Mother Tongue
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Mother Tongue begins with a shocking discovery. In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold.
In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor. "When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own."
In four voices of those whose lives were changed forever by the abduction, the mystery of Nella's kidnapping emerges. Why was she taken? How was the secret kept for so long? What became of the family she was stolen from? Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kornblatt (The Reason for Wings) marks a 20-year comeback with a perfectly crafted novel featuring a middle-aged woman who discovers she was kidnapped as an infant. Nella Pine, a writer and teacher, tells the reader how she's learned at 45 that Ruth, the woman she thought was her mother for her whole life, stole her from a Pittsburgh hospital nursery. Ruth then fled to Australia, where she gave Nella a good life. In flashbacks, the reader sees how Nella and Ruth share a home with an affectionate, childless widow who treats the two strangers like family. After Ruth is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she writes a confession to Nella about her crime, revealing the facts about Nella's birth family. Nella finds the letter after Ruth's death and, after recovering from the shock, finally makes sense of the constant state of subterfuge that shadowed their lives in Australia. As Nella reclaims her birth name, Naomi, she reflects on her deceased husband, who was separated from his unwed birth mother as an infant by the Catholic Church, and considers how loss tied them together. Kornblatt imbues her narrator's pursuit of self-identity with carefully measured prose: "I came upon the facts of my existence as one who returns to her home in the midst of a burglary: here is the shattered glass, the rifled drawers, the thief with the booty still cradled in her guilty arms." This author's worthy return is full of grace and substance.
