cover image Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

Christine Park. Ticknor & Fields, $9.95 (298pp) ISBN 978-0-89919-900-9

This unusually well-edited anthology unites 25 stories that explore the infinite dimensions of mother-daughter relations. Park and Heaton, both British writers, juxtapose luminaries and lesser-knowns--Colette is represented as well as Jan Clausen, Alice Walker as well as Judith Chernaik--and include works from cultures less familiar than our own (among them, China, Ghana, India, 19th century Norway). What the pieces share are the willingness and courage to address darker, subterranean issues. Emily Prager's brilliant ``A Visit from the Footbinder'' measures the anguish of women who impose strictures on their daughters in the name of tradition, while Alice Munro's ``Princess Ida'' examines a girl's conflicting affection and anxiety concerning her unconventional mother. Elsewhere, mothers empathize as daughters discover for themselves the imbalance of power between men and women, a theme handled with particular wit and imagination in Jane Gardam's ``The Pangs of Love,'' an addendum to Hans Christian Andersen's tale about a mermaid who dies for love of a mortal. (May)