Library Loot ~ July 24-30

Mother, Daughter, Me ~ by Katie Hafner, 2013, memoir (California)

This memoir is an exploration of the year Katie Hafner and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions.   Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter.  Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways.  Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines:  memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country,  and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery.  Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay.  Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many.

Only one book this week. No, the cover isn't torn and badly taped back together — that's the way it's designed.  I imagine it's to indicate the "torn" relationships being patched back together, but I still don't like it.  I've never liked things made to appear old or broken or "fixed" like this.  I hope designers will get over it someday soon.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.