The story is told from the viewpoint of Marianne in the present and then when she was seventeen, from the viewpoint of Helen from the time she was a teenager until her eighties, and from the viewpoint of Honor, Marianne's daughter, in the present. During the first section of the book, I was having a hard time getting into the book but once we got to Marianne's younger years, getting more background to the story made it more interesting, and then by the time we got to Helen's viewpoint, I was hooked. Helen's story is a sad one but I had trouble deciding if her cold parents led to Helen's inability to connect with people or if she would have been that way anyway. Whatever the case, what happened to Helen when she was young, was the catalyst for the things that happen later in the book.

A lot of the story takes place in and on the grounds of an old asylum, while it was still in use as an asylum, while it was a decrepit and dangerous mess of rubble, and lastly rebuilt as luxury apartments and cottages. A young Marianne and her young boyfriend Jesse, blackmail politician Helen and this leads to the three being tied to each other for decades to come. So many lies tie them together and each are haunted by what happened in the past and the secrets that they try to keep under wraps. The character of Helen intrigued me the most but for all she had in her life and all she accomplished, the fact that she could not connect with other people meant she had nothing at all.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.

I’m so glad I was able to get my hands on this ARC of “Stone Mothers” by Erin Kelly. Even though Marianne thought that what happened at Nazareth Mental Hospital was long buried in her past, all it takes is one gesture from her husband to bring it to the surface. Some things don’t stay buried forever.

I really liked this book but I don’t know if the different sections of time and character point of views worked for me. It felt jumpy and I wondered if there was a way to have streamlined it more effectively. Especially with that transition into the daughter’s voice and how quickly the action sped up at the end. Parts of it felt choppy, for sure.

I don’t know what the author’s intentions toward Helen Greenlaw were (in terms of painting her as a villain) but I just felt sad for her. All she wanted was to pursue her ambition and she was thwarted at every turn. That’s how I felt about Marianne too, until she made a break from her relationship and pursued her goals. Overall, I think fans of Erin Kelly and “He Said/She Said” will enjoy this book. (This book was 3.5 stars for me but I rounded up since I liked it overall).

Marianne was doing well for herself. She’s been married for 25 years to a wonderful and understanding man. Her daughter, who is mentally ill, hasn’t had an episode in over a year. Life is good. Then her husband surprises her with a trip to her home village of Nusstead. A place she has rarely gone back to since she left at 17. A place where a death occurred and was covered up.

Her happy life is in jeopardy when her ex-boyfriend threatens to expose her secret about what happened at the Nazareth Hospital.Marianne is forced to join forces with the only other person who knows what happened that night. But Helen has her motivation for aligning with Marianne. She has her secrets, and she is willing to do whatever it takes to keep those secrets from coming out.

When I started reading Stone Mothers, I thought that this was going to be a quick book to read. A book with an easy plotline to follow. One I could keep track of the main characters. An interesting book that would keep my attention. Unfortunately, Stone Mothers only hit two out of the three for me.

The Stone Mothers had two significant plotlines. I had a hard time following Marianne’s plotline. It was all over the place. It could be present day then morph back to the ‘80s and then again to the present day. It drove me nuts.

I found myself wondering when the colossal secret was going to be revealed and what it was. It was alluded to in Marianne’s plotline often, but it wasn’t explain until halfway through the book. At that point, I was so irritated by the constant flashbacks that I didn’t care about the secret.

Helen’s plotline was wonderfully written. It stayed in chronological order. There were none of the bouncings around that made Marianne’s plotline so hard to read. As weird as this sounds, I thought that Helen’s plotline was written better.

I do think that Helen’s plotline should have been first in the book. That way there would be no confusion about what was going on. Also, I would have liked to see Marianne’s stay in chronological order. No bouncing around. It would have made the book much easier to read.

I did like that the author got into the history of how the mentally ill were treated in England. It was eye-opening what was considered mentally ill back then. Husband beating you. Mentally ill. Gay or Lesbian. Mentally ill. Someone who was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Mentally ill. A woman who wanted to get an abortion. Mentally ill. I could go on and on. It disgusted me.

I was horrified by how the mentally ill people were treated in the book. The treatments that they were put through were illegal and awful. How the staff managed the patients were horrible. Sure, there were a few that were nice, but they were few and far between. Most of the time, the staff was abusive towards the patients.

I liked also explored what it was like when those hospitals shut down. Unfortunately, what the book showed is the truth. I grew up about 10ish miles from a state hospital (Danvers State). They closed down in the mid- ‘80s. With nowhere to go, they put a bunch of patients out on the street. I remember not being allowed to play outside the summer it happened because my mother was terrified. She used to work there, and she said that there were sick people in there. People that shouldn’t have been allowed back on the street but were there because of cutbacks and lack of funding. So, what happened in Stone Mothers, I could believe.

I did like how the author was able to show how far treating mental illness has come. Marianne’s daughter had her struggles with mental illness. She was functioning because of therapy and medication. The stigma of having a mental illness has lessened but is still there. In this book, it shows how far it has come and how far there is still left to go.

I couldn’t get a feel for Marianne during the first half of the book. She did come off as having an “I am better than you” attitude. I didn’t understand her reaction to having an apartment bought for her until later in the book. Up until then, I thought she was an ungrateful snot. I also didn’t understand her codependent relationship with Jesse. It wasn’t explained until much later in the book. I did come to respect her towards the end of the book. Everything she did was for the love of her daughter.

I did not like Jesse. I did feel bad for him when everything happened with Clay. But other than that, nope. Didn’t like him. His identity was so wrapped up in Marianne’s that he didn’t know what to do when she broke it off. His behavior was erratic from the middle of the book on. By the end of the book, he scared me.

Helen was the only one out of the three that I liked. She worked hard to become who she was. While she had an outward facade of not caring, she did. As for her story, I am not going to go into it. All I have to say is that she deserved most of the stuff that happened in the book.

I didn’t feel that Stone Mothers was a good fit in with the thriller category. There was no thrill. Because of Marianne’s plotline jumping around, I never got that feeling.

As for the mystery/suspense categories, I was kind of eh. I felt that the plot moved too slow and jumped around too much for any suspense to be built. The mystery angle was also eh. I couldn’t get into it because of Marianne’s plotline jumping around.

There was a lag in the plotline about halfway through the book. The author was able to bring the book back on track. There was also the matter of dropped characters and insinuated plotlines. The way the book set up a particular character, I thought that she was the one killed. But, nothing else was mentioned about her until the end of the book. And it turned out to be different than what I thought. I went back and reread that passages to make sure I wasn’t confusing things.

The end of Stone Mothers seemed rushed. I wasn’t expecting what happened. It was also mentioned that something happened to another main character. Then that character was brought back into the book. I did like that it was from Honor’s POV. I liked that I was given an outsider’s perspective on the whole cluster. Still, I was left wanting at how the book ended.

I would give Stone Mothers an Older Teen rating. There are mentions of sex but the deed itself was never talked about. There is violence. There is language. I would recommend that no one under the age of 16 read this book.

I am on the fence if I would reread Stone Mothers. I am also on the fence if I would recommend it to family and friends.

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**

I would like to thank the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Stone Mothers.

All opinions stated in this review of Stone Mothers are mine.

Have you read Stone Mothers?

What was your thoughts about it?

Let me know

Thank you NetGalley and Publisher for this early copy!

I went into this was pleasantry surprised how well-written and suspenseful it was. Kelly did a great job with her characters and keeping you reading until the end. I will be checking out more from this author. I recommend fans of psychological thrillers to check out this new well-crafted one!

What a great atmospheric book this was. The old mental hospital was such a character in and of itself. It thrilled me with it’s eerie and very creepiness and the stories it held within its walls. And as the story goes along and we discover just what did take place there, well it made me find it even darker and scarier than I already did. And I loved every minute of it!

This is one of those books where the setting and the place take just as much credit for the fabulousness of the book. And the characters were so well written, so fleshed out, that I felt like I knew them and was friends with some and definitely not with others.

I highly recommend this book to lovers of psychological suspense, brilliant mysteries and writing that puts you right in the scene and keeps you there for a long time to come. I found this one to be fabulous.

Thank you to NetGalley, Erin Kelly and St Martins Press for the free e-book in exchange for an honest review.

Marianne was just a young woman when she fled her hometown of Nusstead, abandoning her family and her boyfriend at the time Jesse. Now three decades later, she has to return to care for her sick mother and Jesse, who never quite got over her, is threatening to expose the reason she fled. Marianne will do whatever she needs to make sure her daughter never finds out, even if it means making an ally of her worst enemy.

I am not going to lie, the beginning of the book through Marianne’s perspective of the present was slightly disappointing to me because I was often confused by what was going on and why Jesse was such a evil in Marianne’s eyes. The rest of the novel was in the past mostly and it was told from Marianne’s, Jesse’s and Helen’s perspectives and I lapped it up! I really loved that and how we see how their pasts all come together and how different their lives growing up were. We could then see what the motives were for each character in hat happened in the past and that for me was so interesting! I loved the ending and how it all got wrapped up with a neat little bow and how what you really assume is about to happen, actually doesn’t!

Out April 23rd.

"The Victorians used to call their mental hospitals stone mothers. They thought the design of the building could literally nurse the sick back to health."

Erin Kelly is an elegant writer. Her prose is undeniably British, with that lack of melodrama that I enjoy. While I think He Said/She Said was stronger, Stone Mothers is very good. It doesn’t have the narrative hook that HS/SS had, with the alternating stories and unreliable narrators. But what it does have is a dark current running underneath, like a subterranean river about to offer something rotten from its depths.

Told in three parts, Stone Mothers is, at its core, about a decaying town, fighting for its own survival after the gutting of its central hospital. Nusstead reminds me of the Welsh mining communities after Margaret Thatcher destroyed the profession and closed the mines. Utter desolation and desperation. Fractured families. Men left to drink and despair. Women attempting to pick up the pieces. Children running wild, or worse, trying to raise their smaller siblings while their parents dissolve. It’s stark, and realistic, and Nusstead is very much a character in the novel, much like the old asylum, the ‘stone mother’ of titular fame.

It begins when Marianne’s husband buys her a flat. Drawn back to her hometown after her mother develops dementia, Marianne is nonetheless shocked and very much appalled by her husband’s gift. The flat has been converted from the ruins of the old mental hospital in the town, and the dark walls hold memories that Marianne would very much like to forget. When her ex-boyfriend Jesse – emboldened and triggered by her arrival back into his life – threatens to upend the secrets they’ve kept for so long, Marianne feels driven to protect the fragility of her family.

She approaches an old enemy, Helen Greenlaw, she who closed the hospital and sent Nusstead into the realm of miserable towns without a purpose, without a core. Now a peer in the House of Lords, Helen wields more power than ever – except when it comes to what Marianne and Jesse know. Cold and unfeeling, Helen appears ready to do anything to protect her own secrets, perhaps – even kill.

While the action is slow to unfold, the noose that seems to tighten around Marianne is unflinching, and I felt my own throat closing from the tightness of the writing. By the time we hear from Helen and take a dark walk through her past, I was absolutely riveted. There are characters I thought I’d like but ended up loathing, and one particular character that just reached in and wouldn’t let go. Her quintessential Britishness, that stiff upper lip, that survival spirit, the get-up-and-go. The utter tsunami of emotion disguised as cruelty or ennui. God. It tore at my heart.

In the end, Stone Mothers examines the true cost of the choices we make. Even when they seem right, or just, or like they heal an old wrong, there are still consequences, rippling out from that underground river, waiting to be borne into the light.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

This novel started off way too slowly for my taste and didn't pick up up until a third of the way in. I think the past story would have been more effectively told if it was interspersed through the narrative. That said, the story was ultimately interesting.

A intense story that started slow for me.,
It was a little hard to follow at first, more than half way through it started to make more sense and became more interesting. I thought it was just ok. I think I’ve read too many similar books lately.

I’m almost afraid to write this review. Stone Mothers, by Erin Kelly, begins as a slow burn before igniting after the first of multiple key twists. I’m worried that I might reveal too much and ruin the whole experience. This book is layered with plot, tension, and secrets. I want to gush about it, but I have to keep some of those secrets for other readers. Because I really hope that this book has a lot of readers. It is one of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long while.

Stone Mothers opens in 2018, when Marianne receives an unpleasant surprise from her loving husband. He has no idea that his purchasing an apartment in Royal Park, Nusstead, would be an unpleasant surprise, even though the place used to be an asylum and someone was murdered there years ago. It’s not the building’s history that worries Marianne—at least, not the history people know from the news. Marianne slowly reveals her past in Nusstead and why she is terror-stricken at the thought of moving back there. The least of it is that being in Nusstead means that she’s much more likely to run into her teenage boyfriend, Jesse. She and Jesse have been holding a secret for decades and it seems that Jesse is starting to wobble.

The second third of Stone Mothers jumps back to 1988, when Marianne was still a teen, Royal Park was still an asylum, and Jesse and his entire family were campaigning against the closure of the asylum. Almost everyone worked at the asylum in one way or another, but the 1980s in England were the home of Thatcherism. Almost anything that receives government funding is on notice for downsizing or closure. The Nusstead Asylum has already been shutdown by the full-steam-ahead Helen Greenlaw, a rising administrator who refuses to hear any argument to reopen the asylum. But when Marianne discovers some old hospital records, purely by accident, that hint at a deadly secret held by Helen, she hatches a plan with Jesse that almost immediately gets out of control.

The last third jumps back even further in time, to 1958, when young Helen Morris was incarcerated at the asylum under terrible circumstances. This section reads almost like a completely different novel. This third, unlike the very-much-a-thriller first two-thirds, is almost Victorian in the way that the asylum is portrayed. That said, this third rejoins the first parts of the novel in spectacular fashion after giving us Helen’s story. The last chapters bring us back to the present. They give us a front row seat to the incredible conclusion of decades of plots.

By the time we learn everyone’s secrets, all of our ideas about who is a hero and who is a villain have been completely turned on their head. I loved every chapter because it took me further down the rabbit hole. In Stone Mothers, secrets are preceded by misunderstandings that are worse than the secrets. This novel is the story of a group of people who make mistakes, then compound them by trying to keep their secrets. Every step they make is perfectly logical; and every step they make is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The formatting on my version is completely messed up. Unfortunately I can’t read this even though I tried—it’s too jumbled. Not clear to me if anyone else had this problem. I’d be happy to read and review a version with correct formatting. I enjoyed what I read and am still giving it four stars for the opening chapter, which sucked me in. Too bad the formatting made it impossible to continue (I’m talking random like breaks, no paragraphs, chapter titles randomly appearing in the middle of sentences, numbers randomly appearing in the middle of text. This is no way reflects on the quality of the novel and I’m disappointed not to finish it)

3.5 stars

Secrets: Everyone has them. Some, are best kept hidden!

Nazareth: It’s an eerie place. Creepy, dark and downright scary - it’s not a place I’d ever want to visit.

Marianne and Jess were sweethearts once. Then Marianne ran off. Jesse always believed that he got the short end of the stick. That makes him a desperate man.

Nowadays, Helen Greenlaw is extremely successful - and yet she is always afraid that the walls are going to come crashing down. Meanwhile, Marianne’s husband Sam, has quite the surprise planned, which makes Marianne scared straight.

The ties that bind these three are oh so complicated when the past and the present collide! “Stone Mothers” is novel that features different narrators - with Helen being my favorite as I felt her story was the strongest and found her character to be quite intriguing. Having read a few of Erin Kelly’s novels, I think this was one had a different feel to it than her others - it was slow to start and then it took off, and that was thanks to Helen who stole the show. To be perfectly honest, the creepy, dark atmosphere of this one gave me the chills. I have a feeling that once you take a deep dive into “Stone Mothers” you’ll react the same way!

This was another buddy read with Kaceey!

Thank you to Allison Ziegler at Minotaur Books and to Erin Kelley for an arc of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Published on Goodreads on 3.24.19.
Will be published on Amazon on 4.23.19.

I hate it when I do not really enjoy a book and have to post an honest review. The last thing I want is to hurt anyone's feelings. But I did not really like this book. Which is disappointing since I really enjoyed her last book. It was very slow and unlike her other book, no dramatic twist at the end to wrap it all up for you. So, my apologies to the author. But this is just my opinion, I am sure other people will read it and love it. You make the call.

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to review Stone Mothers. I loved the synopsis of this story so I jumped on it. Sadly, I found it so slow and hard to get into. Some characters seemed underdeveloped for my taste and the ending left me wanting more. While this is the first book by Erin Kelly I have read, I had heard many positive things about her other books so wanted to give this one a try. Sadly, it fell a little short. A story about an insane asylum and blackmail, it had all the promises of a great read.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I was so excited to receive this one, because I loved Erin Kelly’s He Said/She Said. Unfortunately, this one did not really work for me.

I loved the premise of the book, and learning so much about the sad state of how mental illness was treated was so interesting. The characters were all complex and multi-dimensional.

But the pacing, to me, was off. The book really dragged at times and didn’t read fluidly. There were some things that didn’t seem to fit or make sense. And the ending was unsatisfying and almost confusing to me.

I seem to be in the minority based on the reviews, and I definitely think Kelly is an incredibly talented writer and most will really like this one. It just wasn’t for me.

This book is very well written. It pulled me in almost right away and kept me interested until the very end. I will definitely be recommending this to the customers at my work!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for this ARC.

Erin Kelly does it again. What a deep, dark, muddy thriller. So well written, deeply felt and wonderfully gothic. I loved the characters, I loved the history and the grit. I fell so hard for He Said/She Said and this one was just as good. A turbulent first love, dark secrets and fragile characters. I highly recommend this one.

I was super excited to read this book. I loved the synopsis and the title. I mean Hello Stone Mothers. That in itself sucked me in. This is my first Emily Kelly read. I was a little disappointed because I was waiting for the big Ooooh moment and it wasn't there for me. This read was also very slow and I felt myself losing interest in the story. I am on the fence of a 2 star rating and 3 star rating...so I am going with a 2.5

Can three keep a secret? Over the course of 30 years we find out how difficult that is. While the story centers around an old insane asylum, we are introduced to three families who are inextricably tied to this place of ruin. What price insanity and who gets to decide?

Not a psychological thriller but more of a domestic drama. Three and a half stars.

Marianne and Jesse are teenagers in love. They live in a small town that had an economy based on employment at the "insane asylum". After the hospital closes, many of the townspeople have been left without a way to make a decent living. Jesse and Marianne spend their days wandering around the facility when they find out a secret about someone that had been hospitalized years ago - someone in power. They decide to blackmail this person, which leads to many other consequences that changes their lives.
This book goes back and forth from the different character's perspectives and it also goes back in time to the 1950's when mental health was treated much differently than today and women especially had a tough time.
If you are a Kelly fan, I think this is a different kind of book than her usual fare. There's not really much "mystery" here, and the last half of the book was really my favorite. Helen's story was riveting and heartbreaking. Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for a review.