Thanks to Authors Guild for publishing this review I wrote for Moms by Yeong-Shin Ma (Drawn + Quarterly, 2020).
“If you can’t be happy or grateful for what you have, that’s misery,” Lee Soyeon says during an internal monologue in the midpoint of Moms, returning to the scene where the book began: a super dramatic and now introspective street fight with very clumsy action between Soyeon and the flower shop lady, one of a few antagonists we meet in Yeong-Shin Ma’s loving tribute to his mother.
On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, instead of joining most people in the United States who spent the day refreshing their browsers and watching the election results roll in, I decided to pick up Moms, a book I had been meaning to read for months. It was a great distraction, and I laid in bed all day gripped by the story. I took notes while I read and I felt productive for once. I literally couldn’t put the book down.
The plan was to read a book and write a review for Authors Guild for their “Author Recommends” column. I’m not good at writing reviews, or maybe I shouldn’t say that. It’s more like, I am rusty at writing reviews. I used to love blogging about books I enjoyed, I would do it for writing practice any time I tore through a new book. Before that, in college, I would relish term paper time and the chance to get weird with making comparisons, like the difference between spontaneous prose and stream of consciousness writing:
Stream of Consciousness is a writing technique sometimes used in literature, almost always used in the first person, as a means of character development. From a Stream of Consciousness, the reader is brought into the theatre of the character’s brain, seeing their thoughts first-hand and reading them as they are thought, without any revisions. Another technique in writing, Spontaneous Prose, uses a similar technique in which thoughts are written immediately down and are left unedited, but unlike Stream of Consciousness writing, there is a clear direction in which the writing is going, an objective. Stream of Consciousness is like Noise. Spontaneous Prose is like Jazz.
Lol. My professor, a noise fan, did not like that paper at all.
I wasn’t really thinking about my college papers when I wrote this review, though. I was thinking of the book reports I wrote in grade school, where we were handed a printout sheet with form questions to answer. It would have been better if we had been taught how to construct a simple five paragraph essay, or even a three paragraph essay, instead of being instructed to answer standard questions that didn’t always make sense. I don’t know what sparked the memory, maybe just the idea of how far I’ve come since that time.
In grade school I wrote a report for a nonfiction book about tornadoes and had to get creative with the answers for questions like, “What character would you want to meet most?” I remember writing, “I’d most like to meet the dust devil because it seems like the least dangerous type of tornado.” That worksheet seems like the kind of thing you might give a second grader, but I might have been in the sixth grade using that silly template, the year Twister was released in movie theaters. It’s sad to remember that. My teacher that year, Mrs. Turner, was definitely phoning it in while waiting for retirement.
Or maybe I just decided to write about tornadoes independent of the movie Twister. Who knows. In the seventh grade I wrote a paper about the American Alligator because I thought they were cool and I liked things that started with the letter A, and not because I had seen a movie about alligators. Regardless of the year, most of my grade school experience was boring and not challenging. I had at least four teachers who ended up retiring the year after I was in their class, and a lot of the teachers generally didn’t seem to care if they were engaging with their students or not.
My seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher however, Mrs. Phillips, was inspiring. Her husband owned a funeral home and she drove a station wagon to school that advertised the funeral home. The other kids referred to her car as a hearse. I liked her class and looked forward to it because we regularly wrote essays. I wrote a paper about Ancient Egypt and was surprised when Mrs. Phillips read the introduction to my essay (which was really fun to write, I liked getting descriptive and writing my introductions with the kind of language used in movie trailers) aloud to the class as an example of what a great essay could be. She gave me confidence in my writing. If you’re still out there, Mrs. Phillips, thank you.
Maybe I ended up channeling that Mrs. Phillips energy toward my book review. As it turned out, reviewing Moms was not as daunting a task as I had built it up to be. As rusty as I felt, once I got going it was pretty easy to summarize and talk about my takeaways. I really enjoyed the book, so I hope you check it out.