M for Mammy - Eleanor O'Reilly

Goodreads 3.08

Meet the Augustts: a loving, Irish family who, like all families, are a bit complicated. But they are bound together by their love for each other and the way their words shape their world.

Things become even more complicated when the mother has a stroke, and the force of nature who is Granny Mae-Anne comes to try and take charge to keep the family together.

She has a job on. There's the son Jacob with all his words trapped in his head by The Autism, the father Mickey struggling to express himself at all, and Jenny, the daughter, quietly writing it all down to try and make sense of it.

M for Mammy is about language and home and the power of a family to heal itself. It is about telling stories, reading stories, and writing them down. It is a story of a young boy without words, of a mother who has lost her words and a father full of stories he has to learn to tell. And then there's the granny who hammers and shapes words on the anvil of love, and a daughter who tries to speak for them all.