Congratulations to Aqueduct Press as their 'Conversation Pieces' reaches one hundred volumes! I believe that 'The Grand Conversation', the collection of essays by its founder L. Timmel Duchamp, may have been their first publication. If not, it must have been close because that was certainly in 2004, the year they began. While this is the series' hundredth title, I've reviewed a fifth of those, starting with #66, Sofia Rhei's 'Everything is Made of Letters', and only going back for the earliest of Cynthia Ward's four 'Blood-Thirsty Agent' books. I'd love to track down more.

This is a fun one, with a lighter heart than the previous few but a story that feels a little awkward and a little comfortable until it sneaks its feminism in on us exactly when we're not looking for it and we realise it's inherently powerful. Just like that of its leading lady, Mollie, who's almost seventeen, its power shifts into gear surreptitiously, suddenly revealing that it was always there, waiting for us to notice it. It first manifests for Mollie as she sinks her fingers into Aunt Helena's garden but it truly speaks to her when she sees the elephants dance at Fargo Fogg's Jewel-Box Circus.

She's a girl not far away from becoming a woman, so sixteen, almost seventeen, in an undisclosed year that we have to assume is the very early sixties because Patsy Cline's 'I Fall to Pieces' has just come out. Almost everything that she's done thus far is for the benefit of her overbearing mother instead of herself and the expectations she has of anyone in the family. She's a McBride, she says, often. "We're better than everybody else, and so we have to do better than everybody else."

It'll surely come as no surprise to realise that mum is known within their household as "Mrs. God" and everything she does revolves around appearance most usually with the ruthless intention of advancement. There isn't an ounce in her body that's real. Everything's there for leverage. That wasn't remotely out of the ordinary in the America of the sixties when women were given duties that rarely involved anything outside the home. Mrs. God was a woman who found the dedication and sheer stubbornness to make something of that because of her own gift as a McBride, even if it's soulless and unworthy, especially when forced onto someone else.

At this point, Mollie can be forced, so she bows to all of her mum's wishes for her. She succeeds in school, becoming the youngest graduate her high school has seen. She attends the spring formal with Denny Walters, who's gay even if nobody else knows. Now she's moved up to Teachers College and its Delta Zeta sorority because that's where mum went and where she met dad. Home to her has always been Sky, wherever that is, but they're all in a southern state at this point, staying at grandma's house so she can be at college. She's not living her own life yet. She's living her mum's, just like so many girls playing sports or competing in beauty pageants.

Her own life on her own terms, begins with Mario Lanza, in what may be her first independent act. She discovers him by accident and mum isn't happy. He's passé, she states, without having a clue that Mollie's practicing what she's calling Mariomancy through random selection from his songs. Her independence grows during summers with Aunt Helena, who's a witch. Mollie doesn't seem like she's one too, even if it's in her blood, but the soil opens at her touch. Gardening is a gift for her, just as appearance is her mum's. So, back at college, she creates a Shakespeare garden, one containing only what Ophelia cited in her speech in 'Hamlet'.

While we might expect the next stage to be the boy she meets at the general store, fingernails as black as working the linotype machines at the 'Gazette' can make them, especially as she finds him reading 'Hamlet', but that's just a promise towards the future. It doesn't have to be him, however he appears within these pages, but it will be someone not her mum. If this book is about anything, it's about forging your own path. Maybe Jordan Caldecote will be on hers and maybe he won't, but there will be a path and we watch Mollie start to forge one. After all, the very soil responds to her touch. Who better to build a path into the future?

Instead, the final stage before things can move forward is the circus, as the book's title was happy to foreshadow before we even opened it. The McBrides are a big family, it seems, though one that boasts more than its fair share of the dead and broken. Mum is the youngest of her siblings. Uncle Taylor is the oldest and he arrives at the house with Dolly in tow. She's a Borneo pygmy elephant, a valued performer in the circus he works for, and he and his wife, Aunt Florence, the Cockney 'Toe Dancer Extraordinaire', have come to invite her to the show while they're in town. Uncle Taylor is a gem of a character and Aunt Florence is a revelation, but what they do best is highlight a path.

It's during a wonderful chat with Aunt Florence that the feminism spurts out like a broken tap, all at once and in a powerful jet. "I want to do what I want, when I want it, without constant criticism and disapproval." That wasn't a trivial wish for a young lady in sixties America, but then Mollie is a McBride and, however her mum twists that, it has meaning. We don't know where the story will take her and, quite frankly, this entire book is a prologue to whatever that will be, but I feel safe in suggesting that the book of her life, now that she knows she can forge a path, will be well worth reading. I'm guessing that Holly Wade Matter won't write that one and that's fine. What matters is that this bedrock allows us to bring whatever we want to the very idea of it.

This is a wonderful novella, a worthy hundredth instalment in a worthy series. There are a bunch of moments to call out—the elephants dancing, the first moment in the garden, Mollie's response to an unexpected request from Barbara in her sorority—but this isn't really about moments. It's about those moments adding up to a change. That makes this a highly appropriate choice for its important billing. What is feminism, whatever genre it's placed into, if it isn't a strong argument for change? I'm with Mollie and wish her all the very best. I'm against her mum and all she stands for. I'm with this novella, vibrant and alive and hopeful. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Conversation Pieces series click here