Every mother is a nightmare
DESTINED to put rocket fuel into Zoom-bound book clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, this propulsive psychological thriller from Canada is first out of the blocks in a new-year salvo of so-called ‘mum noir’ novels exploring the uglier side of motherhood.
In the opening pages we find the narrator, Blythe, spying on her ex-husband as he enjoys Christmas at home with their teenage daughter, Violet, and his son with a new woman. What follows is Blythe’s account of how this came to be – a painful tale of breakdown precipitated by the death of her second child, Sam, run over in his pushchair while Blythe was crossing a road, coffee in hand, with Violet, then aged seven.
Yet life prior to that shattering grief was hardly idyllic, with Blythe’s marriage riven by tension over her conviction that
Violet despises her – a notion dismissed as a mere projection of Blythe’s troubles with her own mother.
The stage is set for a slick page-turner of betrayal and maternal ambivalence, with pungent dispatches from the front line of domestic drudgery pegged to a nightmare ‘what-if?’ scenario no parent would wish to imagine.
There’s a jolt of straight-up horror in the furtively demonic machinations of innocent-seeming Violet, her name subliminally nudging us to think ‘violent’ – or is that just Blythe’s delusions talking? Audrain (left) keeps all possibilities in play until a double-bluff gotcha ending lands with a gut punch. If doubts linger about the depth of the book’s interest in the issues it exploits, there’s no denying the dark magnetism of its live-wire plot.