What is Rae Meadows reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Rae Meadows, author of Mothers and Daughters.

Her entry begins:

I went to a reading the other night at the Loft Literary Center here in Minneapolis, featuring the AWP Award Series winners for 2009: Kevin Fenton (Merit Badges) and Christine Sneed who won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for her collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry. I’m not a very good listener at readings, my mind often drifting, but I was utterly taken with the story Christine read. So I’m reading her book. In the story “12 + 12” a woman is having an affair with her father’s friend whose own daughter was recently killed in a car accident. The tone of the narrator is quirkily upbeat, despite the deeply sad terrain, which somehow manages to make the story all the more poignant. These are richly rewarding stories, and I marvel at Christine’s mastery of the story form.

We moved to Minneapolis from Madison last fall, and all our books are still in boxes in the basement. My husband pulled out a box the other day and in it found...[read on]

Among the early praise for Mothers and Daughters:

“Rae Meadows has written a richly textured novel of three generations of mothers and daughters who by finding each other, find themselves. In these beautifully interwoven stories of birth and death, love and loss, Violet, Iris, and Samantha explore the genetic threads that connect each to the others. Mothers and Daughters is a powerful novel of women’s secrets and strength.”
—Sandra Dallas, New York Times best-selling author of Prayers for Sale and Whiter Than Snow

“A little girl boards New York’s orphan train at the turn of the 20th century and shapes generations to follow in this satisfying portrait of the many faces of motherhood.”
—Kirkus

“A perfect book-club pick…What mothers leave daughters is loud and proud in this book… It will prime conversations about your own choices, which may change your whole sense of self, or at least make you feel not so alone.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A book you’ll want to sit and read straight through… It will have you considering your own choices and those of your mother: What has she chosen not to tell you? What happened before you? What do you want to know?”
—Bookpage

Read an excerpt from Mothers and Daughters, and learn more about the book and author at Rae Meadows's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mothers and Daughters.

Writers Read: Rae Meadows.

--Marshal Zeringue