Book Review: All My Mother´s Lovers by Ilana Masad

´(...) and in the soothing tide of life going on as normal, she died´.

I waited almost one year until reading All My Mother´s Lovers by Ilana Masad as the book was on my TBR for the last year. The waiting was really worth because the book is like no other book I´ve read before both in terms of style and of topic.

Before one will reach the end of the story - which for reasons I will explain later was not as impressive as the rest of the novel - there is the chiselled wording which impresses. It seems like every detail of the story is well pondered and described in a thoughtful way. Reading the book is a pleasure for the sake of the reading. Thus, it took me a long time to finish it as I felt like sipping every sentence and paragraph and page.

Then, there is the subject itself. 

´How would you feel if the person you thought you loved was someone totally different?´ Maggie Krause, in the middle of a love encounter with her girlfriend, Lucia, on her way to an orgasm, is announced that her mother died in a car accident. But as she will mention herself ´(...) dead isn´t about the person who´s dead; it´s about the people who are still alive´. In the next days, Maggie took upon herself the duty of distributing letters written by her mother to be delivered when she would die to various men that she had relationships with, while being married with her father, Peter. ´(...) all this time she thought her parents marriage was so perfect, that she could never do what they did, have what they have´. From a letter to another, she is about to discover a completely different Iris. Not only her mother was married before but she was involved in years-long relationships with a very different lot of men. Some will share their common story, in one case she will read the letter herself as the recipient died. Faced with her own coming out and her tensed relationship with her mother, Maggie is transformed through the step-by-step revelations. 

The family mystery is revealed in the end during a discussion with her father, Peter and is the least surprising part of the book. The end lacks any tension and it is also predictable at a certain extent but it does not diminish the love story which overcome the small details of the encounters and illicit affairs. 

All the characters do have a very deep profile and are at a big extent relatable. All My Mother´s Lovers includes a rare encounter between strong built characters and an interesting story line. Personally, I was more entinced by the mid-development of the narrative but for a debut novel, the book is really impressive and can´t wait to read more by Ilana Masad. 

Rating: 4.5 stars