Mary Coin

Author Marisa Silver wrote a historical novel about the photograph "The Migrant Woman".  Mary Coin (fictional name) was the migrant woman in this novel.  I had a hard time reading this book.  I should have made family trees of the two main characters, because I had difficulty keeping the names of their men, their children, and their grandchildren straight.  To add to my confusion, the chapters were narrated by three characters and in different years.

The book tells a story of two women who lived two very different lives.  Mary Coin, who was born in poverty and ended up working as a migrant woman, and Vera Dare, a photographer, who lived a rather opulent life.  Yet, rather strangely, in the end, the two women had much in common.

In 1936, Mary Coin was widowed and was a migrant worker in California with three children.  As she sat by the side of a road, with her children with their  broken down car, another car passed her, turned around and came back.  Vera Dare was documenting migrant workers at the time and was in that car.  Vera got out of the car, and asked Mary if she could photograph the family.  She posed Mary and her children, took the photos and left. It was a very brief encounter. And they never met again.

Part One of the book began with Walker Dodge in 2010. Walker was a historian, a professor of cultural history, who felt that he never really knew much about his family.  Sadly, his work had taken him away from his own family so much that he and his wife divorced and he was then a part-time father to his two children.

Then the chapters were about Mary, starting in Oklahoma in 1920 as a child, ending up in 1931 in California. Next the chapters were about Vera in California, first in 1920, then in 1932. Part One finished with Mary in California in 1935-1936.

Part Two began with Vera in 1965, then Walker in 2010, back to Mary in 1982 and 1935, and ending with Walker in 2011.

So if I had the before-mentioned family tree, along with a timeline, I could have skipped a lot of my confusion.

Taken as a whole, the premise of the book was a good story. Mary Coin was chosen for one of my book groups and everyone enjoyed the story, but all of us were confused as we tried to discuss the book, trying to figure out who went with who. Would I recommend the book? Only with a warning to the reader to take notes!  Is it staying with me on our move? No.