“What she told them: She told them about the clock radio she got from her birthday one year […]
                What she didn’t tell them: “How her father had reams of paper in his office, and how she used to steal some of it […]”
                -Mary Helen Specht, Mudlark, page 117

                One of the things Mary Helen Specht does so powerfully in Mudlark is create, respect, and press into that distanced space that can exist between two people. In this case, it’s a mother Jenny and her daughter Neko. When the book unfolds from Neko’s perspective, we feel the longing of a child who somehow can’t quite reach across thought and temperament to her mom. When the book unfolds from Jenny’s perspective, we feel a parent’s world forever changed by a changing daughter and by the everythings Jenny and Neko somehow can’t say to each other. Or can’t hear. 
                I’m only halfway through the book, so I don’t know how things will go for these two. But I feel the reach. The distance. The love that goes on all the same. When someone isn’t able to recognize their own story as just one side of the interaction—maybe that’s when they end up locking themselves away. When a story has space for what we say and what we can’t say—space for that longing to reach each other across the distance, even when it doesn’t feel possible—when that longing takes shape—
                Well, I haven’t finished the book yet. But even unresolved, the tension feels like hope.