MAY 2023 - AudioFile
Mary Otis's debut novel examines a complicated, evolving mother-daughter relationship. Lisa Flanagan delivers an expressive narration without relying on character voices to bring the story to life. She employs pacing, emotion, and a precise tempo as she portrays Viva and her unconventional, unstable mother, Charlotte, who rely on the kindness of others for meals and housing throughout Viva's nomadic childhood. Flanagan expresses Viva's yearning for stability as her view of her mother's life shifts and changes. At that point, Viva begins to distance herself from Charlotte and works to avoid her mother's self-destructive choices. We hear regret, hurt, isolation, and yearning as Charlotte struggles to maintain their relationship. Otis's Author's Note shares truths that add to this story's realism. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
02/13/2023
Otis chronicles a mother’s and daughter’s pursuits of elusive love in her perceptive debut novel (after the collection Yes, Yes, Cherries). In a Cape Cod trailer park in 1979, single mother Charlotte uses her sex appeal and strong personality to keep herself and her 11-year-old daughter, Viva, afloat. Too often, however, Charlotte’s alcoholism results in the two having to pick up stakes, keeping them on the move from generous relatives to besotted boyfriends throughout Viva’s youth. At a free day camp, Viva discovers a love of dance, which Charlotte helps nurture. It’s a bittersweet development, as Charlotte, a onetime aspiring artist, is reminded of her squandered potential (“What kind of mother envied her own daughter’s joy?”). As an adult 15 years later, Viva must contend with her own fractured dreams—and with the fear of turning into the worst version of her mother. Otis captures the colorful chaos of Viva’s early years, acknowledging the damage but also the moments of joy. In lyrical language that expresses both Viva’s and Charlotte’s perspectives, Otis portrays a mother and daughter caught in a tense pas de deux, perpetually pushing one another away before returning to each other. This author continues to impress. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Selected by Publisher’s Marketplace as a Buzz Book for Spring/Summer 2023
“In lyrical language that expresses both Viva’s and Charlotte’s perspectives, Otis portrays a mother and daughter caught in a tense pas de deux, perpetually pushing one another away before returning to each other. This author continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly
“Otis’s debut novel explores the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships with depth, humor, and sensitivity...A moving and relatable story; literary fiction fans will be pleased.” —Library Journal
“A new spin on the theme of entwined mothers and daughters…(Otis) steers ably away from cliché in what could easily have been a conventionally tense relationship between mother and daughter, documenting the ways in which both are distorted by the “umbilical cord” that stretches between them for decades but allowing them to be individuals with their own quirks and longings as well.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Mary Otis delivers a psychologically acute vision of a mother and daughter and their haunting waltz in which allegiance, dreams of escape, the desire for dignity and the urge for self-destruction play their part in a dance that spreads over three decades. A powerful debut.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and The Revolution of Marina M.
“A profound, propulsive exploration of what it means to be a mother, a daughter, an artist, and an addict. A transfixing, singular evocation of the precarious, terrifying predicament that constitutes being a woman alone in the world. BURST made me think deeply about my own choices and compulsions and changed, forever, the way I see myself and the world.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age
“Mary Otis is so gifted at giving us two full and complicated women in this captivating novel, allowing each her brokenness and her dignity. Plus, the gorgeous writing about dance! I was making a list in my head of readers I want to give it to." —Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Butterfly Lampshade
“When it comes to stories of mothers and daughters, Mary Otis's Burst is up there with Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here and Elizabeth Strout's Amy & Isabelle. Otis writes with complexity and heart. We are all richer and wiser after reading her work.” —Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar and We Are Each Other’s Harvest
“Beautifully written, propulsive, and utterly transcendent, this is a mother-daughter story for the ages.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest and The Lager Queen of Minnesota
“Burst is a wallop of a novel—it is about risk and pleasure, the way a body or mind can feel like a boundless possibility and a small prison, the way a mother and daughter set loose in the world can make everything shine, even if the shiny things also have teeth.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and Awayland
“The mysterious bond that occurs between troubled mothers and their daughters has been written about endlessly, but almost never with such perfectly-modulated electricity, such humor and deep wisdom, such enveloping–but utterly unsentimental–tenderness. Burst is a taut, economical novel that nonetheless contains multitudes. Its interrogations of what we owe ourselves and one another, how we love our parents and struggle to escape their shadows, and how we reconcile our dreams with our disappointments, is wonderful indeed.” —Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car and American Dream Machine
"Mary Otis writes about the ineffable—the high of being a dancer, the terrible closeness of mothers and daughters—with clarity, soul, and grace. BURST is a radiant first novel, its characters impossible to forget in their individual vividness and their complicated love for one another." —Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Likes and Madeline is Sleeping
"I knew from the first few lines that I was in with this book for the duration. Well-observed and propulsive, Mary Otis makes the reader acutely aware of consequences—both short and long term—and plays them out masterfully.” —Keith Mosman, Powell’s Books
"An arresting debut novel...with writing as deft as a choreographed dance." —The San Francisco Bay Times
Kirkus Reviews
2023-01-25
A new spin on the theme of entwined mothers and daughters.
Debut novelist Otis follows the unstable Charlotte and her driven daughter, Viva, an aspiring dancer, from an eventful stint on Cape Cod in 1979 when Viva is 11 through the next couple of decades, with flashbacks to Charlotte's fraught encounters with the man who will become, though he doesn't know it, Viva's father. Charlotte and Viva are, like many a fictional mother-daughter pair, “a society of two.” After the summer in Cape Cod, they move to California, where they stay with Charlotte's sister. Charlotte picks up a series of odd jobs, and Viva attends a performing arts high school and then college before moving to New York to start a career. When an accident brings that career to a halt, Viva returns to California and starts falling into the same self-destructive patterns that have stymied her mother even as her mother begins to experience ever more serious symptoms of mental and physical illness. While Viva is more sympathetic as a girl and a teenager than as an alcoholic 20-something with bad taste in men and no idea what to do with her life, and the subplot involving her father seems tacked on, Otis pays rapt attention not just to the two complicated women, but to the other characters with whom they interact, from the hippie couple with whom Charlotte shares a mutual dislike at their campground on Cape Cod to the longtime frenemy with whom Viva competes and the mean-spirited high school students she teaches in California. She steers ably away from cliché in what could easily have been a conventionally tense relationship between mother and daughter, documenting the ways in which both are distorted by the “umbilical cord” that stretches between them for decades but allowing them to be individuals with their own quirks and longings as well.
A mostly satisfying variation on a familiar motif.
