Introducing My Real Name is Hanna, by Tara Lynn Masih Inspired by real Holocaust events, this poignant debut novel is a powerful coming-of-age story that will resonate with fans of The Book Thief and Between Shades of Gray. Highly recommended by the Jewish Book Council, it’s sure to be a wonderful addition to your mother/daughter bookclub. A 2018 Skipping Stones Honor Award Book Hanna Slivka is on the cusp of fourteen when Hitler’s army crosses the border into Soviet-occupied Ukraine. Soon, the Gestapo closes in, determined to make the shtetele she lives in “free of Jews.” Until the German occupation, Hanna spent her time exploring Kwasova with…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ros Howell “They are used to us being afraid of them. Don’t be afraid” (45). Maria Alyokhina was one of three members of the Russian feminist protest punk-rock collective Pussy Riot who were arrested in 2012 after performing their “punk prayer” at the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. At the subsequent trial Alyokhina and her band mate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years imprisonment. Media attention was rife and Pussy Riot divided the world – in particular the Russian nation – as…
Not Your Mother’s Midwife Review by Judy Swann This skillful translation and the well-written, consciousness-expanding essays and appendices in which it is nestled, are a landmark contribution to the scholarship of early modern times. In a certain sense, Louise Bourgeois is the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective of her day; and her Observations diverses sur la stérilité, perte de fruit, et fécondité, accouchements, et maladies des femmes et enfants nouveauz nés is the Our Bodies Our Selves of 1626.The text covers a lot of ground in good, plain-spoken French — sterility, miscarriage, fertility, childbirth, hemorrhoids, the diseases of women and…
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 33rd edition of this collaboration in which scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA Art by Kate Walters Kate Walters’s works explore themes around the disembodied uterus, the narcissistic mother, and the connections we have with animals and wilderness. Kate Walters’…
In an article in The Review Review, Angus MacCaull had this to say about MER: Mom Egg Review bills itself as a “literary journal about motherhood” but it is so much more. “Your eyes will fall out of your head,” said De Voe. Taking an unsentimental view of motherhood, you’ll find beauty without false promises at the intersection of motherhood and the arts—it very evenhandedly integrates the two, instead of seeking “balance” between two disparate entities. Mom Egg Review is a print journal, but you can also get MER VOX Quarterly, their online publication, right in your inbox. Instead of articles about motherhood, you’ll…
New Play by Rosie Rosenzweig A ghost hovers watching and waiting to embody itself in the most auspicious womb. Its goal is to fulfill what it couldn’t in its last lifetime called “soul work.” Myths & Ms. is an intergenerational play about abortion and reincarnation, dramatizing the changing attitudes and conditions towards abortion in the 20th and 21st centuries. This idea of reincarnation highlights the strident voices from the pro-choice and pro-life camps. Rosie Rosenzweig, Resident Scholar in the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center, is also a Boston theatre reviewer. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la, explores her son’s introduction…
Review by Deborah Hauser Dirt and Honey, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s debut poetry collection, is a celebration of women as agents of creation in Mexican culture that challenges the patriarchy and assert the power of women to conceive, create, and run wild under the moon. A number of poems explore the theme of domestication, creating tension with the depiction of women as seductresses and warriors in other poems. “Tonight the Stars Look like Labyrinths of Quartz” is a fairy tale-like poem about a woman who climbs a magnolia to collect stars until her husband stops her. But the women in her…
Review by Christine Stewart-Nuñez An intense love transcends most mother-daughter relationships no matter how fraught, tangled, and dynamic they may be. Jill Hoffman’s latest book, The Gates of Pearl, chronicles this intensity with heart-breaking veracity. In her preface, Hoffman—a poet, novelist, and editor—describes the book’s three elements: poems that she addresses to her mother, Pearl; journal entries written by “Pearly” that Hoffman edited; and Pearl’s voice that Hoffman captured from phone conversations. This effective layering drops readers into the psyche of Pearly, then pulls us out through the eyes of Hoffman, shuttling us back and forth on a tight line…
Review by Christine Thomas Alderman “I’ve pretended a lot of things the past sixteen years, but I can’t pretend to feel that” (11). With those words, a woman who has just almost lost her husband to sudden illness, knows she has to leave him. So begins award-winning Dallas Woodburn’s short story collection Woman, Running Late in a Dress, nominated for multiple awards including the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Woodburn’s thirteen interconnected stories chart seismic emotional upheaval that grinds ominously from below and explodes onto the surface of people who might live down your street, or in your apartment…
Review by Libby Maxey A Stone to Carry Home, Andrea Potos’s seventh poetry collection, is the perfect read for mothers seeing children off to college this fall. Although the airy, Mediterranean cover photo might suggest that these poems will be songs of travel, the journey on which Potos takes us is more interior and temporal than it is geographical. Yes, Potos gives us the flavor of Greece—the red wine, the dark coffee, “the slicing and the frying, / the olive oil, lemon and thyme” (38)—but she also gives us the flavor of worry, anger, and aging. She gives us…