Top Highlights

• Esch, too, looks forward to China’s triumphant return, and the moment in which China will look at her and recognize that she and Esch are the same; they are both mothers, and are bound together by the violent demands of their sacred but impossible roles.
• Running like an undercurrent through the novel is Esch’s obsession with the ancient Greek myth of Medea, who famously killed her two children in order to wound her husband, Jason.
• ard suggests that though one of the primary duties of motherhood is to protect one’s offspring from the violence of the world, there is often a violence inherent in the act of mothering as well.
• Esch finds herself beginning to conceive of her own pregnancy in increasingly violent terms, and to worry whether she herself will, in spite of this legacy, be able to mother her unborn child well.

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