Mojo Mom Podcast: Lady of the Snakes author Rachel Pastan

I fell in love with Rachel Pastan's novel Lady of the Snakes, so I invited her on this week's Mojo Mom Podcast. Both podcast segments this week feature literary discussions for busy Moms. You can learn more about Rachel's work and find a Lady of the Snakes readers' guide at RachelPastan.com

To my delight, Rachel also shared a list of recommended books she created just for our Mojo Mom audience:

First, here are some of my favorite novels about the experience of living with
small children:

The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk. This is a smart, wonderfully written ensemble
piece about very different characters with various children in their lives, and how their lives are affected by that.

The Book Borrower by Alice Mattison. This book captures my experience as the
mother of an infant better than any I’ve read. The tenderness and the
ambivalence. It’s also a wonderful novel about friendship between women, and
it has a great historical element. This is the only novel I know in which a female protagonist is referred to by her last name.

The Brambles by Eliza Minot. The mother in this book is less ambivalent than
the ones in mine or Mattison’s. The texture of suburban life with children is gorgeously rendered.

Other books:

Possession by A.S. Byatt. The ultimate literary mystery story, and a fabulous Romance. Unputdownable.

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West. A British novel from the thirties that no one reads anymore and which deserves renewed attention. It’s about two musical twins growing up in an impoverished family in which their untalented older sister gets all the attention. It’s funny, charming, sometimes eerie,
and always compelling.

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Rachel

"Lady of the Snakes" charmed my mind and heart

There's no school today and I had just enough time to steal away to write a new book review:

Usually I tear into a book but this time I felt like Rachel Pastan's new novel Lady of the Snakes devoured me and left me an extremely satisfied reader. As a motherhood writer myself, I've read hundreds of books about the tradeoffs between work and family that all mothers have to face. Since reading is part of my work, at this point in my life I am generally burned out about reading about motherhood, and have little patience for either dense literary fiction or fluffy "chick lit."

Against that background, Lady of the Snakes was a wonderful treat. Incredibly honest about the everyday realities of a young academic juggling work and family, yet engrossing on the level of big questions; compulsively readable and convincingly literary at the same time. Rachel Pastan creates believable voices for both her modern heroine, Professor Jane Levitsky, and Jane's research subject, Russian countess Maria Karkova. (Quite an accomplishment given that Pastan had to create the excerpts of Karkova's journals and letters as well as the fictional 19th-century literary masterpieces of her husband Grigory Karkov.)

The academic mystery/counterplot about Karkov and Karkova is involving even if you have no background in Russian literature. The relationships between Karkov and Karkova, Jane and Maria, Jane and her husband Billy, and Jane and her academic rivals avoid easy categorization, mirroring the complicated textures and ambivalence of real life. I was touched by Jane's honesty about the tug she felt toward her work even as she cared deeply for her young daughter.

Lady of the Snakes would make an ideal book club selection. If you enjoyed Allegra Goodman's Intuition or A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance I highly recommend Lady of the Snakes.