First Fiction Fridays: Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother by Hollie Adams
Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother throws a lot of first novel tropes out the window and never looks back. Hollie is still a young woman herself, yet she has decided to put herself in the shoes of someone a bit further on in life, a mother approaching the cusp of middle age and everything else that comes with it.
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What:Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother (NeWest Press, 2015)Who:Hollie Adams is a Windsorite living in Alberta, where she teaches writing and literature. She has studied creative writing at the University of Windsor and has a PhD in English from the University of Calgary. Her writing has been published in several Canadian periodicals including Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, Carousel, The Windsor Review, and Filling Station, and online at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (Her McSweeney’s post, Sexting Ice Breakers for English Grad Students, is definitely worth a read!)Why you need to read this now:Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother throws a lot of first novel tropes out the window and never looks back. Hollie is still a young woman herself, yet she has decided to put herself in the shoes of someone a bit further on in life, a mother approaching the cusp of middle age and everything else that comes with it. The book is written with second person narration, which might be a little off-putting at first, but it definitely helps in getting you engaged in Carrie’s life in a way that hearing her scattered thoughts directly or just having an omniscient narrator probably wouldn’t do.In the end, while Carrie seemingly begins to self-destruct by drinking too much, losing her job, getting way too competitive with her daughter (and her cat for that matter), the distance we as readers get from Hollie using the second person narration allows us to wonder what we’d do in a similar situation, with our mother dead from ovarian cancer and everything seeming to fall apart.The above might seem a little depressing, but it’s really the humour of Carrie’s tale that gets us into her mind. If you’re a fan of the black humour found in Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, or the flailing around 30 Rock fans find so endearing in heroine Liz Lemon, Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother could be for you. What other people are saying about Things You’ve Inherited From You Mother:“Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother rocks—like a small boat on an ocean of discontent. Hollie Adams’ debut is inventive, authentic, energetic and so funny I nearly peed myself.”—Cassie Stocks, winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour with her book Dance, Gladys, Dance* * *Thanks to NeWest Press for sharing this debut novel with us. I don’t know about you but with a cover that looks this good, this is definitely one I want on my shelf!
