The Women Writers' Handbook (Ed. Ann Sandham)

The Women Writers' Handbook is a fantastic tome to dip in and out of with a plethora of superb women writers, many I'd heard of and many were new to me but I'll look out for in the future.

There's something for everyone with a superb collection of poems, stories, essays and interviews and Ann Sandham has done an amazing and unenviable job of editing The Women Writers' Handbook, there must have been thousands of other worthy candidates that there just wasn't room for. Maybe The Women Writers' Handbook II should be on the cards.

Jaki McCarrick's contribution is The Badminton Court and is a short story laden with such a profound depth of feeling that I'm still desperately sad for Miranda. The female narrator is there to provide friendship and companionship for a terminally ill but still somewhat neglected girl, Miranda. McCarrick reminds us all that happiness is by its very nature transient, something to cherish, but importantly not something that means you should lock yourself away and live in the past. 

I also particularly enjoyed  My Mother, Reading a Novel by Madeleine Thien. She expertly picks up on the universal truth as to how we never really know our mothers because they become someone else when they have us. As much as motherhood is life enriching there's a personal cost that mothers willingly pay, yet as offspring we are oblivious to. Our very birth is a death of self.

The Women Writers' Handbook is a worthy winner of the Pandora Award.

Thanks to Kelly for inviting me on this tour and for my gifted copy.