My Mother’s Eyes: A Short Story Review

Review

An e-copy of the book has been provided by the author, Jeremy Ray, in exchange for an honest review.

“People say countless things while alive. Life is a string of throwaway sentences. We only select words to take on a “profound” meaning when circumstances change. We take what happens and hold the past up to it to see if we can find a connection. Some words we latch on to. We rip sentences out of context and wear them around our necks like amulets. My dad wears so many he stoops from the weight of them.”

My Mother’s Eyes is a poignant story of longing and regret: It follows two brothers sitting by their mother’s bedside while she’s in a coma—Jordie, trying to capture the memory of his mother the only way he knows, by drawing her, but he cannot seem to remember her eyes.

A captivating tale that successfully grappled the emotions it intended to convey. This short story dragged me down into the ardency of appreciation, sadness, and repentance. It reminded readers of how amorphous time is—the ever fluidness of moments and the abruptness of change that might happen in a single snap of a finger.

Ever the bewitching writer that I knew him to be, Jeremy Ray—yet again—delivered a fantastic work that fully immerses his readers into a trance of unsteady rhythmic cadence. He plays you a melody with beats high and low, dipping you into hopefulness and grief.

Get a copy of the book here.

About the Author

Jeremy Ray graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a MFA in Dramatic Writing. He is the recipient of the Max K. Lerner Playwriting Fellowship for his play Boiling Point and the Shubert Playwriting Fellowship for his play Sisters of Transformation. His work has been performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and his screenplays have placed in the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Competition, The Academy Nicholl Fellowship, and the ScreenCraft Drama Contest.

However, he is most fond of prose. He spends his free time devouring books like the bookworm he is.