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3+ stars
A daughter seeks to make sense of her distant mother’s past after she passes away. A mix of past and present narratives revealing her mother’s story from news clippings and photos and poetry found in a box after her mother’s death. She pieces together what happened that affected her mother all those years . There was a connection between them, but it remained unknown to them as they kept a common secret - they both wrote poetry . I loved the writing in many places .

� Just as trees with inextricably entangled branches grow while imprisoning other trees, every story cuts a path between life and death. We never entirely make out all the roots and points of wavering that cause it to break. Or else it does not fracture, but comes closer to the stars that illuminate it slightly. We are not very different from the forests scattered with tall trees, which, like heaps of bones, defy the sky but, from one moment to the next, can dislocate.

Our roots run beneath the ground, invisible; it's impossible to unearth them all. We can try to pull one out, hope it will lead us to another that we can extract as well, and so on until we perceive a meaning in this story that we call our life.�

However, the mixture of the present and past narratives together didn’t work so well for me . The transitions from third person to first person narrative weren’t smooth. It’s about love and loss, the written word, beautifully written in places, and I thought I’d love it more than I did . I felt at a distance from these characters because of the execution of the story and didn’t connect as much as I’d hoped . I was, however moved by the ending.


I received a copy of this book from Book*hug Press through NetGalley.