With incisive writing and a taut plot, Masad ensures that her book remains gripping and unpredictable as she throws at the reader one inconvenient truth after another. When Iris dies in a car crash, Maggie flies home to reckon with a prickly college-age brother, a deflated father nearly catatonic in his grief — with whom Iris always appeared to have a sitcomishly perfect relationship — and the task of interacting with a string of sympathetic strangers, which she finds more than a little annoying.

That last line was awful and the fact her father's asexuality and their open relationship status being kept to the end was a fucking cop-out. Flesh and blood, with richly lived experiences; not extras in the story of your life, or one-dimensional foils who materialized the day you were born. But Maggie’s relationship with Lucia is still at a tender stage; the last thing she wants is for her lover to feel intimidated by her grief. iris was one of the most interesting characters, as she just had so many layers to her and at times she felt completely unknowable, there was so much to her and she was a very complicated human being. As we go through the story, we watch Maggie evolve from an angsty somewhat immature twenty something to someone who begins to understand the complexity of relationships as she learns about her mother as a person versus her mother as a parent.But what sets *Mother's Lovers* (I love the rhyme in the title) apart is how definitively modern it is. In addition to writing fiction and nonfiction, Ilana Masad is one of the best contemporary book critics out there, and her debut novel is evidence that all that reading has done her good. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories podcast and a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also serves as the assistant nonfiction editor for Prairie Schooner .

In literature, this position seems to be portrayed as the stereotypical life of many lesbians, so Masad isn't showing anything new or unique along these lines. Instead, she hits the road to hand-deliver these mysterious letters and learn more about her mother in the process. Overwhelmed by her grief and frustrated with her family, Maggie decides to escape the shiva and hand-deliver her mother's letters. Yet Masad is deft and incisive about the sometimes-fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships, around which loaded subtext can seem to twist and twine like Christmas lights.

As Maggie wrestles with her grief, she also struggles with anger toward her mother’s “discomfort” with her being gay and the unresolved complexity that discomfort yields. When Maggie's mother Iris dies in a car accident, she leaves a small pile of letters addressed to men Maggie has never heard of. Death steals from us the chances we think we have, the conversations and confrontations we postpone for a more opportune time. One of strongest and most enjoyable aspects for me was recollecting moments when I first stepped into a situation where I owned it, made the decisions, drove it forward. Please don't misunderstand this as me not liking the book, but I hope provide insight into why I rated this down a little.