Distance Between-C

The heroine of this meditative debut novel spends a long drive from Massachusetts to her home state of Pennsylvania puzzling over, and coming to terms with, her complicated relationship with her mother. The trip is occasioned by the news that Mattie Welsh's parents have been seriously injured in a car accident, and Mattie, a middle-aged mother of two, embarks on many detours that transform her perspective on how her relationship with her mother came to be ""estranged and entangled all at the same time."" Mattie first picks up a pregnant hitchhiker who goes into labor while escaping a family reunion. At the hospital, lingering until the girl's own brash and critical mother arrives, Mattie visualizes how a free-spirited youngster turns into a reluctant parent. After calling her sister from the road and learning that their mother has died, Mattie makes another detour, volunteering to chauffeur a mother and daughter to the airport to pick up a second daughter, while eagerly looking for answers to her own troubling questions in the three women's tales of resentment and rivalry. Later, in the novel's most moving and illuminating encounter, Mattie leaves a rest stop shocked to find a little girl sleeping in her back seat. The families in this book are troubled, damaged and ordinary: Mattie's mother rages, but also nurtures, while Mattie's sister, Nancy, manipulates but also supports. The power of this quiet narrative lies not in dramatic revelations, but rather in the layers of emotion and understanding gradually revealed. A keen observer of gestures and detailed interpreter of loaded silences, Osborne emulates Ann Tyler in dissecting domestic relations, creating sharply drawn, quirky yet familiar female characters struggling to learn from the contradictions of their lives. She strikes a resonant emotional chord in her honest examination of the painful injustices and thwarted expectations thriving between, and dividing, mothers and daughters. Regional author tour. (Jan.)