Shelf Unbound, “Best of the Book Blogs”
About halfway through Elizabeth Mosier’s The Playgroup,the narrator describes the struggle involved in turning the events of real life into fiction: ”What intrigued me was reality: Sarah’s guilt over her brother’s death, Linda’s postpartum depression, Bryn given up for adoption, Maggie’s son found blue and still in his bassinet. Was it even possible, I wondered, to capture their losses in words?” Fittingly, it’s Mosier’s own gift for turning such losses into a sense of yearning that makes the work of fiction so compelling. Her characters are a handful of mothers whose uncertainty and ambivalance about motherhood is rivaled only by the pressure they feel to put on their best happy faces and pretend for the world that they know exactly what they’re doing at all times. Yet when a member of the group learns that the child she’s carrying may have developed a cancerous mass, the facade of perfection becomes almost impossible to sustain. The resulting crisis forces the members of the group to take stock of their lives and to come to terms, each in her own way, with the myth of the perfect mother.
The Playgroup is one of several titles in Gemma Media’s new Open Door series, a line of books designed to promote adult literacy. Participating in this endeavor, Mosier is in good company. Other Open Door authors include Roddy Doyle, Nicky Hornby and Maeve Binchy. While the narratives are short and the prose straightforward, the subject matter and themes of those works offer much to consider.
–Marc Schuster, www.marcschuster.com
Publishers Weekly
First-novelist Mosier authors a sharp-edged romance about an Arizona native hoping to reinvent herself when she goes “back East” to college. Entering Bryn Mawr, Jaime Cody wants to bury her recent past: the arrest of her father for embezzlement, her degrading waitress jobs and her fling with Buddy the “cowboy.” All goes well until Buddy arrives on campus, “hell bent” on bringing her home. At this point, readers are taken back in time as Jaime recounts her last summer “as a girl,” when she skirts the fate she used to joke about with her best friend, Rosa: “hitched to some loser guy right out of high school, cramped into a trailer in Happy Tepee RV Park, selling fry bread with beans at the mall, drinking beer at desert parties.” Mosier cleanly slices Jaime’s life into three phases: her upper-middle-class childhood; her traumatic adolescence, when financial security slips away as quickly as her trust in her father; and her emergence into adulthood, when she can view her own mistakes and her parents’ mistakes objectively. Featuring lifelike dialogue, three-dimensional characters and an upbeat outcome, the novel also serves up glossy, attention-getting prose (“That was the beginning, as blind and misguided as most beginnings are”) that will appeal to female teens not quite ready to bid their own “girlhoods” good-bye. Ages 12-up. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
