Six contemporary novels that center caretaking through crisis

Sarah Bruni is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis and the MA in Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She has taught English and writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and she has volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is also the author of the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.

Bruni's new novel is Mass Mothering.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six contemporary novels that "explore the psychological toll of caretaking, the challenge of parenting through personal and political awakening, or the legacy of mutual aid within community." One title on the list:

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

The primary narrator of Lost Children Archive is a mother and a collector of soundscapes, embarking on a road trip with her husband and two children, from New York City to Arizona. It soon emerges that the family is on the brink of crisis, as it’s unclear whether her husband will return with the family once they reach their destination. Their children, a ten-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, also narrate, navigating their shifting network of family relationships, while also tracking the simultaneous voyages of unaccompanied children seeking political asylum in the US. When the mother-narrator’s children go missing and cross paths with the lost children, their narrative cohabitation unearths questions around what it means to mother in the same world that children are forced to flee violence alone. In prose that renders the inner architecture of kids’ minds at work, the novel is as much a meditation on childhood as it is on caretaking, collection, and the politics of bearing witness.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue