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Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.
Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating the story of a 5th-century-BC mother-daughter pair whose sense of female loyalty to each other and connection to the divine feminine guides Ava in her exploration of the eternal stages of womanhood. Reaching across time and deep into the female psyche, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 7, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593820476
- File size: 337485 KB
- Duration: 11:43:05
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 18, 2024
An art history professor gets initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries in Landau’s uneven tale of Greek antiquity and modern-day female rage (following Those Who Are Saved). At 45, Ava Zaretsky is drowning in household chores and has too little time for the book she’s writing about a woman’s life in 415 BCE Athens. Kasper, her film producer husband, is in Bulgaria filming an action movie, and Ava visits him in Sofia for the summer with their two young children. There, Ava reconnects with Lydia Nikitas, her former mentor at Columbia University. Decades ago, Professor Nikitas destroyed Ava’s chance to join Yale’s art history graduate program after she chose to write her thesis on a different topic from the one Nikitas advised. Their bond is shaky, to say the least, but Ava confides nonetheless in Nikitas about her struggles, and Nikitas invites her to join a ritual for worshipping Demeter and Persephone in Greece. Landau lays bare the challenges facing a working mother, but the novel’s climax, which is teased in a prologue where a group of angry blood-spattered women form a circle around a man and pelt him with stones, isn’t quite coherent. Novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have tackled similar material to greater effect. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. -
December 6, 2024
Landau's (Those Who Are Saved) new novel is a fiercely feminist story about female rage and the challenges of balancing motherhood with career while not losing oneself along the way. This story intertwines the lives and struggles of two mothers living in the modern-day United States and ancient Greece. In the present, the story follows art history professor Ava Zaretsky, whose research has taken a backseat while she practically solo-parents her children in order to support her husband's career. Her husband's new film shoot is set to take place over the summer in Bulgaria, and Ava accompanies him. In Bulgaria, Ava serendipitously bumps into one of her college mentors and is inspired to join a group of women who reenact Greco-Roman women's initiation rites. This ties seamlessly into the secondary storyline, set in 411 BCE, in which Greek mythology comes to life through a mother-daughter pair whose loyalty and love for each other is tested. Wonderfully narrated by Cassandra Campbell and Jennifer Pickens, who bring to the women's stories great empathy and compassion. VERDICT One to recommend to fans of literary fiction and feminist stories about the mental exhaustion of motherhood.--Shannon O'Connor
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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