It’s 1975 in small-town Iowa when Mama dies in an apparent suicide. But Mama doesn’t go away. She returns frequently to give her teenage daughter, Alice Martin, advice.
Mama gives advice on how to put on makeup. She talks to her daughter about dating. She’s back from the “other world” to make small talk. A reader may be able to suspend disbelief long enough to accept Mama is back. But it is almost impossible to accept that Mama wouldn’t have something a little more serious to discuss with her daughter.
Leslie Pietrzyk’s “A Year and a Day” (Morrow, 368 pages, $23.95) describes how a daughter copes during the first year after her mother’s death.
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The book is by turns charming in its description of small-town life, then maddening as it becomes increasingly obvious that Mama is not really returning to help her daughter. Mama’s advice is aimed directly at us, the readers. She appears in these pages as an overly obvious device to keep the reader turning pages as we futilely wait for Mama to have an honest heart-to-heart with her very confused child.
In the year since Mama’s car was hit by a train, young Alice learns much about how people in this seemingly innocent Iowa town are actually a bundle of secret yearnings and deeds. She learns as well about her mother’s secrets, not just from a few of Mama’s vague clues, but also from friends and from Aunt Aggy, who lives with Alice and her brother, Will.
Any sweetness that Pietrzyk establishes with gentle scenes is offset by the reader’s frustration that a mother would perform this miracle of returning from the dead without really having anything of substance to pass on.
Which also describes this book.