Honestly, "Mother Winter" by Sophia Shalmiyev is a poorly written and honestly often questionable work. Ranging from the story of her boyfriend, a man who, as a child, was molested by his father to her takes on the cases of violent rape in India and the attack on Malala, she needed a better editor. So much of this is an admittance of being rather awful and a lot of it could have been cut out. It's supposed to be her memoir, all of the random bits and bobs didn't matter or add to what was supposed to be her story.

It’s beyond me how/why anyone could think this is good writing. The prose is pretentious and impenetrable; the content is possibly the epitome of misery. Words fail to communicate the degree to which I loathed the viscous, grim sludge I managed to wade through.

I loved the cover for this book and it is what really drew me in. The story overall is good; I was very interested because of what was written about the book but to be honest, this was not really my cup of tea. It was nicely put together and the plot was there, but I felt like it could have been better written at parts. However, this was a fantastic idea and I am glad to have read it.

An engaging start to this serialization of what must have been a horrific adolescence. But the heavy pathos, the prosaic scoffing tone at...just about everything, everyone, comes off as so much pretentious angst. The "art" of the text overburdened the story of escape, renewal, redemption to the point of collapse.

I loved this. I don't have much else to say so I'm going to repeat myself. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this.

Mother Winter is award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev's autobiographical account of her challenging childhood and her need to find somewhere she belonged. The description of leaving Russia with her father to fly to the US in search of a better life reminded me very much of Maria Sharapova's memoir as the situation where her mother stayed behind in Russia with Shalmiyev having to grow up without her is identical to what happened in Sharapova's early life. I couldn't imagine growing up without a mother figure, and the authors search for a surrogate is moving, in fact, the whole book is profound and poignant.

But it isn't only autobiographical it also explores serious and timely topical issues with sincerity, and this makes it a powerful, hard-hitting read; It's a lyrical, beautiful and altogether emotive experience. There is rumination over motherhood, feminism, loss, grief, sexuality, gender politics, history, self-identity, displacement, refugees, art and culture, and that's just for starters. However, at its heart, all of this feeds into the key subject - coming-of-age in a strange country without a mother. But make no mistake this is a heartbreaking story where you feel the authors pain, rage, sadness, not least due to the abuse she suffered.

The format in which it is written is indeed unconventional; we not only have the story arc, but there are poetry and vignettes too. Some may find the way it is written disjointed but I'm a fan of unusual formats and structure, so it works well for me.

Many thanks to Simon & Schuster for an ARC.

A complicated, straining existence, and a memoire, moving, beautiful sometimes sad and "raw." In this way can be synthetized the first book by Sophia Shamliyev

Mother Winter published by Simon & Schuster a publishing house with an incredible, sofisticated touch and devotion for memoires.

This book is an intimate, intricate and naked description of Sophia's existence, in its absurdities, in its obstacles, in its victories.
It is written going deep; a writing-style dense of meanings for capturing the obscurity and mystery that sometimes life present us.

It's also an historical voyage, this one, with vivid descriptions of Soviet Russia, the country where the author was born in and knew so well before to leaving it with his dad; customs and traditions, folklore and magic.

Sophia remembers that Russians are followers of numerology, tea leaf readings, evil eye spells, sharing some of the most important superstitions. "If you forget something inside when you're already out the door you must look at yourself in the mirror upon reentry. This way you make it back home in one place."

It's not simple to growing up, to become adults: less the existence of a baby is stressed, more he/she will become an happy adult.

Sometimes life is different; it wants to add pain, asperity starting in the first phase of the existence. It's unfair, but life doesn't notice it.

Of course it happens because of various factors. In the case of Sophia, the problem was an alcholic mother.

Not everyone pick up the parents that they would want the most for growing up; the ones with which to become adults.
It's a luxury that can't be choosen because parents should be two.
In the case of Sophia, the story was more complicated.

She tells that there were people who wanted to adopt her like her granny Galina wanted to do and one day: "Instead of taking me to court....She and my dad sat on opposite sides of our living room and asked me to walk to the one I would choose to live with if I could."

I felt for her the dilaniating feeling of a kid who had to choose the best parent, the best person in grade of giving her the best education and love, tenderness, friendship, severity, serenity. It's an abnormality and it's unfair; this choice remains as you will read for all the life, lived vividly. Confusion of course, will be great in a kid, because it's a story of love. Who should a kid love more? Her granny? Her dad? Who should a kid trust more? Why excluding someone? Why a choice?

Sophia in this sense remembers a phrase by Gertrude Stein: "There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer."

But...It's a privilege, although dilaniating, to be in grade to choose where and with whom to spend the existence.

I found interesting the traditions about the dead ones, and how Russians try to re-capture the spirit of the person passed away so that he/she can continues to stay close to them.

In the Soviet Russia there wasn't Christmas but Sofia's family prepared a Christmas's Tree opening the gifts with the arrival of the New Year. Sophia remembers that her dad in the old communist country that was Russia didn't never mention her mother and God.

Babies must be loved. The arrival of Sophia hasn't been so loved.
In fact while she was pregnant, the mother of Sophia, told to the husband that she was too weak for an abortion. In the Soviet Union there weren't anesthetics and an abortion wasn't a good practice at all. Sophia writes that her dad "Reluctantly agreed to let her keep me."

Sophia's dad enjoyed to spend time with her. Sophia remembers that her father accompanied her to museums, ballets, and opera every weekend although the absence of the mother was felt tremendously by Sophia. She writes at some point that "...Every library became my foster home and every book a coded path to grappling with the absent woman who never actually raised me."

Once grown up the choice of Sophia will be the one of experiencing in first person what it means to be a mother. Sophia, who hadn't had a mother, who would have wanted so badly to be hugged by her mother for once, became a mother, hugging and loving her children.
Anais Nin returns various times in the book; at first because of her hot relationship with Henry Miller; later because she sold pornographic stories to earning some money for an abortion, deciding of not having children.
Nin is in the mind of Sophia, because she lost two babies describing in detail what happened and her sensations.

Questions regarding the future of her children are many, while, persists in the existence of Sophia this biggest hole: that mother she hasn't had.
This one will be a reason for mourning for what she hasn't had although Sophia does it with intellectual profoundity, using precious words, sofisticated phrases and lines, defining her feelings with passion.

The author describes herself as a person "Without solid plans. I live too far away. An abandoner. A coward. An infidel."

Sophia tells that common couples in general wants to see people part of the existence of the other one; places where their partner grew up. So, with her boyfriend, she went to Russia, for later cheating him and marrying the man with which she would have had two children.
The first baby was born on 12/12/12 she tells. A magical day.

Sophia adds she believes in fear and she started to drive just at 27 and thanks to her husband.

Then memories will focus on her children and a visit at a common house's friend.
Sophia talks of her children, and the other girlfriend does the same, later offering her something to eat. High cholesterol, Sophia accepts fruits; it cleans veins. Sophia writes about tooth problems while she was waiting Franny, and at some point writes: "I don't believe we belong to each other the way my father does, but I am in the business of making the same polarities of magnets touch without repelling; I'm in the real of the unbelievable."


Speaking about abuses, once Sophia has had a relationship with an abused boy. It's common that ex-children abused don't go crazy for sex.
Sophia didn't laugh when her boyfriend told her the horror. She listened, she helped him to recover and later convinced him of having some sex together. Sophia wrote: "He confessed that maybe he can't, but really really really he wants to..."

Another important thematic touched by this book is what it means to be Jewish. For some Jewish is a real sin marrying a Christian but Sophia did it and tells that baptized both her children.
Who knows, she asks to herself, if she is becoming like her mother?

Splendid I love this book because of the sincerity of the author. An author who reveals a lot; she is frank regarding her feelings, her sentiments, for her family, her country, Russia, understanding also that the phantom of her mother, that mother she hasn't never had, influenced her life. Fortunately Sophia is a mother. A wonderful one I guess, at the end in peace also with her own mother!
The end of this book will let you cry a lot.

Highly recommended.

I thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for this ebook.

By all accounts, I should have loved this book as it ticks all my boxes; I generally enjoy memoirs written by women and those that focus a mother-daughter relationship particularly, I love memoirs that are told mostly unchronologically and academically, hell, I adored the first sentences (“Russian sentences begin backwards. When I learned English well enough to love it, I realized my inner tongue was running in the wrong direction.”) but somehow this did not translate into me getting on with the book.

Sophia Shalmiyev tells of her relationship with her mother, or rather of her relationship of the hole that her mother left in her life. Drawing on literature and theory and many things in between she attempts to paint a picture of that fundamental loss in her life. Born in Soviet era Leningrad to an abusive father and alcoholic mother, Sophia struggles with the sense of loss incurred by her father kicking out her mother and then later emigrating to the US without her.

I did find her language clumsy but not in a way that improved my reading experience (which odd sentence structure sometimes can do for me as it makes me read slowly and carefully); now, I am not a native speaker so this might very well be a fault with me rather than with the book. For a book this abstract and intensely introspective, I would have liked the language to be sharper and more precise though (something that Maggie Nelson – whose work this has been compared to – does without a fail). There was also an abundance of metaphors here that did not work for me at all and usually took me out of the reading flow (for example: “The decade is a bronze disease patina – the green paste – on a doorbell that rings when you show up, and you do not show up very often.”). In the end, while I am not usually somebody who judges books on a sentence to sentence basis, I seem to have done so with this book, which lost me early with its vagueness in prose and never recaptured my interest.

Loved the idea and the story of this woman's life. I would have preferred more prose and less poetry, personally. I liked the peek into a world different than my own.

The author wrote a memoir that perfectly captured the triumphs and setbacks of her life. It was easy to empathize with the author due to the raw writing.

I'm crying uncle. I cannot do this. I read the first quarter of the book, which is wall-to-wall rage and violence, much of it sexual, and explicitly so. There's a tremendous amount of potential here, because Shalmiyev is a true word smith. But when a writer mines her pain and rage to create a narrative, there still needs to be pacing, and there still needs to be an arc. This memoir, which I picked up again at the 80% mark but still didn't finish, is dialed into the maximum-horror setting from the get go to the end--or at least, till the 85% mark, which is where I permitted myself to quit for real. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes horror is better conveyed by building up to it than by pummeling one's readers on page one and swinging unremittingly clean through. I hope it was cathartic for the writer, because I don't think it's going to make her rich. Apologies to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for taking a galley I couldn't read in its entirety, and yet I suspect I am not alone.

'Hall of Fame. Hall of Shame. That’s Motherhood…'

This is a memoir of longing and love for one’s absent mother, as if when Sophia Shalmiyev left her native Russia in the 1980’s for America a decade later, in her Azerbaijani father’s care whom she called a ‘benevolent dictator’, she too was forced to divorce her mother. “It was too risky to ask for her and be denied so I didn’t say her name much.” Yet for so long, she had ‘no body’ without her mother. Who grounds us in our bodies more? While Sophia was still in her homeland, her mother was already failing at motherhood, certainly in the Hall of Shame category more than Hall of Fame. Women are forgiven nothing, especially in the 1980’s Soviet Union she spent her childhood, where her alcoholic mother was ‘pickled in the brain’, is judged far more inferior to any man who struggles with alcoholism. Of course her father gets to keep her. A father, who tries to ‘heal’ his little girl when she comes home from boarding school on weekends, who has an inconsolable need for her absent mother, the body hungry for her loving touch and nurturing. Stuck at that school so that she’ll be safe from the threat of that very mother showing up, she deals with bullying, unkempt as she is standing out like an outcast and many ailments. Her body as undernourished as her hungry heart. Sophia ruminates over the state of motherlessness, and explores feminism through time, reminding us of how the blame always falls to the mother, even if she does everything ‘right’ by societal standards. That women, even those we admire for their boundless talent are still caving into men, letting their bodies betray their intelligence. How she was unable to fill the space her mother’s absence occupied until she herself was a mother and could give them all that love she never got to feel. Yet her mother’s blood courses through her still, that urge to flee and trickles into her own babies, just like eye-color and height.

For Shalmiyev, she chases her mother through time, a woman who may be dead, how would she even know? A mother who one time demanded to know her young daughter’s whereabouts but was denied because another man, her ex husband’s brother, decided she be ‘kept in the dark’ because she was in a bad place, wasn’t sober, judged and found wanting. Men, making decisions for women without one thought for their own wants and needs. A mother that has been smudged, remnants of her appearing only in the mirror as Sophia grows up, looking at her reflection.

“I would like to wear an equivalent of a medical alert bracelet: I lost my mother and I cannot find her- née Danilova.

This is poignant, “why can’t it be both ways? Why do mothers have to be forgotten or brave like soldiers?” Her mother is erased, for being a drunken mess, a failed mother and in that erasure a life is shaped, a motherless future for Sophia. The days in Russia are vastly different from her next life, coming of age in America where standing out and being ‘special’ is praised, not like in the Soviet Union where everyone is meant to be the same, where choices are limited. But before that, as a preteen refugee in Italy she loses so much of her innocence. Her father fails her too.

In America there is Luda, a stand-in mother of sorts, one of her father’s Ukranian girlfriend’s that comes to join them from Russia. Only 12 years older she is in between being a mother and a sister for Sophia. There is love and rivalry between them, another person who doesn’t want to hear tell of Sophia’s mother, whom in Luda’s eyes is nothing but trash, whorish. Of course as her sole female role model, she wants to be the only mother in Sophia’s heart, jealous even of the longing she feels.

Later there will be work at a peep show in her twenties, hanging out in the music and art scene in Seattle, as hostility settles over her, gifted at leaving her body when she needs to and being present when she chooses, something she mastered far sooner than anyone should. She is in danger of becoming her mother for a while, until she finds a life in New York and a career.

Jumping time lines do not always work but when they’re done intelligently it flows and isn’t a disruption. I think it’s just right here! The flashbacks in time feed into the future and situations trigger memories of the past. I like that it’s not just a sad memoir about wishing for one’s mother, that Shalmiyev confronts the world women and young girls live in. The flashbacks of her childhood in the Soviet Union are eye-opening, I find myself devouring stories about that world, so foreign to my own childhood. Against her father’s wishes she eventually goes back to Russia to find her mother.

There are tales of abuse in here, and it’s gut-wrenching not just for the act itself but for the simplicity of such a life-altering transgression. Abuses on women and children are so casual in our world, aren’t they? Sometimes when you re-evaluate the past, things that you never questioned with your child’s mind send alarm bells all throughout your adult soul. Certainly what happened to her during her short time in Italy is haunting. This was an engaging memoir. Dislocation isn’t always about the physical body, it can be the soul and in Sophia Shalmiyev’s case it’s both. Her mother is her phantom limb that causes a constant ache. How do you make peace trying to understand mother as an archetype and compare you own, so deeply flawed, a crumbling cold statue on the pedestal of your memory? How is a woman meant to define herself, carve a self out of the discarded parts of her own mother when she was off limits to her? In the end, do we ever have closure, solid answers when chasing a ghost?

Publication Date: February 12, 2019

Simon & Schuster

It's always hard to review a memoir because you are commenting on someone's life. In this case, I think there's a terrific story here but the method of telling it was not, at least for me. It's unconventional, to be sure, to write a memoir comprising fragments of poetry and vignettes. Oh and feminist figures. It can also be challenging for the reader to follow. Shalmiyev has written thoughtfully about the loss of and search for her mother, who was left behind in the USSR as she and her father emigrated to the US. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. This is worth reading if you enjoy experimental formats.

Of the three memoirs I read this month, Mother Winter was far and away the one that hit me the hardest, which may surprise you as I’ve talked before about my disinterest in ‘motherhood books’ (only as a matter of personal taste). But I suppose Mother Winter is less of a mother book than it is a daughter book, centered on the irreconcilable grief that Sophia Shalmiyev incurred by growing up motherless. This is a sharp, focused, achingly tender and highly literary memoir that reads like a constant gut-punch.

Growing up in Leningrad in the 1980s, Shalmiyev had very little contact with her alcoholic mother, who she was forced to leave behind altogether when her father decided to emigrate in 1989. Shalmiyev spends the rest of her childhood and then adolescence and then adulthood unable to contact her mother, without any means of finding out if she’s even alive or dead. Her experimental memoir (which will undoubtedly appeal to fans of Maggie Nelson) fuses her unique experience of loss with themes of exile, grief, sexuality, displacement, and feminism; she often looks to iconic feminist women as stand-in maternal figures, as she relentlessly interrogates the lacuna that comes to define her.

Shalmiyev’s prose is vivid and searing. In this passage she’s talking about a dream she has where her mother is a statue at the bottom of the sea, and the imagery and emotional honesty on display here is rather emblematic of the rest of the book:

“When you’re fished out, you will go to your proper place in a museum to be admired by me only. I will polish your bronze name plaque, and I will be writing the small paragraph, printed on heavy card stock in a tastefully solemn font, about you as a priceless relic, a found shard, degraded, a puzzling piece of history. A head lost, bust found somewhere, a battered woman with blank eyes, erected by those who had infinite worship in their hearts.”

My one criticism is the overly abrupt ending, which leaves the reader with question after unanswered question. I obviously have to ask myself if that was indeed the point, which is certainly a possibility, but this is one of those books that seems so mired in the past that there isn’t much consideration for the future, and I’m left wondering what Shalmiyev intends to do after the final pages of this book. But, perhaps she does not owe us that explanation, or perhaps we will have to wait until she writes another book. Which I certainly hope she will.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

I would not have chosen this book for myself, but was offered this book through a NetGalley email and it looked like it might be interesting. However, after reading approximately 20% of this book, I do not wish to invest any more of my valuable time reading it. The writing style is very offbeat and confusing to me. Reading this feels like work without any payoff. I am very grateful for the opportunity to read this book, but it is just not my cup of tea. I will not publish this review anywhere. Thank you again.

After her alcoholic mother lost custody of ten-year-old Sophia Shalmiyev, her father emigrated with her from Leningrad to the United States - as they left the USSR in 1989, Shalmiyev not only lost her biological mother, but her home country collapsed and vanished behind her. In her memoir, which is also the author's literary debut, we learn about Shalmiyev's childhood which was overshadowed by her mother's illness and excess as well as her father's violence, about her trip back to (now) St. Petersburg to find her lost mother as well as her journey to become a mother herself.

While the story is certainly affecting and interesting, what sets this memoir apart is the lyrical composition of the text - which is unfortunately also the source of some of its problems. But first things first: I applaud Shalmiyev for being daring and ambitious, for venturing out into poetry, art and history and for trying to find a unique und recognizable voice. I rather see someone aim for something bold and courageous and maybe not quite getting there (yet), instead of reading a text which is suffocated by conventionalism - and you certainly can't accuse this author for being overtly conventional.

The two dominant narrative strategies Shalmiyev employs are playing with poetic images and ideas - like numbers or descriptions of nature - and making connections to famous people, often women, from Sappho to Aileen Wuornos and Malala. And of course there is the underlying theme of the lost mother, which is at the center of the whole text (the book cover shows a picture of her). Especially the poetic images are sometimes overreaching and underline how hard this author is trying - again, I want my writers to work hard, but some of the numerous vignettes are just overdone and make the writing feel forced (I can't quote from the text because I have an ARC). Authors like Terese Marie Mailhot show that it is possible to write a highly poetic memoir without falling into these traps.

Still, this book is well worth reading, as it is surely fascinating to follow Shalmiyev in her lyrical adventure. I think this author has the potential to one day write a novel that will blow all of us away. Until then, you can also have a look at the pictures on her website which illustrate some scenes in "Mother Winter": https://www.sophiashalmiyev.com/about/ (scroll down!)

I found the story of the author's childhood in Russia fascinating. The author was separate from her mother she was quite young and despite a trip back to Russia in 2004, was not able to track her down. The writing is engaging, but the organization of the story is disjointed and rambling. The author throws in references at odd junctures, which is disconcerting. It's an interesting story, but the disjointed writing made it difficult to follow.

Engrossing and personal account. Very well written. character development needs work but otherwise held my attention and was a page turner. Thanks very much!