Tones of Tale

 The general style of Mother's Urn matched the tone of the text (the vulnerability to fingerprints was not terribly attractive, nor was the binding, which failed before I was finished reading the book for the first time) in a way that I appreciated.  The slightly abstract, poetic style of writing, along with the red text on black background in the beginning of the book made sense because the addiction issues of the characters were pretty dark.  

     There were  a few moments I found jarring.  The first was "...for long before this love occurred, she was a mother" (5).  Although it is early in the book, I felt that I should have known that a main character was a mother.  

    Another jarring moment begins with the section that starts on page 19, "No refills on the photo album."  The picture that accompanies the introduction to that section is small and it looks like a Poloroid.  More importantly, It is black and white only.  The previous images in the book have been rich in color.  Page 20 provides more jarring activity, as the narration switches into first person.  Thus far, we have read a sort of abstract narration, but page 20 starts with an "I,"which is the first time we have seen that.  I found this jarring because the artwork changes tone, from rich and multi-colored to black and white, and because the narrator has changed from someone we do not necessarily know to someone we must know, because she refers to herself as "I."  

     The perspective of the narrator changes again on page 26:  "She'll wash your window if you ask her and she'll offer if you don't" (28). The book sticks to the black and white style in this section.   The illustration reminded me of the Navajo storyteller, who has children crawling all over him or her.  There are many children in the image of  and all seem to be clamoring around the storyteller/mother figure in this book.  There is little  color.  Most of the image is in black and white, and the image of a fetus in the storyteller/mother is very clear,  This section ends as it began, with a claim that someone will wash your window if you ask her and she'll offer if you don't" (34).  To me, this section felt like a change in narrator from mother to daughter.  The artwork changed, even in color.  Page 35 begins with the same sort of super-saturated color, which is very different from the black and white work that has been offered.  I guess that it is the narrator's mother who will wash your windshield?  I'm not sure.  

     I think one of my main concerns is that I'm not sure what happened when the narration switched to an "I" perspective and when the artwork changed to a more black and white color scheme than the multi-colored I'd been seeing.  I *think* the perspective changed from the mother's point of view to the daughter's, at this point, but I am not absolutely sure.  The daughter becomes focused and important when the mother disappears?  I think the story is all the daughter's...She realized the truth of the story pretty late to write it, but wrote it anyway.  Even going on this assumption, I find the switch in perspectives jarring.  I assume that the preconceived notion of the book is that the story is that of a single mother, and how she became single.  When the artwork changes, along with the tone of the narrative,  I feel that I am to assume that the narrator is now the daughter of the person in the beginning of the book.  She knows that her parents had this courtship, that they were really into one another, but that then the mother developed a cocaine addiction, while the father focused on alcohol.  The daughter, who apparently is Kalamity J, is the creator of all the stories in the book, and she is now suffering from never re-connecting with her mother.  Again, I could be wrong.  I actually had trouble interpreting the  narrative of this story, which is weird to me because I really like this kind of artwork and narrative.