Love Me Tender (review)

Elvira's mother is pregnant, which has put the world of thirteen-year-old Elvira into a spin: her eight-year-old sister is more of a brat than ever, hormones make mother Mel moody and demanding, and now Dad has gone off angry to try to make a comeback in Las Vegas as an Elvis impersonator. Just as Elvira is trying to sort all this out, a frantic call comes from an aunt that she's never met that Mel's estranged mother is dying. Mel packs the girls up and heads to Memphis, only to find that reports of her mother's imminent demise have been exaggerated but that it is nonetheless time to sort out some family business. Couloumbis is at the top of her form here as she constructs believable, complex characters and sets them in dynamic relations with one another. The women in Elvira's family are all stubborn, sharp-tongued, and manipulative, but they are honest in dealing with each other's flaws as they realize their need for connection and shared strength. Instead of digging in and turning each other into convenient excuses to maintain past grudges, the women work past their differences and find the grace to forgive. Elvira proves that she is a member of this family as she replays some of her mom's and aunt's sibling difficulties in her relationship with her little sister, but she also engages in the emotional work of trying to really understand what motivates people, in particular, what motivates her own desire to be mean to her mom and her sister. As in most real families, there are no good guys and bad guys here, but there are patterns of love and pain that get respun in new arrays; readers who enjoy family drama will get a healthy dose of insight into what makes for solid, lasting relationships here—real, astringent love without a whiff of sweetness or sentimentality.