Queen for a Day
Author(s): Maxine Rosaler
The reader knows by page one of Queen for a Day that Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son is autistic, but if anyone told her, she wouldn't listen, because she doesn’t want to know—until at last Danny's behavior becomes so strange even she can't ignore it. After her son's diagnosis Mimi finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son's. It is a world she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach. In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, we meet these women, each a conflicted, complex character totally unsuited for sainthood and dreaming of the day she can just walk away.
Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants, housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering, competed with each other for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women living under enormous pressure. Rosaler tells their story in ironic, precise and vivid prose, with dark humor and insight born of first-hand experience.
Review(s):
“An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.”
“Maxine Rosaler’s ‘novel in stories’ resembles Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, except rather than surviving an absurd and unjust war, the burden here is one of mothering an autistic child. Like O’Brien, Rosaler explores the mettle and morality of Mimi Slavitt on the ‘battlefield of her existence’—as she seeks help for her son, and as her story is set off against other stories of different mothers with handicapped children. The failures of our institutions, especially schools, to confront special needs are one common minefield; and the dream of cures another. Rosaler continues throughout to plumb both Mimi’s humanity and that of her son Danny . . . . In all, the writing is generously unsentimental, spiritually probing and filled with piercing intimacies.”
“Maxine Rosaler's novel in stories is sharply observant and deeply poignant, yet at times so darkly humorous that the reader will laugh out loud. Queen for a Day is unlike anything you've read before, and is absolutely unforgettable.”
“If you're looking for a heart-warming, inspirational account of saintly parents raising an autistic child, Queen for a Day isn't the book for you. Instead, what Maxine Rosaler offers us is the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival. Here is life as it was actually lived in twentieth-century New York, in all its profane, crazy-making, transcendent glory.”
“Queen for a Day crackles with insight, energy, and New York City wit. Maxine Rosaler’s novel in stories revolves around an odd sorority of mothers brought together—and sometimes apart—by their autistic children. Rosaler is both compassionate and wonderfully unsentimental in her portrayal of their fear and fury, longing and isolation. She is also really good at capturing the random bursts of connection so endemic to New York City street life, and her take on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy otherwise known as the Department of Education is hilarious. I loved this book and recommend it highly, not only to parents dealing with autism, but to anyone who enjoys gritty, funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately affirming stories of modern family life.”
“These stories speak eloquently to the loneliness and isolation that can be an intrinsic part of raising a child with a disability. With unsentimental candor and edgy humor, Maxine Rosaler describes the surreal situations these mothers encounter, but she also reveals glimpses of the deep love and against all odds dreams these women have for their children.”
“Maxine Rosaler’s stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsman’s approach to the construction of these contemporary parables.”
“Queen for a Day is a constellation of stories forming a vibrant novel about maternal love, its struggles, its ambivalence, and, ultimately, its persistence. Each is from the perspective of a mother in crisis, and each moves us in a profoundly different way. The stories shifting points of view create moments of dissonance and also of great empathy. Mothers who otherwise have nothing in common are brought together, often with sudden intimacy, through the challenges of their children. Queen for a Day poignantly evokes a maternal dance between denial and celebration.”
“I was both moved and impressed by this novel, and the intelligence and sympathy with which the author presents her afflicted characters.”
“Queen for a Day is a compelling collection that explores the terror and denial parents experience when realizing their child is ‘different’ in linked stories that are tender, unflinchingly honest, and at times, chortle-out-loud funny. The book takes us on a journey from Danny’s early years to his teen years, peopled with idiosyncratic characters and events (a doomed Bar Mitzvah party and an apple-picking expedition gone bad) that allow us to see Danny and his loving but star-crossed parents, Mimi and Jake, from a variety of perspectives. Maxine Rosaler deals with a difficult subject in deft and graceful prose that make everything from a trip to the doctor’s office to wheeling a broken grocery cart down a NYC sidewalk feel like an adventure fraught with danger and wonder. I loved this book—read it in two sittings.”
ISBN: 9781883285753