Mothers and daughters are the heart of Shout Her Lovely Name, a richly detailed and sensitively written story collection by Natalie Serber. Featuring in the majority of the stories are Ruby and Nora, an independent-minded young single mother and her increasingly rebellious daughter living in 1970s California. Serber charts the complex terrain of their unconventional lives and the fraught tug-of-war of love and hate that lies at the core their relationship.
Living on a teacher's salary, Ruby and Nora are always a hair away from making ends meet. Ruby is beautiful, always dating but never settling down; her most serious long-term relationship is with a married man. She struggles with alcoholism, to the point where she is forced to check in to rehab. As a teacher, however, she offers wisdom and strength to the girls in her class, encouraging them to embrace the feminism that is appearing on the horizon. Meanwhile, the plainer, less forceful Nora's challenge is to emerge from Ruby's shadow, and discover what her own desires truly are.
Perhaps the most compelling of the stories is "Shout Her Lovely Name," in which a family is torn apart by the daughter's anorexia. As the daughter's disease intensifies, so does her verbal abuse of her mother. Alienated from her daughter and from her husband, who blames her for the disaster, the mother faces the ultimate challenge of her life: loving her daughter in spite of everything, and keeping her alive.
Shout Her Lovely Name is a strong and elegant debut that explores in depth the great complexities of motherhood. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post