(2 stars - sorry if I sound mean, I

got infected with the nightmare vegan disease

)
Thank you to Thomas & Mercer for providing a digital advance review copy through Netgalley in exchange for this review.

REVIEW
I'm going to be honest: there's not a lot in Mothered that I particularly enjoyed. The pacing, story, prose, and characters were not at all what I want from a horror book. There were exactly two characters I actually liked (which is stretching it, since one of them is a cat) and one horror moment that I found to be memorable and actually creepy. While it was a fast read, if I hadn't gotten this book through Netgalley I almost certainly would have DNF'd it pretty quickly (and that is if I had picked it up at all, since it would have failed the page 99 test).

As it opens and ends the story, I may as well discuss the prologue and epilogue. These two follow a therapist named Silas, who claims he is excited to work with a patient due to the brutality of the murder. It's obfuscated which of the two women, Jackie or Grace, committed homicide. (Keep a pin in this, we'll be returning to it.) Due to this setup, I was assuming that the main bulk of the narrative would be in the narrative frame of a patient speaking to their therapist (a la Frankenstein sharing his story with the captain). It's not. The prologue and epilogue might as well have not been there; they add little to nothing to the narrative and just disappoint me by hinting towards an interesting framing then snatching it away in favor of completely normal close third person.

The completely normal third person was. A Choice. It works fine--I do like close third--but it feels like a strange choice to make after that prologue setup. Why not go with first person? Additionally, the prose in general was rather basic. It was easy to read but not particularly interesting, something that would have been fine if it had been telling a more interesting, cohesive, enjoyable story. But it wasn't, so I'm complaining about it.

The prose also would have been excusable if the characters were enjoyable to read. They weren't. Grace as a protagonist could have been interesting; she has a lot of childhood trauma, but does genuinely try to help those around her, and has the bizarre hobby of catfishing women online, which she describes as intentionally trying to help build their self esteem and improve their lives. The interesting elements of her, however, aren't really fleshed out enough, and what we're left with is not very engaging. Part of that issue is with the dialogue; it is middling at best and stilted, awkward, or shallow at worst. There's not as much of it as one would think for a story about a toxic mother-daughter relationship stuck in close quarters.

The pacing. God, the pacing. The pacing was strange, due to the fact that a bulk of the narrative is dream sequences and

the narrative jumps forward in time rather suddenly between chapter breaks in order to dump the reader into these dreams without indicating that they're dreams. For example, chapter 14 ends with Grace texting her best friend Miguel; chapter 15 begins with her having been hired by her old boss and visiting the new salon space. From that first paragraph, it's obvious that it's a dream, meaning that the reader knows whatever is going to happen isn't real and doesn't really matter. While suddenly jumping from reality to a dream can be a valuable strategy--and it did actually work the first time--after that, since I always knew what the author was trying to pull, I could figure out when a dream sequence was happening pretty quickly.

The pacing during the non-dream segments felt too quick, too, like the narrative was just trying to hurry and get to the next dream sequence.

Finally, for a mystery/thriller novel, it is not very mysterious or thrilling. While there is certainly a hidden past tragedy that is eventually revealed, the actual reveal is... kind of boring. The narrative takes, in my opinion, the most uninteresting route. One example of this, as I mentioned earlier, is

the intentional obfuscation of who killed who. Because the narrative follows Grace in close third person and never follows Jackie or anyone else, that indicates to the reader that she will probably be the one doing the murder, because protagonists don't usually die. However, there is always room for the narrative to turn that on its head and have Jackie be the one doing the murder, or at least have something more complex happen. But, no, that setup of not knowing who dies is never cashed out.

It just follows the most obvious route and calls it a day.

THE DREAMS
I love dreams in horror. There's real potential there in terms of explore unreality, watching the line between waking and dreaming blur, or having one encroach into the other. The premise of having horrible nightmares wasn't the issue. It was the execution.

The horror elements were almost entirely restricted to dreams for the bulk of the narrative. Although there were one or two moments of horror that I found genuinely intriguing, memorable, or creepy (for example,

the "Mona needs a calfskin bag" dream

), most of the rest of them were tropey, predictable, or overdone. While I bought that these dreams were upsetting for the character, they were not particularly upsetting to me (and, in fact, got old fast). The use of dream horror is, to me, something that has to be done subtly, carefully, and sparingly, especially when we have an unreliable protagonist. Grace's dreams are none of those things.

Even the horror of their toxic relationship and the childhood trauma was restricted to these dreams as well; while there are some moments of toxcitiy, gaslighting, or emotional manipulation, the levels of intensity never quite reach the intensity needed to make that final snap that leads to the murder feel satisfying.The few horrifying elements that are outside of the dreams are hallucinations that Grace dismisses as such pretty quickly (and those hallucinations aren't even good ones; they're even tropier than the dreams).

Pretty much all plot development relating to Hope, their familial past, and Grace's anxieties was also done in dreams. The only element of the mystery that we only get from real life was the box. Her relationship with Hope was only ever developed in depth through these dreams. Her mother is, in these dreams, referred to as "Mommy" (something that was offputting and not in a creepy way, just in a vaguely amusing way), and most of their past relationship is worked and explored in them (save for one or two moments where Jackie apologizes for being a bad mother but those conversations are incredibly short and way less in depth than they could have been).

All that said, the dream scenes were far better written than the scenes that took place in reality. If they'd had better connective tissue and were more subtley handled, they could have been very effective. As it is, they're disappointing and overused.

REALITY
From the premise of this book, I was expecting a book about a toxic mother-daughter relationship. I expected the narrative to explore that relationship in-depth and watch it worsen as two people with a complicated relationship are forced to stay together in close quarters for an unknown length of time. I wanted to watch them try to navigate that. I wanted conversations about Grace's childhood! I wanted them to have long conversations that balloon out of control! I wanted a slow build of tension and complex hatred! I wanted gaslighting, damn it!

There were a few times where we got a glimpse of this--for example, the dinner party with Miguel--where there was subtle friction between actions and intention between the two, with some push-and-pull between Grace and her mother. For the most part, though, their interactions were not all that complex, did not have subtextual implications, and were so direct and unnuanced it just was never all that interesting. While Grace certainly had reasons to doubt the reality around her, as a reader, I did not have any reason to believe what she was being told by her mother was untrue.

On all accounts, even down to the title, Mothered is supposed to be about a toxic mother-daughter relationship ending in matricide. However, the mother-daughter relationship isn't what the book is about. It's about:

- A weird disease that causes nightmares about trauma, sleepwalking, an obsession with truth, and turns you vegan.
- Growing up with a single parent and the neglect that resulted from that.
- Having a disabled twin who requires constant attention and care.
- The pandemic, which didn't really work for me. (If it had been a book set during the pandemic, it might have worked. The difference between the two is a bit difficult to explain, but it's something that made a huge difference. Pandemic fiction is hard to write well and usually completely uninteresting to me.)
- An ace woman's relationship with her gay best friend and the ways in which they care deeply for one another.
- A woman who catfishes other woman as a handsome man as a weird hobby, but only because she wants them to sort out their lives.

The book tries to juggle too much in the 300-ish pages it has. As a result, the narrative becomes muddled and shallow, with the titular thematic of mother shoved to the side.

Before I close out, I just want to complain about the whole mystery illness plot point. It's another unnecessary, underdeveloped plot element that muddies the narrative waters even further. The final hook it provides in the epilogue (the therapist is like "oh no I'm having nightmares... just like Grace did!!!") was so cheesy I actually laughed out loud. It became doubly funny when I realized one of the symptoms of the disease is becoming a vegan. I'm sorry, but I genuinely cannot take the narrative seriously enough to be thrilled or frightened.

FINAL THOUGHTS
While I can see why other folks enjoyed this novel, it's absolutely not to my taste when it comes to horror, thriller, or adult fiction. Further, in my opinion, I think it's ineffective in what it's trying to do. I requested Mothered because I always heard such great things about Baby Teeth; unfortunately, I think this has indicated she's not an author for me.

Thank you again to Thomas & Mercer for providing a digital advance review copy through Netgalley.

If you're interested in reading Mothered, it releases March 1, 2023.