Burst

February 13, 2023
Otis chronicles a mother’s and daughter’s pursuits of elusive love in her perceptive debut novel (after the collection Yes, Yes, Cherries). In a Cape Cod trailer park in 1979, single mother Charlotte uses her sex appeal and strong personality to keep herself and her 11-year-old daughter, Viva, afloat. Too often, however, Charlotte’s alcoholism results in the two having to pick up stakes, keeping them on the move from generous relatives to besotted boyfriends throughout Viva’s youth. At a free day camp, Viva discovers a love of dance, which Charlotte helps nurture. It’s a bittersweet development, as Charlotte, a onetime aspiring artist, is reminded of her squandered potential (“What kind of mother envied her own daughter’s joy?”). As an adult 15 years later, Viva must contend with her own fractured dreams—and with the fear of turning into the worst version of her mother. Otis captures the colorful chaos of Viva’s early years, acknowledging the damage but also the moments of joy. In lyrical language that expresses both Viva’s and Charlotte’s perspectives, Otis portrays a mother and daughter caught in a tense pas de deux, perpetually pushing one another away before returning to each other. This author continues to impress.

February 15, 2023
A new spin on the theme of entwined mothers and daughters. Debut novelist Otis follows the unstable Charlotte and her driven daughter, Viva, an aspiring dancer, from an eventful stint on Cape Cod in 1979 when Viva is 11 through the next couple of decades, with flashbacks to Charlotte's fraught encounters with the man who will become, though he doesn't know it, Viva's father. Charlotte and Viva are, like many a fictional mother-daughter pair, "a society of two." After the summer in Cape Cod, they move to California, where they stay with Charlotte's sister. Charlotte picks up a series of odd jobs, and Viva attends a performing arts high school and then college before moving to New York to start a career. When an accident brings that career to a halt, Viva returns to California and starts falling into the same self-destructive patterns that have stymied her mother even as her mother begins to experience ever more serious symptoms of mental and physical illness. While Viva is more sympathetic as a girl and a teenager than as an alcoholic 20-something with bad taste in men and no idea what to do with her life, and the subplot involving her father seems tacked on, Otis pays rapt attention not just to the two complicated women, but to the other characters with whom they interact, from the hippie couple with whom Charlotte shares a mutual dislike at their campground on Cape Cod to the longtime frenemy with whom Viva competes and the mean-spirited high school students she teaches in California. She steers ably away from clich� in what could easily have been a conventionally tense relationship between mother and daughter, documenting the ways in which both are distorted by the "umbilical cord" that stretches between them for decades but allowing them to be individuals with their own quirks and longings as well. A mostly satisfying variation on a familiar motif.

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