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Anna Eva Mimi Adam
Three generations of women suffer the consequences of a single violent act. Mimi has no memory of the beating she endured at her mother Eva's hand. Both struggle to understand and perhaps overcome the detachment that defines their adult relationship. Eva's gentle mother, Anna, who witnessed and stopped the event, becomes a thorn in Eva's conscience, a constant unwitting reminder of her shame and self-loathing. Adam, Mimi's small son, occupies the center of this troubled family. He knows nothing of the cause, but is a precocious observer who, unawares, uses the best of his open nature and the purity of his child's love to move the women toward healing.
178 pages, Paperback
Published February 13, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 24, 2019
Anna Eva Mimi Adam by Marina Antropow Cramer
The story of three generations of women; Anna, Eva and Mimi. Many years ago Eva had a moment where she lost control of herself and struck her young daughter Mimi to which Anna was witness. This caused a strained relationship between the two. Anna tries to hold their small family together. Adam is Mimi's young son. (He) knows nothing of the past, yet he loves all three unconditionally.
An emotionally charged story told from each persons perceptive. With alternating chapters devoted to one person, I was able to connect on an individual basis. All three women has their own inner demons they must face.
They have to learn how to overcome their differences, make peace with the past, to live life to the fullest. I was engrossed from the first page until the end. Overall I (greatly) enjoyed Anna Eva Mimi Adam and feel others will as well. I highly recommend.
The story of three generations of women; Anna, Eva and Mimi. Many years ago Eva had a moment where she lost control of herself and struck her young daughter Mimi to which Anna was witness. This caused a strained relationship between the two. Anna tries to hold their small family together. Adam is Mimi's young son. (He) knows nothing of the past, yet he loves all three unconditionally.
An emotionally charged story told from each persons perceptive. With alternating chapters devoted to one person, I was able to connect on an individual basis. All three women has their own inner demons they must face.
They have to learn how to overcome their differences, make peace with the past, to live life to the fullest. I was engrossed from the first page until the end. Overall I (greatly) enjoyed Anna Eva Mimi Adam and feel others will as well. I highly recommend.
January 1, 2022
This was an interesting story of a family with a tragic past. Each chapter is from the perspective of one of the characters. Three of the 4 are told in first person while the 4th character is always in third person. I’m sure there’s a reason, but speculation would lead to spoilers and I don’t do that.
The story is well written and makes you sympathetic to the characters- even though they have flaws.
The story is well written and makes you sympathetic to the characters- even though they have flaws.
December 5, 2019
First, I found the structure of the tile interesting. Anna Eva Mimi Adam is the story of four generations of a family who live a closely connected life primarily because of Adam who is the youngest member of the family. Readers learn early on there was a violent act that hangs over the family. The narrative is told in the voices of the characters. As a result, readers get to know them quite well. The characters are well developed and complex as are their relationships. The story embraces the power of family ties and forgiveness. Highly recommended.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
I received a complimentary copy of this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.
March 1, 2023
Beautiful prose and deeply felt, nuanced storytelling mark this novel as a poignant narrative told from four viewpoints by four family members. The legacy of the past haunting the present and future of these characters. I loved sinking into each of them, witnessing their pain, joy, wrenching guilt, and heartache. I highly recommend it.
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February 12, 2020Generations Defined by Their Pain
a review by Erin Michaela Sweeney
How can you spin a family story that spans generations? Write a third-person multiple viewpoint novel. (For a fuller explanation, see “Writing a Multiple Viewpoint Novel,” on the Novel Writing Help blog.)
It can be enlightening, for authors and readers alike, to see a story unfold from more than one character’s perspective. A fairly standard technique these days is to change the perspective, called point of view or viewpoint, at the start of each chapter. Many writers label the chapter with the character’s name, as Marina Antropow Cramer has done in Anna Eva Mimi Adam (Run Amok Books, 2020).
In this, her second novel, Cramer shares a multigenerational story of women. Anna is the matriarch. Her daughter, Eva, lives two floors below her in the same building. Mimi and her son, Adam, share their own home nearby. The action of the book spans about a year, which I determined because Adam is in kindergarten near the start and he’s entered first grade before the end. Of course, the characters recall earlier times (to give readers backstory), as far back as Anna meeting her future husband, Leo, in sixth grade.
The key when switching point of view from one character to another every chapter is to clearly differentiate those characters. I applaud Cramer’s craft in this novel. She has wise Anna refer to literary classics and use elevated language in contrast to downtrodden Eva who, when not cursing, spits out slang or partial sentences. Mimi hides her feelings with pragmatic talk and uses expletives for effect.
Though these women work as a credit union employee (Anna, retired), a hospital cafeteria worker (Eva), and a small business owner (Mimi), writerly ideas spring from all three. It’s an instance of blurring characters together. It might have been better to have such notions only come into one character’s mind. Yet perhaps there’s an argument to be made that seeing their worlds from a writer’s perspective in certain moments actually tie the three generations together.
The book title makes for a clever cover design, but I wish the author or publisher had pushed for something else. Perhaps an alternative could be Defined by the Pain, which comes from Anna’s thoughts a little more than two-thirds through the text (my ebook didn’t include page numbers):
“Myself, I’m beginning to see this illness as a gift, three women seeing each other more or less clearly, each of us defined by the pain in some new way. Maybe we’re ready to welcome some peace into our lives.”
Cramer’s book focuses on how these strong women interact and misinterpret each other’s actions and words. Without giving anything away, I’m pleased the book doesn’t have a predictable Hollywood ending with everything tied up in a neat little bow. Cramer also doesn’t give readers a Happily Ever After that, say, the Romance genre would require.
Figuring out the genre or category can help readers align their expectations. Anna Eva Mimi Adam, though written by a woman, doesn’t fall into the women’s fiction category. While Cramer delves more deeply into characterization than plot, I wouldn’t label this book as literary fiction, either. Let’s put this title on the mainstream fiction (as defined by Writer’s Digest) shelf.
By divvying up the chapters equally among all four characters, the author gives lots of room in this short book to a young boy. Maybe Cramer could have transformed Adam into a secondary character with his perspective of child wonder and innocence conveyed by the three women. Here’s a well-done example, from Anna’s musings:
“How I envy children their laughter, the way they fill a room with merriment, honest and unrestrained. I know that the same intensity is true of all their emotions: sadness, anger, or blackest despair. That doesn’t stop me from wishing I still knew how to laugh from the gut, how to clear the accumulated debris of everyday living from my mind, conscious of nothing but the clarity of joy.”
I’m left wondering what other wonderful revelations Marina Antropow Cramer could have included if she’d devoted more space to the three women in Anna Eva Mimi Adam.
* I received a free ebook of Anna Eva Mimi Adam as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer member in exchange for an unbiased review.
a review by Erin Michaela Sweeney
How can you spin a family story that spans generations? Write a third-person multiple viewpoint novel. (For a fuller explanation, see “Writing a Multiple Viewpoint Novel,” on the Novel Writing Help blog.)
It can be enlightening, for authors and readers alike, to see a story unfold from more than one character’s perspective. A fairly standard technique these days is to change the perspective, called point of view or viewpoint, at the start of each chapter. Many writers label the chapter with the character’s name, as Marina Antropow Cramer has done in Anna Eva Mimi Adam (Run Amok Books, 2020).
In this, her second novel, Cramer shares a multigenerational story of women. Anna is the matriarch. Her daughter, Eva, lives two floors below her in the same building. Mimi and her son, Adam, share their own home nearby. The action of the book spans about a year, which I determined because Adam is in kindergarten near the start and he’s entered first grade before the end. Of course, the characters recall earlier times (to give readers backstory), as far back as Anna meeting her future husband, Leo, in sixth grade.
The key when switching point of view from one character to another every chapter is to clearly differentiate those characters. I applaud Cramer’s craft in this novel. She has wise Anna refer to literary classics and use elevated language in contrast to downtrodden Eva who, when not cursing, spits out slang or partial sentences. Mimi hides her feelings with pragmatic talk and uses expletives for effect.
Though these women work as a credit union employee (Anna, retired), a hospital cafeteria worker (Eva), and a small business owner (Mimi), writerly ideas spring from all three. It’s an instance of blurring characters together. It might have been better to have such notions only come into one character’s mind. Yet perhaps there’s an argument to be made that seeing their worlds from a writer’s perspective in certain moments actually tie the three generations together.
The book title makes for a clever cover design, but I wish the author or publisher had pushed for something else. Perhaps an alternative could be Defined by the Pain, which comes from Anna’s thoughts a little more than two-thirds through the text (my ebook didn’t include page numbers):
“Myself, I’m beginning to see this illness as a gift, three women seeing each other more or less clearly, each of us defined by the pain in some new way. Maybe we’re ready to welcome some peace into our lives.”
Cramer’s book focuses on how these strong women interact and misinterpret each other’s actions and words. Without giving anything away, I’m pleased the book doesn’t have a predictable Hollywood ending with everything tied up in a neat little bow. Cramer also doesn’t give readers a Happily Ever After that, say, the Romance genre would require.
Figuring out the genre or category can help readers align their expectations. Anna Eva Mimi Adam, though written by a woman, doesn’t fall into the women’s fiction category. While Cramer delves more deeply into characterization than plot, I wouldn’t label this book as literary fiction, either. Let’s put this title on the mainstream fiction (as defined by Writer’s Digest) shelf.
By divvying up the chapters equally among all four characters, the author gives lots of room in this short book to a young boy. Maybe Cramer could have transformed Adam into a secondary character with his perspective of child wonder and innocence conveyed by the three women. Here’s a well-done example, from Anna’s musings:
“How I envy children their laughter, the way they fill a room with merriment, honest and unrestrained. I know that the same intensity is true of all their emotions: sadness, anger, or blackest despair. That doesn’t stop me from wishing I still knew how to laugh from the gut, how to clear the accumulated debris of everyday living from my mind, conscious of nothing but the clarity of joy.”
I’m left wondering what other wonderful revelations Marina Antropow Cramer could have included if she’d devoted more space to the three women in Anna Eva Mimi Adam.
* I received a free ebook of Anna Eva Mimi Adam as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer member in exchange for an unbiased review.
January 11, 2023
Another amazing, enchanting, and heart-achingly realistic masterpiece by Marina Antropow Cramer. I loved her book Roads, so I looked for more books by her and found this one. The characters are so well-described I feel like I know them, and sometimes want to hug them or scream at them, depending on which chapter I'm reading. The author's attention to detail, without getting bogged down, is one of my favorite aspects of both her books. The character-by-chapter took a bit of warming up to, but once I got the rhythm of it, I loved it. Antropow Cramer captures life at the edge of society so utterly perfectly, in addition to the lives people experience within families and without (like Eva's experience with a date gone sideways, or Mimi's experiences in Paris). Even the inner voice of Adam, the child, is nuanced and accurate, thankfully devoid of all treacle. The ending is so sad, and so beautiful.
I'd give it 6 stars if I could! Huzzah for another fantastic book, and looking forward for the next one!
I'd give it 6 stars if I could! Huzzah for another fantastic book, and looking forward for the next one!
August 29, 2020
A beautifully told story of three generations of women and their troubled relationship. Anna is the matriarch. Eva is the daughter of Anna and the mother to Mimi. Mimi is the granddaughter to Anna, the daughter of Eva, and the mother to Adam. Adam is the great-grandson to Anna, grandson to Eva, and the son of Mimi.
When Mimi was younger her mother, in a moment of frustration and anger, hit her; hard. Anna witnessed the act. This act caused a strain in their relationships with each other. The book is told from multiple viewpoints to help distinguish the characters and to get a better understanding of who each character is as an individual.
You get a look inside each of the character's minds and see things for what they are or how they interpret things. I highly recommend this book.
When Mimi was younger her mother, in a moment of frustration and anger, hit her; hard. Anna witnessed the act. This act caused a strain in their relationships with each other. The book is told from multiple viewpoints to help distinguish the characters and to get a better understanding of who each character is as an individual.
You get a look inside each of the character's minds and see things for what they are or how they interpret things. I highly recommend this book.
May 5, 2020
This book is a lovely quick read. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one generation of this four generation family. Although at times the writing is to forward, most of the book allows the reader to get to know the characters and storyline naturally.
*I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review.
*I received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review.
June 11, 2020
Told from four points of view, this story looks at intergenerational relationships. There were several good quotes from each character that would generate great discussion points.
January 1, 2020
Even better than i thought it would be! Actually thought that if a wee bit of editing was done, it had the wit , storyline, and heart to be in the "cozy" category.
Well-defined characters with distinct personalities kept the pages turning.
3.5 stars
Well-defined characters with distinct personalities kept the pages turning.
3.5 stars
November 12, 2025
I received this as an ARC from Library Thing's Early Reviewer group.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I mean it was good, but I also felt like there was no resolution, Eva and Mimi's relationship wasn't repaired. They just were a little kinder at the end, maybe Cramer wanted to leave the reader to decide if the cracked door opened or not, but I felt unsatisfied at the ending. This was a small book, and I kept reading because I kept hoping to see the relationship between Eva and Mimi repaired, but it never really happened. I enjoyed the characters they were flawed, and I think if the book had been longer there could have been some real character growth.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I mean it was good, but I also felt like there was no resolution, Eva and Mimi's relationship wasn't repaired. They just were a little kinder at the end, maybe Cramer wanted to leave the reader to decide if the cracked door opened or not, but I felt unsatisfied at the ending. This was a small book, and I kept reading because I kept hoping to see the relationship between Eva and Mimi repaired, but it never really happened. I enjoyed the characters they were flawed, and I think if the book had been longer there could have been some real character growth.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews