Shivah

Solod’s undercooked debut follows a woman as she copes with her mother’s impending death. Leah, a late-middle-aged woman with a daughter of her own, has always had a tense relationship with her mother, whom she views as a “bone-deep narcissist” and a “mutation of Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the East.” Six years after Leah’s mother began suffering from dementia, she is no longer lucid and awaits death in a hospice facility. Leah, having lost all hope of reconciliation, flashes back to scenes from their past: her mother’s drinking to cope with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her parents’ amicable divorce, her father’s protracted death after a series of strokes and heart attacks. As Leah sifts through her memories, she tries to come to terms with her ambivalent feelings for her mother and the lack of closure on their relationship. Sloppy similes (Leah’s mother’s anger “bounced off [Leah’s] hardened flesh like insects”) and opaque prose (“The original belief in God was born out of violence and disbelief”) distract from the story, and though the seven chapters bear epigraphs corresponding to the days of shiva, the faith element otherwise goes largely undeveloped. Sincerity doesn’t make up for the slipshod execution. (June)