When mothers were not at the party ...

We had discovered the Norwegian Anne Birkefeldt Ragde with Zona Frigida we had loved and we said that the next book certainly deserves a little heart ...
It's done.
Yet this is a very different novel as Zona Frigida was humorous (black), as the arsenic tower stands over the dark family saga (1).
Three or four generations of Scandinavian women parade: A Century of Women.
A century that probably was not the best.
So much so that the maternal love must sometimes skip a generation or two.
The book opens with the death of the grandmother Malie.

[...] My mother called me to tell me the news:
- Mom is dead.
Then she laughed. Length. A sound and rude laughter, interspersed breaths.
- Grandma is dead?
- Yes! It's not great?

The mother Ruby, jubilant.
Therese girl cries a grandmother who loved him more than her own mother.
And Anne B. Ragde will take us in the dark recesses of the past, we discover little by little (the book is particularly well built) the history of the women of the north.
It almost reads like a suspense thriller and, eager to discover the secrets of each of these women, it devours the big book without being able to let go: the outset we understand that Ruby is pleased with the death of his mother that the aura ever loved, much less desired. Malie was a cabaret singer and his career was shattered by the arrival of Ruby which found themselves in turn incapable to bring some love to his own daughter. And the story is strong and bitter and hard, and you want to know all of these women, how Malie has become cabaret singer, who was born Ruby, why Theresa's name is so ...
The grandfather also will be entitled to a few pages: it was he who was painting on porcelain blue, cobalt blue obtained in arsenic ovens. But if there is a little matter of arsenic, there is unfortunately no question of lace and it is in the blood of women and mothers that runs poison the blood of menstrual pain, blood and difficult deliveries that clandestine abortions ...

[...] In Danish, a birthmark says modermoerke, mother brand. The birth of this, it is associated benefit.

When the death of the grandmother occurs, Theresa is the mother of a little boy: the thread of inheritance seems cursed finally broken and we sincerely hope it will be easier to be a mother in this new century than the previous.
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(1) - we do not read in order: The arsenic tower is his latest novel (hence probably very safe this writing) and we'll have to dive into the trilogy of Neshov, another saga, one that made her famous Anne B. Ragde