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pineconek 's review for:
Motherthing
by Ainslie Hogarth
"But mooooom, it's my turn to use cannibalism as the plot device"
The best part about this book is the cover. What a stellar cover.
I had such high hopes for this book. What adult woman doesn't have a complicated relationship with her mother?? What about her mother in law?? And mother figures she projects onto and is way more attached to than should be healthy??
(Ok I'm projecting)
I really expected to enjoy this but instead found all the narrative and plot choices tedious. The nonlinear narrative that opens up with the MIL's suicide described in a "I'm gonna make every sentence exquisite" kind of way truly backfired for me. I found myself distracted by reading and truly not caring about our main character.
Abigail was remarkably uninteresting in her narcissism, which is a strange sentence to say. She was incapable of empathizing with any of the other characters, casting them instead as extreme caricatures, but this meant that we also didn't get to actually experience these characters. We got the tiniest glimpses into the actions of Ralph the husband, Laura the dead MIL, Mrs Bondy the mother figures, and Janet the mother figures evil neglectful daughter.
The most interesting parts of the book were the contrasts between who these people truly were (shown in small details here and there, such as Janet having the codependency bible on her bedside table) and how Abby saw them... And they were so few and far between.
And there was no haunting. The basement and shower scenes were so familiar but similarly left me wanting. So here I was, 85% into the book, wanting Something... And we got some run-of-the-mill cannibalism.
I read a bunch of one star reviews of this before writing mine, and want to emphasize that this isn't a "eww this book was gross" review. I love me a gross book. What annoyed me most was that this book tried to be Chuck Palahniuk meets Sayaka Murata meets some weird commentary on mental health and family dynamics that pales with what I've seen done in modern horror by Paul Tremblay, or Grady Hendrix (controversial, I know), or even Stephen Graham Jones.
Anywayyyy. I don't love writing a long one star review after spending a week wrestling with a book I was desperate to enjoy. But I want to remember why I didn't enjoy it.
More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/CQjXPtxuYVo
The best part about this book is the cover. What a stellar cover.
I had such high hopes for this book. What adult woman doesn't have a complicated relationship with her mother?? What about her mother in law?? And mother figures she projects onto and is way more attached to than should be healthy??
(Ok I'm projecting)
I really expected to enjoy this but instead found all the narrative and plot choices tedious. The nonlinear narrative that opens up with the MIL's suicide described in a "I'm gonna make every sentence exquisite" kind of way truly backfired for me. I found myself distracted by reading and truly not caring about our main character.
Abigail was remarkably uninteresting in her narcissism, which is a strange sentence to say. She was incapable of empathizing with any of the other characters, casting them instead as extreme caricatures, but this meant that we also didn't get to actually experience these characters. We got the tiniest glimpses into the actions of Ralph the husband, Laura the dead MIL, Mrs Bondy the mother figures, and Janet the mother figures evil neglectful daughter.
The most interesting parts of the book were the contrasts between who these people truly were (shown in small details here and there, such as Janet having the codependency bible on her bedside table) and how Abby saw them... And they were so few and far between.
And there was no haunting. The basement and shower scenes were so familiar but similarly left me wanting. So here I was, 85% into the book, wanting Something... And we got some run-of-the-mill cannibalism.
I read a bunch of one star reviews of this before writing mine, and want to emphasize that this isn't a "eww this book was gross" review. I love me a gross book. What annoyed me most was that this book tried to be Chuck Palahniuk meets Sayaka Murata meets some weird commentary on mental health and family dynamics that pales with what I've seen done in modern horror by Paul Tremblay, or Grady Hendrix (controversial, I know), or even Stephen Graham Jones.
Anywayyyy. I don't love writing a long one star review after spending a week wrestling with a book I was desperate to enjoy. But I want to remember why I didn't enjoy it.
More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/CQjXPtxuYVo