[.ca] Mere (ISBN 0006485235)

Amazon.ca:
Mere is one of those books that seem to be doomed by their own novelty. The idea of a novel about a mother-daughter relationship, loosely based on the myth of Demeter and Persephone and written by a mother-daughter team, already feels cute enough; when that team is made up of novelist and Brick editor Linda Spalding and her daughter, poet Esta Spalding, the weight of the premise is almost too much to bear. Superficially, Mere feels much like Linda Spalding's earlier novels, Daughters of Captain Cook and The Paper Wife, both of which concern women who, by and large, live without men. In this case, the isolated protagonist is Faye Holmes, a fugitive who lives on her boat, the Persephone, aimlessly wandering the Great Lakes with her daughter Mere and her adopted son Mark. Faye is a former political activist, wanted for her role in a disastrous bombing at an antiwar protest in '60s Chicago. Mere's father, Merrill, managed to escape justice and now lives in Toronto, making a tidy living as a breeder of exotic birds. When Mere writes to her father, bringing him out of hiding, Faye's precarious shipboard existence is thrown into danger. There is an interesting story here, but (aside from the intervals set in Toronto) it proceeds without a strong sense of place. The isolation, poverty, and beauty of Mere's shipboard childhood are not recounted--readers are asked to take its details as givens. Mere has many strengths, but ultimately it feels rushed. Esta Spalding's poetry is far superior to this novel, and readers who are drawn to Mere because of her would be better off rereading Anchoress or Lost August. --Jack Illingworth

Full of insights about human relationships~:
The story was told as a modern-day style of the Demeter and Persephone myth. The mother and daughter team of Linda and Esta Spalding, together creates a tale both mythic and contemporary; It is hard to succeed in narrating both themes so powerfully. Mere is an uncomprehending and uncivilized child seeking for independence from parental protection, while showing her desperate for her father, and living as complicated as the political plot of its time. From this book, I have earned an understanding of the political views of that time and also the culture of the 60s with the free sex and tremendous use of drugs, most of all, the desperate bid for peace. The mother and daughter relationship has created issues that I think, will be carry on from generations to generations without any changes; teenagers are always be desperate for independence while the mother was being protective and never consider the child is mature enough.