When a child is born, the expectations of growth and milestones are taken for granted by parents whose children meet them in the required timeslot. It is expected by life that children grow up, mature, and eventually continue the cycle of humanity. But for every healthy child, there is a child who is not able to meet milestones, and when they are unable to do so, the consequences for parents, mothers, in particular, become tragic who become not only isolated due to the nature of parenting but become unwilling participants on the sidelines, watching everyone's children mature and begin lives, while their own are floundering within the sea.
For awhile, Mimi Slavitt and her husband Jake, believe that their three-year-old son, Danny is going through a phase, that he indeed will grow out with what appears to be autism. Believing their unqualified marriage counselor over preschool teachers and other parents, they delay and resist in giving Danny the help he needs, wanting to stay in normalcy for as long as possible. Reluctantly though, even when the label of autism is given for Danny, Mimi is forced to become her son's advocate as well as an expert on how to handle Danny's moods and piques. The reader then becomes a participant in watching Mimi's life unfold, from the time Danny is a three-year-old boy, to the time he becomes a teenager, and along with watching Danny grow up, the reader will meet other mothers who are forced to sit on the sidelines, with only Mimi as a common thread.
There is plenty that I loved about QUEEN FOR A DAY by Maxine Rosaler, including the complex inner lives that her characters lead as mothers of special needs children; I also loved the intimacy that she shows within the story, able to understand the complex path of life-term caregiving that the characters are forced to assume. While not a traditional novel, QUEEN FOR A DAY by Maxine Rosaler, is very reminiscent of Anne Leigh Parrish's two books I have previously read: OUR LOVE COULD LIGHT THE WORLD and WHAT IS FOUND, WHAT IS LOST. The short stories sucked me in, and it's easy to spend few days and nights reading QUEEN FOR A DAY and hoping that she will go on and on with the characters.
Whether environmental and/or genetic, autism is getting a lot of attention from people, but what is uncommon is paying attention to the caregivers who are forced to do what Mimi has to do: be an expert, an advocate and do whatever she can to help her son. In eleven heartbreaking and raw tales, Maxine Rosaler captures the pain and isolation that parents who have children with special needs are forced to feel when they have to miss the milestones that so many others take for granted.
For a read that is not to be forgotten, QUEEN FOR A DAY by Maxine Rosaler should be read as soon as possible without delay.
After Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a position 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, these women emerge as conflicted, complex individuals, totally unsuited for sainthood, often dreaming of the day they 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 one another for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women coping under enormous pressure.
In her impressive debut, Rosaler tells their stories in ironic, precise, and vivid prose, with humor and insight born of firsthand experience, and offers readers “the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival” (Eileen Pollack, author of The Bible of Dirty Jokes).
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