Someone Not Really Her Mother

A Novel

by Harriet Scott Chessman
Myra Platt

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As Hannah Pearl's memories of her 1940 escape to England from war-torn France come to the foreground of her consciousness, her memory of her more recent American life, including her relationships with her daughter and granddaughters, is almost erased. Her daughter, Miranda, attempts to bring her mother into the present and the daily activities of family life, yet finds herself instead pulled into Hannah's unresolved past. Miranda's daughters confront the shadows of history in their own ways. Fiona, content with her life as a new mother, tries to ignore the ghostly presence of Hannah's family who perished in the war, while Ida clings to Hannah's revelations as if they form a lifeline. Facing the mystery of Hannah's unspoken memories, each woman must ask how well anyone can know the inner life of another person.

Creators
- Harriet Scott Chessman
  
  Author
- Myra Platt
  
  Narrator
Publisher

Blackstone Publishing

Edition: Unabridged
Release date

March 1, 2006
Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
  - ISBN: 9780792741237
  - File size: 133860 KB
  - Duration: 04:38:52
Languages
- English
Reviews
- AudioFile Magazine
  
  Hannah Pearl lost her entire family in the Holocaust, escaped from France to England, married an RAF pilot, also killed in the war, and came to Connecticut to raise Miranda, their only daughter. Now in her 80s, with Alzheimer's advancing, the past, so long hidden from her family and herself, spills like vintage wine into her memories. By skillfully modulating her tone, Myra Platt frames Hannah's confused interior monologue within the world of her bewildered family. As they struggle to understand what is happening to their grandmother, she drifts deeper. Platt's gift for the perfect accent bridges Hannah's passage from the banal external world of Con-necticut--filled with nurses, drug store clerks, and granddaughters--to the rich but painful interior world of her French past and English husband. P.E.F. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
- Publisher's Weekly
  
  June 28, 2004
  "How long can a war last?" This question—metaphorical, physical and above all, emotional—sits at the heart of this brief novel by Chessman (Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
  ; Ohio Angels
  ), centered around Hannah Pearl, a French-born World War II survivor now residing in a Connecticut nursing home, where she is increasingly prey to memory loss. The author uses Hannah's condition as the starting place for a series of finely crafted meditations that blur the lines between past and present, English and French. This technique allows for many melancholy confusions. Hannah's ongoing encounters with unrecognizable yet familiar family members convey a quiet, heartbreaking grace as they digress into memories of loss undiscussed for years: Hannah's departure from France as a teenager in the 1930s, the loss of her family in the Holocaust, her marriage to an Englishman, his death in the war. Hannah's daughter, a museum curator, and her granddaughters, a young mother and a college student, write and visit, but cannot penetrate the fog in which Hannah is lost. Chessman creates a lovely if precious world filled with snapshots, letters and internal dialogue, but the gradual fading away of the protagonist leaves a hole at the book's center. Agent, Amy Williams.
- Library Journal
  
  May 15, 2005
  Hannah Pearl is suffering from old age. She cannot remember people, places, or even words for things in the present, but she can recall in vivid detail the events of her life as a girl and a young woman. Hannah easily remembers when the Germans threatened to invade France and she was sent to live in England, where she fell in love with an RAF officer, lost him after it seemed all danger was past, and bore and raised his child. She remembers the voyage to America with her tiny daughter, Miranda, and her years of teaching. To Miranda, Hannah has become someone other than her mother, a confused, elderly lady whom Miranda really doesn't know. Chessman writes with understanding about the painful changes of advanced age. She evokes strong emotions, capturing the anguish and loss of those aware of the present and the confusion and disorientation of those who live in the present but exist in the past. Well read by Myra Platt, this story is exquisite and excruciating; recommended. -Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence
  Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.