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A review by stenaros
Unbecoming by Jenny Downham
3.0
Read for Librarian Book Group
I shall begin by discussing the thing that distracted me throughout the entire novel: the timeline. The grandmother gave birth to the mother in 1954. And the mother's daughter is a contemporary teenager. Wait. What? Really? And there is also a younger brother? How old was she when she gave birth?
I can't tell you how many times I counted forward from 1954 trying to make the timeline sensible. A sixteen-year-old today would have to have been born in 1999 or 2000 which would make her mother forty five? And forty seven when she had the younger brother? You could maybe subtract five years and have the story set in 2011--but probably not many more than that due to phone technology--but even being a forty-two-year-old first-time mother might bring up some commentary very early on during the book. For instance, would her daughter attribute the mother's insistence on safety and sensible choices to the fact that she was so old* when she became a mother? If there had been just one sentence early on--"my mother was so much older than all the other mothers"--I could have stopped my endless counting. The age thing is finally addressed near the end of the book, but by then I'd exhausted myself with different decade permutations.
Setting aside the (rather large) issue of timeline, I loved the stories of these three women. The grandmother's memory loss was terrifying to read about, but such a good way to tell her story. And the mother and the daughter's stories were also compelling.
*Note that I realize there are women who are first-time mothers in their forties (though forty-five and forty-seven is unusual) and I don't think forty itself is old.
I shall begin by discussing the thing that distracted me throughout the entire novel: the timeline. The grandmother gave birth to the mother in 1954. And the mother's daughter is a contemporary teenager. Wait. What? Really? And there is also a younger brother? How old was she when she gave birth?
I can't tell you how many times I counted forward from 1954 trying to make the timeline sensible. A sixteen-year-old today would have to have been born in 1999 or 2000 which would make her mother forty five? And forty seven when she had the younger brother? You could maybe subtract five years and have the story set in 2011--but probably not many more than that due to phone technology--but even being a forty-two-year-old first-time mother might bring up some commentary very early on during the book. For instance, would her daughter attribute the mother's insistence on safety and sensible choices to the fact that she was so old* when she became a mother? If there had been just one sentence early on--"my mother was so much older than all the other mothers"--I could have stopped my endless counting. The age thing is finally addressed near the end of the book, but by then I'd exhausted myself with different decade permutations.
Setting aside the (rather large) issue of timeline, I loved the stories of these three women. The grandmother's memory loss was terrifying to read about, but such a good way to tell her story. And the mother and the daughter's stories were also compelling.
*Note that I realize there are women who are first-time mothers in their forties (though forty-five and forty-seven is unusual) and I don't think forty itself is old.