I promised to post how my reading has unintentionally worked well with Project Spectrum. At the beginning of January, I had selected a few books to read outside my typical avenues from the latest BookPage from my library. I somewhat randomly selected the books based upon the little blurbs they provided.
The nine stories in Mothers and Sons examine in depth some of the ways that the bond that is forged–or not–between mothers and their sons is altered, re-formed, or broken forever.
Mothers & Sons was a very gray and blue book. Not the lovely shades of blue that I surround myself with but more the melancholy grey-blue of a dreary day tinged with a starkness. I found this collections of short stories to be interesting but more than anything I found most of them to be tinged with a sadness. There was such disconnect between the mothers and the sons and such a lack of understanding between them. It was like many of them were living parallel lives but never actually crossing paths. Many of the the stories depicted a lacking element to the relationship between mother and son. The story that stood out for me were the one of the mother of the fallen priest. And how though she is upset at her sons’ abuse of boys, she stands strong in the community. And in the end beside her son not as a supporter but as a mother. It was an interesting slice of what it means to love someone unconditionally.
I think I read this from the perspective of the young mother with sons. Perhaps it shaded my view of this book but it seemed filled with shades of gray.
