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The indigenous view is one of gratitude, respect, and reciprocity.  Nature gives us much and we have a responsibility to return the favor.  All living things are seen as persons and native language reflects this.  Trees, for example, are “she” not “it.”  How much harder to cut a tree down if you think of her as a living person, a “she,” instead of an “it.”

Kimmerer’s essays describe her experiences as a mother, botanist, teacher, and Native American. She harvests maple syrup and makes baskets. She takes her students into the woods and on farm visits to experience the concepts she teaches.  Those nice Thanksgiving squash are actually swollen ovaries?  Yuck. There is an abundance of scientific information told in a delightful way.

One of the best chapters, Collateral Damage, was about salamanders, those cold-blooded often unappealing little beings that are never poster animals for endangered species. She writes that when the first spring rain comes into the forest when the temperature has reached 42 degrees, the salamanders rise through the humus and head towards their natal ponds.  The females, swollen with eggs, go first.  A couple of days later, the males go.  They get together in a very particular kind of watery environment.  Any writer who can make the moving and mating of salamanders both beautiful and fascinating is gifted indeed!

The book is slow starting; it is also repetitious.  Her portrayal of the success of the Native American lifestyle was idealized. Kimmerer herself tells us there was a “hunger moon” in the winter when starvation was common. But the essays are thought-provoking; the descriptions evoke the best days in nature; and the book made me see the world from a different perspective.

The characters are Nigerian who live there or who have moved to the states. Their culture controls many of the stories but some are universal.  Mothers die; children die; mothers sell their children; they reject them. The stories explore the bond between mothers and children, different facets of becoming a mother, things that go wrong along the way.

In a short time Ajose-Fisher’s characters pull at us so we are invested in their outcome. There is little backstory and sometimes the lack of detail is confusing, but the feelings of the woman or child are very clear.

What does the author mean by the title?  Does she want to dispel idealistic notions about both mothers and gods? Is the mother the most primal, God like influence on her child? I leave it to the reader to decide.

But Maud was no fool. She soon figured out what the neighbor wanted and devised a plan to keep her from getting it. But then…what? Maud! Not what I expected.

Helene Tursten has given us a different kind of main character – one who plays the old lady card, and anything else she can get her hands on, very well.  Of course, we don’t approve, but yet… Each of the five chapters in this short, small book is a tongue-in-cheek separate story about Maud’s problem-solving capabilities.  It is easily read in an afternoon.

Before she wrote short stories, Tursten wrote serious detective novels set in Stockholm. Check out my new Facebook page for a short review of her first, Detective Inspector Huss.