Kate O'Riordan

"Mothers and daughters are not entirely different from lovers, she thinks. Both have the capacity to destroy and to reconstruct once more. But with each reconstruction a little strip of skin, a transparent graft, must be lifted from somewhere to seal up somewhere else." writes Kate O'Riordan in this beautiful gem of a novel about the relationships between mothers and daughters. A heart-warming, lilting story, rich in its prose and lush in its description of beautiful Ireland, following the lives of four generations of women of one family. The struggles of these women, their bonds, their secrets and their warm, relatable characters make a wonderful tale - a poignant and gripping exploration of love, loss and the nature of memory itself, "The Memory Stones" is a novel worth reading in all aspects!… (altro)

If I summarized the plot you would probably laugh...but this is not meant to be primarily a funny book. It's just that O'Riordan has put together a rather weak and unbelievable story. However, the reason I found it be be actually an OK book is that the core characters: the mother, her three sons and the father, all struck a resonance with me. The experience of feeling that you love your children, and then not long after feeling that you can't stand living with them any more, was well described by O'Riordan and caused me some considerable reflection on my own family situation. The emotions felt by the wife-mother at the prospect of her husband's possible affair with an old mutual friend seemed realistically complicated to me. ...but maybe I'm just a simpleton. I won't, however, be adding Kate O'Riordan to my list of authors to be followed up.… (altro)