According to common wisdom, “it takes a village” to raise a child. In her new novel, The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone, Randy Susan Meyers explores a fictional village called Puddingstone and its off-the-grid members. First based at an urban communal home in Boston, then at a rambling, ramshackle estate in rural Vermont, Puddingstone is a political collective made up of a small group of dedicated social justice warriors, most of them married with young children. This intriguing, multifaceted novel tells the story of Puddingtone’s unintended effect on the children who’ve been raised among busy idealists.
The novel is told from two perspectives. The first belongs to Annabel, whose early life involves a life-altering trip to Mississippi during the fraught Freedom Summer of 1964. In her fight for civil rights, she learns how dangerous it can be to champion justice. Now, Annabel is the mother of Ivy and Henry. They are sent to the ostensibly sheltered Vermont countryside, where they live alongside several other children whose activist parents continue to work toward social justice in Boston. The consensus is that they will be safer away from the racial, economic, and gender battles that consume their elders. Entrusting the bulk of childcare to the commune’s confident leader, Diantha, Annabel drops in on the Vermont collective to see her children only when time and circumstance permit. Though the children at first enjoy their wild, unfettered, fresh-air freedom, Annabel’s sensitive daughter, Ivy, increasingly misses her mother. In alternating chapters, we see Annabel’s passionate idealism and Ivy’s primal longing for a consistent maternal presence in her life.
The novel travels through many decades of American life, from young Annabel’s fraught love affair with a Black freedom fighter to Ivy’s own eventual marriage and motherhood. Meyers’s portrayal of Annabel discourages us from judging or condemning her; Annabel’s only wish throughout her life is to repair a broken world. The author also helps us understand Ivy, whose worries and misgivings foreshadow a disastrous event at the commune. The novel ends in the present day, when Annabel ripens into grandmotherhood and Ivy herself faces the conflicts and complexities of adulthood.
The Many Mothers of Ivy Puddingstone suggests that having parents who want to save the world can be lonely. Sometimes, a child must compete with that world for anything more than glancing attention. With a compassionate hand, Meyers explores the many manifestations of love in a flawed but eternally hopeful universe.
Sonia Taitz, a Ramaz, Yale Law, and Oxford graduate, is the author of five books, including the acclaimed “second generation” memoir, The Watchmaker’s Daughter, and the novel, Great with Child. Praised for her warmth and wit by Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, People and The Chicago Tribune, she is currently working on a novel about the Zohar, the mystical source of Jewish transcendence.
