Mother and Child

“Rochelle Ratner’s Mother and Child is a novel that takes no prisoners. It examines the dark underside of American childhood, past and present. Ratner takes us into an intimate arena of love and anger where domestic battles are never lost or won but merely repeated from one generation to the next. Hard-edged and realistic, poetic and surreal, Ratner’s prose offers the reader complexity, beauty, and sharp-edged truths.” —Mary Mackey, author of The Notorious Mrs. Winton.

"With an honesty unadorned as her prose, in a novel as much love affair with New York City, Rochelle Ratner explores how our past continually suffuses our present, making us who we are despite ourselves, how a woman named Ellyn finds herself forced to come to terms with her own skewed childhood and her own desire for an independent existence. A crisp, sharp, provocative pleasure." —Lance Olsen, Girl Imagined by Chance and Nietzsche's Kisses