Product Description

Persephone revisited: a unique mother-and-daughter story written by amother-and-daughterliterary team

Mere’s young life is confined to the wind and water, the boat that shelives on docking only long enough to stop at the grocery store orvisit the library, but never long enough to take out any books. Thatwould mean having a library card, and a library card would meanrevealing your name on a government form.

Mere, her mother, Faye, and Mark, the mysterious teenage runawaywho shares their boat, seem destined to sail around the Great Lakesforever, navigating the Persephone through the deep waters, stoppingin Toronto twice a year to pick up envelopes of cash left with thedockmaster. Faye is a fugitive, still pursued for her part in the violentone-year anniversary events marking Chicago’s 1968 “Days ofRage”—a seminal student protest against the Vietnam war. NowMerril, Mere’s father, has suddenly appeared on the boat after manyyears. The authorities are looking for him and Faye is his ticket tofreedom. But, in a desperate bid for her own adolescent freedom,Mere makes a choice that will change everything.

Mere is a wonderfully electric novel about the inexorable bondbetween mothers and daughters, written by two of Canada’s mosttalented writers—themselves mother and daughter. Rich in itsallegorical and sociological strands, it reaches into the Greek myth ofPersephone; it explores a woman’s primeval need to protect herchild; and it lays bare the explosive events of a touchstone period inour history. A novel of choices and consequences, betrayal andatonement, Mere builds lyrically to a shattering climax, an endingthat haunts long after the last page is turned.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1702340 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-12
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.ca
Mere is one of those books that seem to be doomed by their own novelty. The idea of a novel about a mother-daughter relationship, loosely based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone and written by a mother-daughter team, already feels cute enough; when that team is made up of novelist and Brick editor Linda Spalding and her daughter, poet Esta Spalding, the weight of the premise is almost too much to bear.

Superficially, Mere feels much like Linda Spalding's earlier novels, Daughters of Captain Cook and The Paper Wife, both of which concern women who, by and large, live without men. In this case, the isolated protagonist is Faye Holmes, a fugitive who lives on her boat, the Persephone, aimlessly wandering the Great Lakes with her daughter Mere and her adopted son Mark. Faye is a former political activist, wanted for her role in a disastrous bombing at an antiwar protest in '60s Chicago. Mere's father, Merrill, managed to escape justice and now lives in Toronto, making a tidy living as a breeder of exotic birds. When Mere writes to her father, bringing him out of hiding, Faye's precarious shipboard existence is thrown into danger.

There is an interesting story here, but (aside from the intervals set in Toronto) it proceeds without a strong sense of place. The isolation, poverty, and beauty of Mere's shipboard childhood are not recounted--readers are asked to take its details as givens. Mere has many strengths, but ultimately it feels rushed. Esta Spalding's poetry is far superior to this novel, and readers who are drawn to Mere because of her would be better off rereading Anchoress or Lost August. --Jack Illingworth

About the Author
Linda Spalding is the author of the bestselling The Follow. She is editor of Brick magazine and lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Ondaatje.