MY MOTHER’S LOVERS

The daughter of two hippies must confront some unresolved family business.

Poet and storywriter Passanante’s first novel, the latest in this university press’s Western Literature Series, strikes familiar chords. It’s another of those well-intentioned stories that works hard to give life to a theme by now as picked-over as department-store bargain tables: the relationship between mother and daughter. Narrator Lake Rose Davis circles around her characters rather than getting a convincing fix on any of them as she recalls life with Mom and Dad in Wilders Ferry, Idaho. Her parents are known locally as the people who live in a purple house and once traveled around in a painted school bus. Kirk runs a bookstore; Mimi is an artist who has cut off relations with her family in St. Louis, except for her glamorous but needy sister DeeDee. As a small child, Lake adored Mimi, but then she sees her in the arms of first a handsome logger and then the enigmatic beautician Graceanne. Eventually, Lake begins to resent her mother’s self-absorbed behavior and the silence she maintains about her family. Just before she turns 15, Lake comes down with a mysterious illness that isn’t diagnosed as rheumatic fever until weeks of uncertainty have passed. (This seems both unlikely and hokey, given that these events occur in the 1980s.) In a trip to St. Louis, Lake finally meets her grandparents, Vin and Pearl Rose, when Mimi leaves her in their care. She learns that Granddad, an Italian-American, was a doctor who served in WWII, and Grandma is the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Both have been grievously hurt by Mimi’s behavior. As Lake recuperates, then stays on after a tragic accident, she learns more about her family, Mimi, and the binding ties of love as she chases her own dreams.

Overwritten and underwhelming.