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Feb 16, 2021carolwu96 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Although I never liked children and decided against reproduction a long time ago, I have been reevaluating this decision recently. I will save you the philosophical and pragmatic musings, but will say that such contemplations are the reasons for which I was intrigued by the motherhood-gone-wrong premise of the book. For all the women who tout the mother-child bond as the happiest surprise, there have to be a few who lack such a connection. What happens to them? ⁣ ⁣ The protagonists, Blythe, is the daughter of such a mother. Abandoned at a young age, she is resolved to reject motherhood herself but eventually yields to the expectations of the love of her life. Yet her daughter is sinister from the beginning, and the story takes a thrilling turn as Blythe realizes that the biggest tragedy of her life may have been of this daughter’s doing. ⁣ ⁣ As multiple narratives intersect, the reader begins to suspect that Blythe might not be the most reliable narrator. This is the mystery that keeps us on our toes until the very end, through Blythe’s battles against her own unhealed childhood trauma, her efforts to become a perfect mother, and their consequences in the face of an uncomprehending husband and other truly blithe (in its original meaning) mothers. ⁣ ⁣ For this reason, when the answer is finally revealed, it, anticlimatically, no longer seems so important. As someone told me before I began this book, it is really difficult to point to a single character as the source of the tragedy. And that is my favorite aspect of this book——similar to in real life, familial disintegrations are often the culmination of myriad factors, but one mistake that sits at the heart of many characters’ unhingements is that, to which the author skillfully alludes in a seemingly tangential plot development, they have taken “too long to speak.”