On Forgiveness: Natalie Serber

I am over at the Huffington Post with a review of Natalie Serber’s Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June, 2012). You can read the full review here. Below, a taste:

“There is an element of the miraculous in a collection of stories whose characters reveal the fundamental predicament of all parents and children: to make new mistakes that, inevitably, leave us with few joys and deep regrets. To swear, as Ruby does, to defy her mother’s manthra, to “learn to shift my expectations, to learn that some things in life you just have to put up with,” and, decades later, end up with a daughter her own age who looks at Ruby, her “mother with a terrible sense of direction” — in all possible iterations of that word, we’ve come to learn — and says “I’ve never been young, Mom.” Five simple words more damning than any speech full of reference to specific incident could ever be.”