Five Great Books for Mother’s Day

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From narrative cookbooks to engaging memoirs to fantastic fiction, these titles make for the ideal Mother’s Day gifts — whether you them give away or to yourself for some much deserved you-time.

 

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple’s hilarious and heart-breaking novel, uses emails, letters, police reports and diary entries (among other things) to tell the story of 15-year-old Bee and her hunt for her brilliant mother, Bernadette, who has gone missing after a series of unfortunate events.

Read an excerpt here

 

Amity & Sorrow, the debut novel by Peggy Riley, is the enthralling story of a mother and her two teenage daughters as they flee a polygamous, fundamentalist cult and find themselves stranded in rural Oklahoma.

Kerosene Curry by Cindy Ryan grew out of the time Ryan spent in the slums of Mumbai visiting her son’s charity The Dirty Wall Project. Ryan chronicles her interactions with the local women, huddled over the kerosene burners in the lane ways of the community, sharing their stories, recipes and photos of the community they call home. Proceeds from the cookbook go to The Dirty Wall Project.

 

 

The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett

A remarkable memoir of a mother and son that gives insight into the complex world of autism as two ordinary parents meet the challenge of bringing up a boy with an off-the-charts IQ who was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism at age two.

 

In Mary Coin, Marisa Silver uses Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” photograph, an iconic image of the Great Depression, as the inspiration for a fictional exploration of this time in history. Three viewpoints bring the era to life: Walker Dodge, a present-day professor of cultural history; Vera Dare, a polio-stricken photographer who shoots portraits of people in poverty; and Mary Coin, the subject of the famous photograph.