All My Mother's Lovers

Product Information

But what sets *Mother's Lovers* (I love the rhyme in the title) apart is how definitively modern it is. The characters acknowledge their awareness of major news events, really events that are a crisis for those living them.

Along the way, she discovers a side of her mother she never knew existed, secrets she (and in some instances, Maggie’s father) kept, and she starts to understand things her mother did and said which never had context before.I was reminded of *The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo* when I finished, and I think fans of that book will love this one, too. This is one of those stories that you need to go in with an open mind and see where the story takes you.

All My Mother’s Lovers is a powerful debut that signals a new voice in fiction who can interweave multiple threads through a single protagonist. Maggie's need to reduce the act of making love in the opening line of the book to "being eaten out" .

Discovering, alongside Iris’s will, a stack of letters to be mailed in the event of her death gives Maggie an out: She’ll hit the road and hand-deliver them, while also investigating her mom’s mysterious connections to the male addressees, none of whom she’s ever heard of.

Maggie assumes this rejection of closeness is a byproduct of “seeing such a good example in her parent’s marriage” which perhaps was “detrimental, made her standards too high, her expectations over the top. I'm a liberal Obama loving old millennial/young Gen X-er, and I can affirm we are not a monolith that thinks with a hive mind. This was a decent enough book, though it did feel a bit preachy at times as though we had to be sure of HOW liberal the author and every character is.I want to say something about the ultimate centering of queer/ace/poly relationships among older characters, since that was special to read, but I don’t really have much to add on that front other than it was cool to read a bad book that still decently explored such an array of queer identities — may have been the first book I’ve read with an ace character! It dawns on Maggie that whatever else her mother was…Iris was strong, and her strength felt like a kind of protection between Maggie and the world, even long after moving out and having her own life.