Breaking Milk

TITLE: Breaking Milk
AUTHOR: Dawn Garisch
PUBLISHER: Karavan Press
REVIEWER: BERYL EICHENBERGER
​ ‘Breaking Milk’ is Dawn’s 7th novel and takes us into the world of protagonist Kate, a former geneticist and now an award winning organic cheese maker, over one seminal day. Her estrangement from her daughter Jess is at the heart of the novel as, on this day, Jess’s conjoined twins will be separated and Jess has forbidden Kate to come to London to be with her.  

​We enter the rooms of Kate’s mind as she wrestles with her inner anguish using her routine chores to cover her turmoil. Making cheese, running the farm and restaurant, dealing with her dementia addled father, a manipulative ex-husband and a besotted neighbour take us step by step through this day in vivid prose. Mothers united in their fear, Kate and Nosisi whose son Luzoko is undergoing initiation, work side by side in silent contemplation.
Highly emotive, the novel is an evocative and thoughtful exploration of confrontations, loss and ultimately acceptance. Incisively Garisch cuts through to the core of motherhood and relationships between humans, animals and the environment and uses all her very impressive skills as a writer, poet, playwright, mother, doctor and member of the medical humanities movement to set the scene. 
Garisch has the vision to show the connections and separations that are part of all our lives. It is a beautifully crafted book with a rhythm that is almost like a heartbeat.