The back cover blurb call’s The Mating Season “a dazzling work of the imagination and a piercing look at the human heart.” I could not have said it better myself.
Alex Brunkhorst’s novel is a whimsical journey through love and loss. On her eleventh birthday, Zorka Carpenter’s father walks away. No goodbye, no explanation, just exits from her life. Her mother arrives home moments later with candles for the birthday cake claiming the candles can’t be lit and the birthday cake not eaten until Daddy comes home. But Daddy doesn’t come home, and Zorka’s mother sits beside an ever more stale cake as the hours and days pass. She is convinced Daddy will soon return and spends the next six years of Zorka’s life perpetuating this fantasy until one day she expires from heartbreak.
“What makes you love another person?” [Zorka asks]
“It’s impossible to know, sweetheart,” [her mother replies] ... “Your heart will know, but your mind won’t. And you can spend years trying to figure it out, but you never will.”
“How do you fall out of love?”
“That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet.”
The now orphaned Zorka fills her life with creatures, 310 to be exact. Birds, bugs, fish, everything but humans. She creates a dialogue for them and forms her own family unit. Living in a glass greenhouse with her menagerie she is content until the day she meets Richard and falls in love herself. Richard is a man obsessed with the past, specifically a lost love of his own and cannot offer Zorka a future. Determined not to be like her mother Zorka finds the strength to let Richard go, and move forward into her own future.
A very poignant and moving story filled with whimsy and magic. A great read that I highly recommend.
Till next time, happy reading.
L :)
| TBR = 2 | WPL = 0 |
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