Hello friends! Welcome to another book review! 🌸 Today’s book is a nerve-wracking thriller from Aimee Molloy. It has been a while since I’ve read a thriller, and I will be honest with you, I didn’t like it as much as I liked thrillers in my high-school age. Back then in middle school, one of my closest friends was actually my neighbour, she was my mother’s friend (also mine) and she gave me lots of horror/thriller books to read; every week at least 2 times I was in her home, playing with his son and reading books because my mother would work late. It was great to have her, and she is still one of my favourite human beings on the entire planet. I owe so much to her, regarding my love of books, games, and accepting the weird person I am, and she is like a mother to me. A mother who would encourage me to read more and more. (If you read this, I love you Ayça Teyzem! ❤️)
Thanks to her, I have had my fair share of thrillers in the past, but eventually as I grew older, thriller and horror books ended up becoming less and less frequent in my TBR lists. However, this was a nice change from my usual erotica/romance books. It wasn’t a ground-shaking book for me because I am so used to thrillers in this form, although I didn’t have a name throughout the book I knew what was going to happen. I knew how this book was going to end and although I knew what would happen it didn’t really bother me.
This book follows new mothers, by new mothers, I mean new mothers who recently gave birth to their children. These women met during their pregnancy from a website, and they decided to meet up twice a week in a park to share how they were feeling. I wouldn’t understand this, but I guess pregnancy leaves the future mother kind of alone no matter what kind of partner you have, there are things that you cannot share with your significant other because they are simply not equipped to understand the situation you are in. The book follows these women who are going to give birth and we look through their stories little by little on every page.
We do not have a main character, but we have two different narrators in the book. One of them is first person singular and the other one is a third person narrator which helps you to understand what is going on with these characters who have “above the head narrative”. The first-person narrator is not very obvious until the middle of the book because you think that it is the mother of the child who got lost but eventually you figure out that it is something completely else. I rather not spoil this part to you because you may not be open to a spoiler like that but I would say that I liked the narrators in the book. What I didn’t like about this style of writing was that it was all over the place. And I’m not talking about the writing style, I am talking about the format of the book. Although we see three different characters in the third person singular narrator the changes between characters are not divided very well. The characters didn’t have respective space between each other and it made it very hard even for me to understand which characters started and ended at what point. And I think this took away from the originality of this type of narrative in the book. We do not really see narrator changes in modern books and she made this very well however the format of the book actually destroyed this intended purpose.
Characters weren’t as superficial as I thought they would be because we did have some background of them as the book progressed, and we saw a very beautiful symbolisation of society’s bias over new mothers and their respective mother roles. All our characters ended up being part of some sort of gossip and their photographs got leaked which showed us how society is prejudiced among first-time mothers and how they should be mothering their children.
This was very heartbreaking to read because although the plot was very intriguing the fact that these women had to deal with the child loss of one of their friends, but also, they had to deal with the unrealistic expectations that society put on their shoulders. I think this was the main reason that I considered this book good not the fact that it was a thriller, or it had a very different type of plot. It showed a very nice representation of how we see women, and how unjustified some things are. Also, it will be given at the end of the book but dealing with child loss is not something that one person can understand until they must go through something like this. Throughout the book, we have this lost baby Midas, but also, we see the grave of a mother who is never going to be able to get her baby back.
Overall, I think this was a nice book that you can give it a chance for but instead of reading this as a heartbreaking thriller, I think the underlying messages in the book make more sense and bring more pleasure to read and realization. This book was 3⭐s for me and if you like deep messages in thrillers, do give it a chance.
Until I see you in my next post, bye! ✨
Luster of Books 
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