Blue Hour by Sarah Schmidt

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

💓💓💓💓💓

How spectacular this novel by Sarah Schmidt is! Trying to write a review for a book that I still carry along with me in my bag three days after finishing it is difficult. I keep rereading passages and rediscovering new ones.  I don't want to reveal too much away and ruin it for you. And yet, there are so many things to write about it.  I never cry when I read a story, no matter how sad. But this story? I felt I was as raw as one of the main characters, Eleanore. The story is deeply affecting and confronting and it contains scenes of violence that will shock you. It moves back and forth between the stories of Kitty and her daughter Eleanor at different stages of their lives with "Motherhood" as the central theme, its toxicity, and the damage it causes as it seeps through generations. War is the backdrop to this brutal, honest, and incisive account of grief, trauma, and discontent. It is a memorable, harrowing, gut-wrenching piece of writing and it will challenge all of us, mothers, one way or another.

 Schmidt admitted in an interview that a lot of her own experiences were used to create characters and to develop the relationships between them. Yet, she thinks of her novel more as a love letter to her daughter and I agree with that part too. You finish the book and you leave with something. It is impossible not to carry some of it with you afterward. “Weeks went by. I thought there was something broken inside me. Then one day a crow flew above her and she had a big smile on her face. I felt like I’d lifted up outside of my body and I could see the world for what it really was: human and nature and love and all of those big things. {…} I thought, that’s what love is. I realized there was nothing wrong with me. I think I was falling in love with my daughter at that moment.”

Maybe it is because a lot of what she says resonates with my own story, my mother-daughter relationship, something very toxic and damaging I am making sure I do not pass on to my children (especially my daughters) on a daily basis. I’ll leave you with this last quote: "The years of parenting are dangerous, make you believe that you deserve the entirety of your child because they wouldn't exist without you. But Elenerr knows the real danger: the inability to register that the new version of yourself can't exist without them".” This helps me a little bit to shape a different lens on the complex trauma of someone feeling parental love is conditional.

I gave it a 5 stars but if I could give it 10, I would.