Review by Emily Webber
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, follows the unforgettable Rosenberg family—consisting of Leon, Louise, and their daughter Lydia —over forty years as they navigate life, especially in the face of a terminal diagnosis. Despite the heavy subject matter, this novel remains irreverent, quirky, and funny. As Louise learns she has a genetic illness that affects Ashkenazi Jews, she agonizes over the impact on her daughter, both her ability to be a parent as her body becomes more disabled, and wanting to spare her daughter from becoming her caretaker or witnessing her decline. Yahm’s novel explores the complexities of motherhood, caring for others, facing mortality, and finding one’s path in the world.
As I read the first few chapters, I couldn’t wait to spend many more hours with these characters. Louise is wild and impulsive, countered by Leon’s gentle, logical, and steadfast nature. They meet right after the funeral of Louise’s mother at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in the 1970s, immediately ending up in Leon’s bed.
“Do you want a quilt?” Leon asked.
Louise nodded, and Leon threw back the sheet and squatted in front of his closet naked, sifting through boxes unselfconsciously, giving her a view of his ass and dangling scrotum. She surprised herself by not being repulsed
Yahm’s descriptions are not only original and funny, but with her characters, she always captures the reality of our human bodies. As Leon and Louise’s relationship begins, she is mourning the death of her mother from what she believes is brain cancer, but later learns it is a genetic neurological disorder. Louise has butted up against her mother, who was a psychoanalyst, her whole life: If a girl defines herself in opposition to her mother and her mother no longer exists, does the girl still exist? She’s also traumatized by the time she spent caring for her mother as she got increasingly ill and watching her die.
As Louise and Leon settle down and have their only child, Lydia, Louise struggles with the new reality of motherhood and her sometimes extreme feelings of anger towards her new daughter. In this, Yahm shows not only the impacts of chronic illness on mothering but also the everyday challenges all mothers may face.
Her entire sixteen years of motherhood were defined by this contradiction—the desire to sleep forever next to your child, hungrily breathing in her skin, and the equal and opposite urge to escape. She wanted to spend every last second she had left on the planet with this sullen, hilarious adolescent sitting behind her, and she also wanted to be five thousand miles away in the desert.
Louise gets past the challenges of early motherhood, and she and Leon help Lydia through abuse from her time at a camp when she was a child, her OCD tendencies, and adolescent angst. However, most of this novel vibrates with the tension and difficult decisions that Louise faces due to her illness. Every beat of Louise’s actions has a simple motive that anyone who has cared for a child knows—the wish to make their lives easier and better. Yahm honestly portrays all sides of Louise’s decision to leave the family and spend her remaining time on a religious kibbutz in Israel.
Then the story shifts to Lydia dealing with her grief, trying to find purpose and direction in her life, and ultimately giving her father a great gift even when deep in her own sorrow and regrets. In another surprising shift towards the end of the novel, Leon, who has remained the steady strength of the family, sometimes in the background to his wife and daughter, takes center stage. The arc of his storyline is an ode to the importance of caring for others. As Leon says, “There’s nothing wrong with being addicted to caring for things. That’s what keeps the world from collapsing.”
Throughout this book, from the very beginning, Yahm turns a sharp eye to all forms of grief. Whether it be the sadness over an ever-changing relationship with a best friend, or the way life changes when you become a parent, or an unexpected health diagnosis, or the actual death of a loved one. Louise writes to her daughter:
Your relationship with your mother doesn’t end with something as paltry and insignificant as death, it just keeps evolving. So I hate to break it to you, kid, but you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon.
The end of life scenes and how the characters who have died continue to thread through this story in the form of memories, dreams, and unexpected signs are one of the most beautiful aspects of this novel. Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is a wild and unconventional ride, heartbreaking at times, but never losing sight of the beauty of honoring family and caring for others. Motherhood and life are often hard, and Yahm’s novel shows the good times, humor, and closeness in family relationships, alongside the mistakes, difficult choices, and the inevitable end of one’s life.
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm
Dzanc Books, May 06, 2025
9781938603280
Emily Webber is a reader of all the things hiding out in South Florida with her husband and son. A writer of criticism, fiction, and nonfiction, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer, Five Points, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated. Read more at emilyannwebber.com.