The Perfect Mother

I was on the hunt for an audiobook and asked my book club if they had a favorite and several ladies said that I would enjoy, The Perfect Mother. As always, they were right and this was a wonderful thriller to listen to this summer.

The May Mothers are a local mom's group that meet twice a week at the park to share their challenges with new motherhood. The ladies have yet to socialize outside of this though so they decide to meet at a hip bar in town for drinks to get to know each other better and get a break from their babies.

Winnie, a single mother, is reluctant to leave her child for the outing, but is convinced that this will be a good move to get away for a bit and relax. Her child is kidnapped though and Winnie, an extremely private person, finds that her whole life has been opened up for the whole world to see.

Though none of the moms are close, they all go to risky lengths to try to help find her son. Told from alternating perspectives, each mother is carrying a few secrets of her own and as the police begin to uncover them, they began to wonder if one of these ladies just might be involved.

I am picky about my thrillers and this one delivered for a light summer thriller that had me guessing the whodunit through a good portion of this story. This is a great one to add to your beach bag this summer. The narrator also was fantastic on the audiobook, if you prefer to listen to your books!

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.