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Just Like Mother

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Just Like Mother

By: Anne Heltzel
Narrated by: Regina Reagan
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About this listen

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything - and everyone - at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had. Soon she's spending more and more time at Andrea's remote Catskills estate, not minding that her cousin's wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry - baby fever comes with the territory.

What worries Maeve is that the more she immerses herself in Andrea's world, the more her long-buried memories flood to the surface. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come...

©2022 Anne Heltzel (P)2023 Isis Audio Domestic Thrillers Horror Psychological Thriller & Suspense Scary Suspense Fiction
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This fast paced modern gothic read offers up the opportunity of some incredibly broad & dynamic plot points that could have been employed more rigorously given the author has already attempted to handle themes of: second wave feminism & criticism of such, general female autonomy, a woman’s right to manage her own family planning, abortion/abortion as healthcare, antenatal mental illness, pregnancy, child birth, parenting, emotional and cognitive labour division/allocation within a family, inappropriate (& gratuitous) and incorrect depictions of other mental health issues, the commercialisation of healthcare, tech in healthcare & criticism of such, the ‘wellness’ industry, family and relationship violence (including coercive control), surveillance of the female body in society & employed in coercive control, financial abuse, depiction of living within a cult as a child, psychosocial life outcomes for ex-child cult members, living within a cult as an adult, self harm, typical horror genre murder, body horror & gratuitous gore and even worse, gratuitous trauma based sexual ‘kink’ in abused women (the last few themes are not so much indicative of promising plot points, but rather a check list for lazy suspense and thriller writers who sacrifice good plot for ‘trauma porn’ - yuck!)
However, despite the cheap thrills of ‘trauma porn’, many of the above mentioned themes sparkle out from within a very sparse plot driven text like un-mined gold seams. You can briefly see the possibility for the book to take a sudden change in direction, depth or tone. You can see the book it could have been - if perhaps some of the more challenging themes were handled more sensitively, or some of the other themes, such as exploring identity, autonomy and alienation from the self during pregnancy and the first years of parenting, the growing commodification of the ‘pregnant woman’ in both the commerce based healthcare industry (Hello Big Pharma!) and the ‘wellness’ industry form part of the backbone for the novel’s plot, along with the development of proprietary tech that folds nicely into preparing for the arrival of a new baby, or the terrible grief and loss of another. Surprisingly this tech, while espoused as central to the plot and always sitting around on the side lines with behaviour and dialogue that makes little sense, makes only a very little appearance in the novel and is in fact
*%* Spoiler Alert *%* just a red herring that actually leads to a plot twist that if you cannot see it coming from early chapters in the book, then perhaps this was actually the book for you after all. Whereas there were so many opportunities to make this tech absolutely terrifying/horrifying if you actually examine the psychological programming that had been planned for its role out. And we are not completely spoiled by tech horror tropes yet. This could have been possible, but again it feels like missed opportunities only serve to highlight just how many clichés and tropes the plot relies upon; and just how little exposition and world building the author has attempted.

Rather predictable modern gothic styling gone wrong.

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