Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
Centered by radiant parent-child relationships, Sarah Yahm’s exquisite novel Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is about chronic illness and defiant love.
Louise and Leon meet at a friend’s Shabbat dinner. She’s just fled sitting shiva for her mother; he’s a therapist in training who has more in common with Louise than they know at first. After a sultry night gives way to cold words in the morning, Leon learns to navigate the barbs that conceal Louise’s pain and to see her ferocity as beauty. Their daughter, Lydia, arrives soon after, followed by a move to the country.
Escaping the city doesn’t mean escaping the troubles of their pasts, though. Before long, Louise starts showing signs of the disease that killed her mother. Not wanting Lydia to watch her suffer, she calculates her choices:
x=Good Parenting
y=Unforeseen Future Traumas
z=Lydia’s Health and Well-Being
x-y=z
When she feels the time is right, she flees, leaving heartbreak, and her troubled genes, in her wake.
An extraordinary novel about the inescapability of family patterns—some of which can be reversed, but all of which leave indelible marks—the story holds Louise and Leon’s love for their daughter, and her love for them, at its incandescent center. Lydia’s parents make sure her life is awash with evidence of their devotion to her, still feeling the lack of that parental warmth in their own lives. They cradle her through sexual abuse and her childhood feelings of not belonging; their methods include magic and magical thinking. Even in her mother’s absence, Lydia feels her glow; it carries her through a funeral in Israel, her own diagnosis, and another reversal of established paths.
Devastating and unforgettable, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is a celebration of unabashed family love.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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