Someone Not Really Her Mother

Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of the acclaimed novels Ohio Angels and Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper as well as The Public Is Invited to Dance, a book about Gertrude Stein. Formerly an associate professor of English and women’s studies at Yale University, she has also taught literature and writing at Bread Loaf School of English and Wesleyan University, and has published several essays on modern literature.

Hannah Pearl lost her entire family in the Holocaust, escaped from France to England, married an RAF pilot, also killed in the war, and came to Connecticut to raise Miranda, their only daughter. Now in her 80s, with Alzheimer's advancing, the past, so long hidden from her family and herself, spills like vintage wine into her memories. By skillfully modulating her tone, Myra Platt frames Hannah's confused interior monologue within the world of her bewildered family. As they struggle to understand what is happening to their grandmother, she drifts deeper. Platt's gift for the perfect accent bridges Hannah's passage from the banal external world of Con-necticut--filled with nurses, drug store clerks, and granddaughters--to the rich but painful interior world of her French past and English husband. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine