ages 8 and up.

 

Marvin, Isabel.
A Bride for Anna’s Papa
(1994). Twelve-year-old Anna and her nine-year-old brother Matti try to arrange for a mail-order bride for their father in 1907 Minnesota. Ages 9 and up.

 

Mazer, Norma Fox.
Girlhearts
(2002). Fourteen-year-old Sarabeth loses her young, widowed mother to a heart attack and moves in with family friends. Soon after she embarks on a journey to her mother’s hometown to uncover secrets about her past. Ages 12 and up.