Great Moms of the Bookish World

We all know that books are great to gift any time of year, but especially for moms on Mother’s Day (hopefully promoting some much needed rest and relaxation for them), and much ink has been spilled throughout the internet on which book would make the most perfect present. This post is not that exactly. Instead, I thought I’d highlight some books that we love in the store that are written by great moms or are about great moms. While I think these would make great gifts, I also think they are a celebration of moms everywhere. So to all the moms out there, thank you for all you do. And to my mom especially—who is the very best person I know—you rock.

Bomb Shelter by Mary Laura Philpott

This was a favorite of both mine and Amanda’s when it came out last year. Philpott is a self-described “anxious optimist” which, and I’m going to speak for both myself and Amanda here, describes the two of us as well. As both a mother, daughter, and steadfast friend, she always believed the power of her love and care would protect those closest to her from any harm—until a terrifying incident involving her oldest child throws that out the window. Informed by this experience, she writes about the existential dread involved with loving people so deeply and desperately, the quantities of her love matched equally by the terror she knows she will feel if (and when) bad things happen. Yet this memoir isn’t (just) a downer. Instead it is funny, kind, and brimming with compassion for Philpott herself and others. Reading this felt (for me, a child-free late twentysomething) like talking with a trusted mentor about all the fears I didn’t know how to put into words, only to be met with affirmation and good advice.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

In this memoir, poet Maggie Smith processes her recent (and ongoing) divorce and the fallout of a poem going viral with lyrical, moving prose. Rage is an easy emotion to feel and Smith has no shortage of this emotion herself. She unflinchingly addresses how she writes her own life when she is still processing and trying to continue living through difficulties, through this rage. It’s a story of a mother’s own fierce love for her children and her attempt to protect them as much as she can from the disintegration of her marriage. It is also a narrative of how a woman can stand up for herself, and through the prioritization of her own health and happiness, her children’s lives can be made better, too. Though this book is unquestionably something wrought from intense pain and anguish, Smith still shows how beauty can be found not only outside us, but within ourselves, too. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is not only an amazing story of a mom doing her best, but would also make a great gift for any person trying to see the joy in life despite hardship.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

This novel follows Frieda Liu, a young mother struggling but doing her very best. After one lapse in judgement, she finds herself in a government-run reform program that puts custody of her own child at risk. With Big Brother’s eyes always on her, Frieda must prove that, despite being a bad mother, she can learn to be good. This Handmaid’s Tale-esque novel of ideas is about the rot at the heart of “perfect” upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted on mothers both by systems and by one another, agencies that separate families, but also the boundless and redeeming love a parent has for their child. We are living in a time where the state increasingly is taking control of women’s bodies, and, like all good speculative fiction, Chan takes these current threats to their logical conclusion, feeling both eerie and prescient. While not an easy read emotionally, Frieda’s love for her child is blatant on the page, and will hopefully help people see how mothers, specifically mothers of color, are surveilled and controlled.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

When Lessons in Chemistry came on the scene last year, it absolutely swept both me and Amanda off our feet. I always jokingly tell customers that we fought over who could choose it for our staff pick (laughingly saying that, since Amanda is my boss after all, she won). And it seems we weren’t the only ones—this novel has consistently been a hardcover bestseller since it was published, and I think one of the biggest reasons is the mother at the center of the book—Elizabeth Zott. Though she did not dream of being a parent, Elizabeth proves to be an excellent one for her daughter, whom she raises without the child’s father. Trained as a chemist, Elizabeth finds herself the star of wildly popular evening cooking show Supper at Six which not only teaches women how to cook but also how to change the status quo. Her unusual methods extend to her parenting strategies as well, and this funny, poignant, dazzling debut novel shows that motherhood can look like a lot of different things—and as long as a child is loved and encouraged, that’s all that matters.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

While I do think the mothers in this book are sympathetic, I am including this title in my list because of the main character Alex’s aunt, Marla. When Women Were Dragons is set in the 1950s where one day, all at once, tens of thousands of women suddenly turn into dragons—full on scaly, winged, enormous dragons. But soon after, no one talks about them, yet questions abound. Why did these women become dragons? How? What it their choice? Why did Alex’s Aunt Marla turn, but not her mother? Alex is forced into silence and yet must contend with living in a totally different world, her mother growing more distant, an absentee father, and the insistence that her aunt never even existed. Aunt Marla’s dragoning shows Alex that there are more places for women in the world than she has been taught and how to accept others for who they are. This book celebrates mothering figures and the radical impact they can have in children’s lives. May we all have an aunt like Marla, even if they aren’t an actual dragon.

The Mothers by Britt Bennett

Britt Bennett is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting authors to come on the scene within the last few years, and her debut novel The Mothers is an excellent example of why. Set in a Black community in Southern California, The Mothers is an emotionally perceptive story about love, ambition, and the communities that form us. This story starts with a secret. Nadia Turner is 17 and mourning the recent loss of her own mother to suicide, so she ends up hanging out with the pastor’s 21-year-old son, Luke Sheppard. Young love results in a pregnancy that Nadia feels she must hide from everyone, including her religious best friend Aubrey. As the years go by, Luke, Nadia, and Aubrey must live with the choices they made as young people, caught in a love triangle and navigating around the big question they’re all thinking—what if they had chosen differently? With beautiful, moving prose, Bennett explores how motherhood can look different for everyone in every different context, but that everyone is largely trying their best. This is one of the best and most interesting meditations on parenthood I’ve ever read.

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

Keep some tissues by the side when you read this wild trip of a novel. Katy and her mom Carol have a trip planned to Italy’s beautiful Amalfi Coast, a trip mirroring the one Carol took the summer before she met Katy’s father. But everything is torn asunder when Carol dies and Katy doesn’t know what to do. She ends up going on the trip any way and feels her mother everywhere she looks, in the deep blue waters, beautiful cliffside, and and delectable food. And then Carol appears in the flesh—tanned and beautiful and 30 years old. Katy doesn’t know what do, but ends up befriending this version of her mother, getting to know her not as a mom but as a person for one summer she never thought she’d be able have. This is a story of love, loss, and adulthood, about being a grownup and getting to know your parents as figures outside of who they are in your life. It shows how to embrace the people we love not in spite of their history and selfishness but because of it.

This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Especially relevant in our current times, This is How it Always Is is about Rosie and Penn and their 5 children, all boys—or so they believed. Claude, their youngest loves peanut butter sandwiches, playing princess, and says he wants to be a girl when he grows up. Rosie and Penn want Claude to do whatever will bright their child joy, but they live in a relatively conservative Wisconsin town where they fear Claude will not be accepted, so the whole family keeps Claude’s secret. Until one day, everything explodes and it can’t be kept any more. This is a story about a family with struggles that every family might not face, but is universal in the one struggle all parents face—trying to do your best by your kid. And that struggle is hard and no one piece of advice can guide every situation. Parenthood always involves stepping into the unknown and crossing your fingers. And children always grow, but not always according to plan. Rosie (and Penn, too, but this is a post about mothers) both show what it’s like to wade through it all while loving their children for who they are.

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

I know I very recently mentioned this collection in my post for National Poetry Month, but when I thought of mothers of the literary world, I immediately thought of Ocean Vuong’s achingly heartfelt tribute to his late mother. Written in the wake of the runaway success of his first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Time is a Mother is a moving eulogy to this woman who supported Vuong at every step in his career, from his early poems and his first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, to the unexpected windfall of his novel, only for her to pass before his success reached its height. Experimenting more with form and language, this collection is moving, vivid, brave, and propulsive. His mother is not the only topic of these poems, but she features prominently, and he uses this space to examine what it means to lose a mother you love so much, and what it means to lean in to family when all you want to do is look away from your grief. Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.