Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm

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"One of the funniest, truest novels I've read in years." –Jess Row, author of The New Earth and Your Face in Mine

Following a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation combines the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief in a stunning tale for fans of Allegra Goodman and Rebecca Makkai.

The night after fleeing her mother's funeral, cellist Louise Rackoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah show more dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease—the same one responsible for her mother's slow, agonizing passing.

Determined to spare Leon and their daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. Her disappearance forces the Rosenbergs to grapple with how to find meaning in the face of mortality—a manic and mystical quest that sends them careening across the globe, colliding into tattoo artists, Chasidic Jews, playworkers, and witches. And finally, back into each other.

Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm's own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.

. Humor (Fiction.) Literature. Fiction. show less

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Eliz12 263 reviews

NOTE: Please note that this review contains language some might find offensive.

I paid full price for this title and planned to attend a book club where it would be discussed. But 50 pages in - I try to give every book 50 pages before tossing it on the DNF pile - and I was already very unhappy.
First problem: The main character, Louise, has to be the most unbearable woman I've ever met in a book. Whining, self-pitying, thoughtless (was I really supposed to think it was funny when her nursing baby bit her and she called out "Motherfucker"?), and dreary.
I had little patience with the book's attitude to Judaism, as well. Having an oppressive mother, labeling the religion "misogynistic," making observant Jews seem gross and insipid: I don't show more know, maybe it would all work out in the end but meanwhile I found myself bored and offended. show less

Jun 19, 2026

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