Beautiful. Moving. Intimate. These are the adjectives I clutch at to describe Queenless, but none of them adequately describe the experience of reading it. July's book subscription selection: Queenless by Mira Marcinow, translated from Polish by Maggie Zebracka.
Written in short, exquisite fragments, this is a book that I devoured greedily. Rich with imagery, the writing was incredibly satisfying but I always wanted more. Sparsely packed pages sometimes contain only a single sentence, a form that encourages a swift turning of the pages, a single-sitting read.
What’s it actually about? Loss. Family. The push-pull of a mother-daughter relationship. We quickly become acquainted with the details of the narrator’s mother. Her habits, her cooking, her sense of style, the make-up she uses, her opinions, her force. The details and specifics that make a life.
'Queenless’ is the word for a honey bee colony without a queen. This is the story of a daughter navigating the world after her mother. And it’s a beautiful and brilliant read.
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