The Perfect Mother

It took me a few chapters to settle into this book. At first it was kind of aloof to me - everything in third person, bouncing between different people's perspectives, and providing a bunch of women's names I was having a hard time remembering. But once the ladies go out to the bar, the story picks up. The author did a great job of painting the scene; the fact that there were multiple perspectives and back stories helped to build the mystery and confusion about the turn of events. In fact, after the third chapter I glanced back at the highlights of chapters one and two, and that helped cement the starts of the story-line.

There were times when the reading would get laborious for me because there's 4 different women that are featured, and each woman usually has either her own chapter or chunks of a chapter that are from her viewpoint. This means that several chapters were left on semi cliff-hanger moments with new revelations about respective characters. The problem with that for me was that not every character had the same level of interesting things going on. So some of the chapters felt kind of boring while I was trying to get back to where another character left off.

The book definitely has a twist. However, now that I'm finished with the book, I don't really know how I feel about it. The author brushes over the main characters' back stories - so I kind of felt connected to them, but then also not really. The epilogue felt like it kind of happened in shadow. You have an idea of where things stand, but it felt like it finished it the middle of a thought.

Ah, I wanted to love this book, I really did but I had too many issues with it to overlook them. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad at all, it's just not the best in my opinion. I love psychological thrillers and got this book from The Book of the Month Club a long time ago but it fell short at delivering a fascinating story.

To begin with, I could absolutely NOT get over the style that this book is written in. I find that it completely takes away from the experience and the whole plot since it prevents the book from flowing effortlessly and I found myself going back and rereading some parts to clarify, for example, what was happening to the character at the present moment and what the character was remembering from what happened to them before. I have never had such a hard time deciphering what was in the past and what was in the now.

In continuation, it took a good chunk of the book to get all the characters straight and the fact that the novel jumps around between perspectives quite a bit, I just couldn't get the different characters to stick. This is also probably partially due to the problematic characterization I found because even though the characters all had different lives and backgrounds, there wasn't anything that made them stand out to me and see them as potentially real people.

Furthermore, the plot is decent, perhaps the stronger aspect of the book and I found that I had no idea who the bad guy was and it really did take me by surprise at the end. However, because of the lack of the other aspects, the plot was overshadowed by them and still made it difficult for me to get through this book, even though it is on the rather shorter side.

However, even though the plot makes up for some of the other negatives, the way that the plot was executed is not ideal and whereas the first seventy percent of the book moved extremely slow, the ending was abrupt and too short, not giving us much. It's really a shame because the plot was really a rather good one, just not written in the best way, in my opinion.

All in all, this book was mediocre at best and even though the plot is somewhat decent, there were too many negatives to cancel or even balance it out. I would also be okay with trying another book by Aimee Molloy, however if all the other books are written in the same style I would not be able to get through them, it just irritates me too much. I would not recommend this book, there were just too many problems with the execution even though the plot is a pretty good one.

3/5 Stars

The May Mothers. That's what they call themselves. A group of women who joined together through an online forum, all with due dates in the month of May. They meet weekly at the same park, under the same tree to talk about their babies, their pregnancy, and motherhood. Channeling their pre-baby social lives, some of the women agree to meet at a local bar for a Mom's Night Out. But this MNO takes a turn for the worse when one of the mother's babies goes missing from his crib. Cue the media. Bashing the mothers for “abandoning” their babies at home and stirring up any tidbits of information they can get their hands on to paint the women in a negative light. Mothers Francie, Nell and Collette take matters into their own hands to help solve the mystery of what happened to baby Midas.

One thing I would say that I appreciated most about this book is the way in which the reader really got to know the main characters' personalities and backgrounds. I truly felt as though I had a solid grasp on what the characters are like and how Molloy wanted to portray them. I caught myself sighing, saying “really, Nell would do that!,” almost as if I knew them myself. I will say that I was mislead a few times (although I've found that I'm not the best detective when it comes down to who-done-its), and that the ending was not my favorite. 1) The Mastermind behind the abduction came out of left field and I was genuinely surprised because this person was barely mentioned throughout the book. Also, there's excerpts - almost like thought bubbles - where the narrative switches to first person and the narrator is unknown...until the very end of the book. And 2) the Epilogue almost reminded me of the last scene in Mean Girls - when Cady is looking at the new Plastics and breathing a sigh of relief. Almost as though she paved the way and these newbies don't know what's in store for them.

I heard a lot of mixed reviews on this book. Some loved it while others had wishy-washy opinions on it. Was this my favorite book? No, not really. But was it my least favorite book? Also no, not really. I would rate this a solid 3/5.