Traveling with Pomegranates

June 22, 2009
In a probing literary collaboration that moves from Greece to their home in Charleston, S.C., novelist Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees
) and her daughter, Taylor, explore and record the changing stages of a woman's life. At 50, Kidd, a wife and mother who had found fulfillment as a writer in recent years, was approaching menopause and anxious about tapping the “green fuse,” or regenerative energy, for the next step in her life. Traveling to Greece with her daughter, Taylor, 22, when the latter graduated from college in 1998, Kidd recognized that her daughter, who had just received a stinging rejection from a graduate school, was also undergoing another kind of wrenching transformation—from child to adult faced with decisions about what to do with her own life. In passages narrated in turn by Kidd and Taylor, the two create a gently affectionate filial dance around the other, in the manner of the fertility myth of Persephone and her mother, Demeter. In travels through Greece, Turkey and later France, Kidd and Taylor found strength and inspiration on their respective journeys in the lives of Athena, the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, but mostly through a new understanding and appreciation of each other. Although the “maiden-mother-crone” symbolism grows repetitive and forced, their's is a moving journey.

June 15, 2009
The New Age odyssey of bestselling author Kidd (The Mermaid Chair, 2005, etc.) and her daughter Ann.

In alternating chapters, the mother-daughter team recounts their different but parallel journeys of self-discovery. Mom found guidance in the regenerative myths of Demeter, Persephone and the Virgin Mary, while Ann, feeling confused and rudderless in her early 20s, wondered whether the power of Athena could help her unearth life's purpose. Sue, who grew up in upstate South Carolina and worked as a nurse during her early adult life, eventually found her writer's voice and moved with her husband to Charleston. Ann attended Columbia College (in South Carolina) and resolved to study Greek history after an inspiring group trip to Greece in the late'90s, but she was rejected from her ideal graduate program. During a subsequent trip to Greece to commemorate Sue's 50th birthday and Ann's college graduation, Ann felt depressed about her future just as Sue was hoping to find spiritual clues to the next phase of her life. Most of the book is devoted to their first trip to Greece in 1998, narrated first by Sue, then Ann, from Athens to Eleusis (the sanctuary of Demeter) to Ephesus, Turkey, where"Mary's House" is located. Both mother and daughter continually sound the themes of autonomy and self-realization. Yet while Sue hit on her life's mission to write a novel—which became the mega-selling The Secret Life of Bees (2002)—Ann returned home, got married and had a baby. Although she did find courage to apprentice as a writer, the letdown is palpable.

A touching rapprochement between mother and daughter, but much of the writing is murky and both narratives sound curiously alike—won't deter the many fans of Mom, however.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2009
Best-selling author Kidd travels in 1998 throughout Greece and France with twentysomething daughter Ann to (re)define their life changes as Kidd contemplates middle age and her daughter approaches marriage. They take turns sharing their thoughts directly with the reader as Kidd contemplates the loss of a daughter now grown and a stranger, and Ann fears losing herself in her upcoming marriage. While Kidd wonders, Is there an odyssey the female soul longs to make at the approach of fifty? Ann is confused and filled with pain; she has lost a cohesive vision of herself. Using the Greek myth of the mother-daughter bond between Demeter and Persephone as the underlying foundation, the two women, in emotional crises as ones life waxes and the others wanes, seek to reforge their once close connection. Their spiritual pilgrimage includes a visit to the 900-year-old Black Virgin of Rocamadour, one of the European Black Madonnas. A return trip in 2000 finds both women changed, and a 2008 afterword rounds out this stunning account of inner journeys, separate and intertwined.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)