Motherthing is a dark look into the lives of bad mothers and the effect they have on their children oft times through multiple generations. Author Ainslie Hogarth tried to wrap this tragedy in humor, but it fell flat, mainly because it truly a story about survival and failure to thrive. It’s hard to wrap that in humor.

The book takes place entirely in the head of Abby, a victim of emotional child abuse. She basically had no connection with her mother and mom’s revolving door of disastrous love affairs. Abby was left to seek her own comfort that she found in the soft, cushy sofa she named “Couchy”. Couchy remained a character throughout the book representing the benchmark of good mothering.

Abby eventually marries a momma’s boy named Ralph who seems to have grown up under the constant threat of his mother’s see-saw moods and threats of suicide. The marriage was precarious from the start and the novel opens in a hospital with the couple hearing the news of the inevitable: mom’s suicide attempt was successful.

The novel meanders from neighbors to Abby’s job at an elder care facility introducing more and more characters who all seem to be or have had unhealthy and damaging relationships with mothers. The author addresses mothers past, present and future. The angst and torment reaches an unbelievable crescendo which left this reader with a head shake and an eye roll. This could have been a much better novel if the author didn’t feel that “gross out” equaled humor. Maybe a novel aimed for the teenage boy demographic would be a better forte.

Thank you #NetGalley, #VintageBooks, for this ARC

This dark comedic horror book is not going to be for everyone, but it was definitely for me. Oh my god. I LOVED this book! This was such a fantastic experience, it was dark, funny, quirky, and creepy. I recommend to anyone, who like myself, loves a good unhinged wild ride.
BIG thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This was very interesting as a concept & I was eager to see where it'd go, although I will say that it was a little slow to start. The build up eventually did lead somewhere and there were a few comedic moments throughout, but for something with a ~haunting~ in it, I think I wanted just a *little bit more*. I'll definitely be checking out more from the author in the future!

This was such a delightfully bizarre, and darkly humorous read, and I loved every moment of it.

When Abby and her husband, Ralph, move in with Ralph's mother, Abby views it as an opportunity to bond with her mother-in-law and to finally have a mother figure (a motherthing) who will love her, having had an unstable childhood and not much of a mother herself. Instead, what Abby gets is a cruel and manipulative mother-in-law, Laura, who will never approve of her or shy away from a chance to undermine her or cut her down, resentful of Abby and wanting to be the sole recipient of her son's attention.

After Laura commits suicide, Abby believes that it could be a fresh start for her and Ralph, but Laura haunts them both, sending Abby on a desperate quest to save her husband.

Abby was such an outrageous character, and I couldn't help but to feel for her, and I even found myself relating to her at times.

I really enjoyed the writing style of this book, and I thought that Abby and Ralph were brilliant together. Also, that cover! It might just be one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

So this was not what I was expecting but in the weirdest and best way. It was challenging and twisted and funny and sad. It was definitely a mother in law. I just really was thinking it was going one way and then boom it all changes. Okay I am sure I am making no sense just read it and see.

I really wish I could have loved this book as the concept behind it is brilliant. It felt like it took ages for anything to happen especially in regards to the haunting. I kept wondering when it would finally pick up.
I know the book has been pitched as a dark comedy but i found very few genuinely amusing moments. The characters were just too unlikeable for me and I really didn't mind if they were left haunted by the dead mother/mother in law for the rest of the book. The writing is good in terms of the descriptions and there was a few sections that I enjoyed.
Overall I was left disappointed as I think there could have been so much more. It just wasn't very readable for me.

If you’re looking for a spooky ghost story, this isn’t it. BUT if you’re looking for dark comedy, this will definitely do the trick.

All Abby wants is a normal family, with her super good husband and the baby she’s been longing for. After a rough childhood, rotten relationship with her own mother and complicated relationship with her mother-in-law, Abby is dead-set on becoming a mother herself. But she can’t do that, not while the ghost of her recently deceased mother-in-law is haunting her home, her thoughts and her husband and really making moving forward in normalcy impossible. Needless to say, Abby is willing to do whatever she can to get rid of her and get back on track.

I did not anticipate the ending, and it only made me love the whole story more. I laughed way more times in this book than I would admit considering the subject matter, but Ainslie Hogarth is a genius.

I can’t wait for this book to come out because that cover is everything.


Thank you Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for approving me for a digital arc of this book.

Thank you to Netgalley for sending me an ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

*sigh* I really really wanted to like this book, and I tried my hardest but... it was so disappointing. Right off the bat, the writing style made me cringe. You are slapped in the face with metaphors and purple prose in every paragraph. I generally like a good metaphor but hate it when every single description or action has a metaphor attached. Abby is a deeply unlikable character who comes off as incredibly selfish and immature. I found myself rooting for the mother in law ghost. Through most of this book, I ended up skimming through paragraphs just to speed it up and get it over with.

That being said, I know there are plenty of other readers out there who will love this book. If you like unhinged girl horror comedy and lots of metaphors this is the book for you! The cover is fantastic too. Very retro horror vibes and I love that.

It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book as well as those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters which contain reflections on the sexual endangerment of a minor, suicidal ideation, self-mutilation, grief, suicide, reproductive fertility, graphic descriptions of the mutilation of a minor, parental abuse, mental illness, sexual assault, & others.

I am not in a professional position to reflect & commentate on the accurate representation of mental illness. Therefore, please take the reflections posed in this review as coming from a person who has not studied nor worked in the fields dealing with mental illness. Alongside the content warning, it is important to note that the characters in this book experience both diagnosed & un-diagnosed mental illnesses. The principal subject matter I will be addressing in this review are the repercussions of intergenerational trauma & inflictions of behaviour stemming from naivety both from those who are aware & unaware of their conditions. The experiences of the characters in this book exhibit a very severe & distressing reality which leads them to perform & imagine extremely gruesome acts on both themselves & others. Please be aware of this before moving forward with my review & the book.

Abigail Lamb is as sweet as the white fleece that encumbers the body of the flock. She is married to the one good man among a slew of vicious men, her dearly beloved Ralph Lamb. This man is as soft as a marshmallow, fresh from the bag; he is as tender as the heart that beats in his chest & as troubled as his soulless wife, Abigail. They move into Laura Lamb’s house, a woman teetering inappropriate relations with her only son after swiping him away from the father he never got the chance to know. All men are devils in Laura’s eyes, except of course the marshmallow son that she strings along to the fire. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) haunts Laura’s bones, ripples her skin & shoots itself out of her palette spewing seeds into Ralph’s vision, leaving him to fend for himself in a world blinded to the horrors he experienced as a child.

When Ralph meets Abigail, one evening at a bar, their lives are forever altered by their decisions to completely forget the roads that led them there. Abigail has marooned through life, haunted by her mother’s promise to a boyfriend that she would offer him her own daughter for sexual relations (rape) if it meant he would stay with her. This mother, a person who never questioned Abigail’s actions or physical cries for help, lay stark naked in her child’s presence because she had nothing to hide so little was there of substance to her person. How does one begin to grow past the void of a loving mother? In Abigail’s case, she grows from the tendrils planted firmly in the ground by a man named Ralph, a person who exhibits just as voracious tendencies for self-harm as herself but, who hides it a wee bit better.

In all, this is a book that presents the reader with many questions & ample instances to reflect on care & love. Who are we when, as children, we hadn’t been given the chance to grow into the people we hoped to become? What happens to those amongst us who are stunned, shattered & glued together by little children’s hands trying to manoeuvre their way into the world of giants?

There was no protagonist in this story, no one to come & save the day. The ending, the conclusion, & the final scene, are cut as we become aware that the reflections of trauma like light on a mirror’s surface, have every opportunity to shine again when one lets down their guard & is self-serving in a most muted & destructive manner. Though the majority of this book focuses on generalized descriptions of motherhood & what it means to be a mother figure, the presence of male characters both primary & other, is very valuable to the narrative that Abigail spins.

One may spend hours dissecting this book so, before I begin my little exploration into the void let me start by saying that Hogarth wrote this story with more brilliance, gumption, morbidity, garishness, detail & force than I could have ever hoped to come across. This story was presented in an astounding manner because Hogarth’s talent as an author absolutely annihilates any doubts that the characters are stored away, safely, out of reach. Everything in this book, within the character’s behaviour, tendencies & thoughts; the scenery of roadways, subway stations, long-term care facilities & snow-covered ground; morose basements, sticky bedsheets & skin follicle-covered surfaces, renders this story a colossal obstruction of the mundane; riddling itself into the subconscious, the parts of the self we seldom visit. This is a story that is more than a ghost leaking phlegm into the crevices of those it haunts. This is a book about collapsing. One concludes their reading with a muted wish that the phantom of a goblin snuck into a closet at night, had been the only thing haunting the pages.

As Abigail looks at the red-rimmed eye on the business card, handed to Ralph by an assistant of the Medium, she begins to connect all the red irises that she has come upon in her lifetime. Albeit, this is done unconsciously as Abigail has an innate ability to remain disconnected from reality. Regardless, this instance drew a particular intrigue from me as I found the significance troubling. It is difficult to know where to start when reflecting upon the experiences I had while reading this book & to know where to start in terms of breaking down the characters into palatable morsels. In the beginning, I was rooting for Ralph & I should say that I maintained that sentiment throughout the novel. Therefore, it is with him that I shall commence.

The plot unravels before the reader as both Abigail & Ralph wait to hear from doctors about whether or not Laura’s suicide attempt was fatal. The story in its entirety is narrated by Abigail save for the parts that transform into theatre script; presented to the reader through a gap in Abigail’s subconscious that reflects, imagines, & transforms events into a type of acted scene. This was a delightful way of encouraging the reader’s view to change, the perspective altered by the narrator in something of a disconnected stance — staring into the void, if you will — about things that could or did in fact transpire.

Due to the fact that Abigail narrates the story, our understanding of Ralph as a character is limited. He is a successful man, a loving man, & a man who was once a child caught in the riptide of a destructive wave of a mother who made no effort to ensure that her son had a healthy environment growing up. This is not to say that I blame Laura for having a mental illness, I should not want my comments to be taken to this effect. I very much appreciate that there are significant aspects of brains that are truly outside of our control. I also acknowledge that there are things that take place which alter the chemicals in the brain so that we are physically removed from who we were in the process of becoming.

What I am saying is that Ralph is a person who never stood a chance. It is revealed that he has previously made attempts on his own life, being someone who deals with depressive episodes that result in auditory & visual hallucinations, Ralph is constantly making the effort to rise above his illness. It is so much easier to give someone a generalized coping mechanism than it is to put on their shoes & attempt to maneuver the ground they walk on, one that is scattered with eggshells. As helpful as the coping mechanisms, books, research, professional help, & relational love, have been in helping Ralph hold steadfast to healthy mental wellness, he is attempting to overcome intergenerational trauma.

Upon learning that his mother has in fact died by suicide — having found her body mutilated in the open basement floor plan — Ralph’s depression sturdy grips & overwhelms him. It is hard to find reasons not to want the best for Ralph. He is, after all, the product of repeated childhood abuse & has spent all of his years trying to be the best version of himself. He moves back with Laura upon learning of the devastating effects her mental illness has played on her solitude & works at being there for her, even knowing she was never there for him. I cannot say that this is a good or bad thing. Ultimately, it is up to the player to choose their best move & far be it from me to decide what is best for a generalized populace.

However, deciding what is right & wrong is exactly what Abigail does, repeatedly & without a qualm. As the reader grows longingly towards Ralph in the hopes that he might overcome this psychotic episode, we are exposed to the devilish reality that Abigail inhabits on a daily basis. Once again, we are asked to consider whether or not a person can be totally in control of their actions. One might employ the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Is Abigail the antithesis of Ralph or are they simply two sides of the same rusted coin?

It’s quite pointedly awful to realize that what Laura’s ghost tells Abigail is the truth. On the night when Abigail begins her period & subsequently realizes that she is not pregnant with ‘Cal’ — the neutrally named baby she is certain to have — everything begins to tumble, though, admittedly, everything was going to hell far earlier than that night. When told that she is not unique in her struggles, that her childhood experiences of neglect, distance, & heightened exposure to violence & sex, did not happen to her alone in all the worldwide, Abigail is repulsed. There is something to be said for validating someone’s experiences. There have been articles produced wherein people speak on their experiences of feeling demeaned by those who claim that they are ‘not alone’ in feeling or experiencing something. By simply bulking everyone into a single molten heap, we are invalidating an individual experience.

There are certainly ways to ensure that someone is not feeling isolated by their experiences without swooping how they feel under a rug. Unfortunately, when Laura tells Abigail that her experiences are not in fact uncommon — as horrible as that is to realize — she is being honest & given Abigail’s distinct disconnect with reality, there is hardly a better way of chiming the gong to return her to real life. I do not mean to say that it is too late for Abigail to experience good things in her life nor am I saying that it is too late for her to seek help. However, this is someone who is on the cusp of putting another child’s life — little unborn Cal — into a toxic, abuse-ridden, situation & revitalizing the same things that she & Ralph experienced.

Abigail is her own self-fulfilling prophecy. She goes out of her way to victimize herself whilst demeaning the very valid reasons she has for experiencing the mental illness, trauma & struggles, that she does. We see this play out when she is confronting Janet. Though it is an absurdly difficult thing to do, we must try & accept the fact that even the worst people in the world are viewed with love by at least one other person, even if only by themselves. Mrs. Bondy was an abusive parent to Janet. We must take her word for that. Yet, this same Mrs. Bondy is a loving, caring, tender figure in Abigail’s life. These two truths can be accurate, factual, & authentically representative of reality, at the same time.

Perhaps due to her childhood experiences or perhaps due to her total lack of a sense of self, Abigail is unable to grasp that people are three-dimensional. She pretends to be dead so that Ralph is more interested in having sex with her because, in her mind, she is simply on earth to be a void; no technicalities linking her to other human beings because no one else could have lived through such horrors as she did. Yet here, stands another person who lived bad things, Janet. Perhaps Abigail is unable to grasp this fact as truth because she would have to come face to face with the fact that she loved & cared for an abusive person.

This is something we all have to come to terms with, some of us in quite shocking ways. Though no one really wants to stand out of the crowd & scream tender little words of adoration for someone who was a child abuser, it is nearly impossible to be made aware of every single person’s actions throughout all of their lives & even more difficult to distance ourselves from things we know not. By loving Mrs. Bondy, Abigail must ignore Janet’s truth & highlight her own. She must disregard the fact that Mrs. Bondy is someone that is not entirely known to her — as we are never really fully known to anyone — & she must accept that it is possible that the person she adores, the mother she wishes was her own, wasn’t a very good mother after all.

I cannot say that it is within Abigail to sit with herself & be honest. If she were honest she would have to change & I cannot say that this is something she is able to do on her own, so far into the tar-filled crevices of her hiding places, is she. This is ultimately very sad. Though Abigail chooses to murder & cannibalize Janet, her reaction time is always a second delayed. Her self-serving mentality sees her at once ignore the fact that human flesh might probably poison Ralph, especially given the fact he’s barely eaten any food since his mother’s death, as well as ignore the fact that she did not kill a villain, she killed a victim.

What makes Janet any different than Ralph or Abigail herself? Nothing. Abigail chooses to believe Ralph, she has no proof of anything. Even living in the same house as Laura, abusers are very skilled at making themselves unknown. It would be just as easy to believe that Abigail was being sensitive when Laura said that the cookbook she cherishes was a piece of garbage — given that she found it in the literal trash. However, she wants to believe Ralph because she wants Ralph’s love; she wants to be loved by someone, she wants to be cherished, she wants to root herself in the confines of someone else’s life; she believes him when he says that he had a difficult relationship with his mother. So, she becomes a motherly figure for him as she hopes he will be for her.

Ultimately, the terrible ghost that haunts the house is neglect. The reader stands toe-to-toe with troubled, unreliable, sick, mean-spirited, hopeful, & romantic, characters. We are asked to almost disregard Laura’s apparition because it is practically inconsequential. Ralph is thrust into a psychotic episode not because he thinks he saw the ghost of his mother but because the person he was manipulated into loving, for her role in his life, stripped herself raw in a bloody mess for him to scrub away. Abigail does not feed Ralph human flesh because Laura’s ghost is haunting his spirit but because she is someone whose validation arises from the comfort of physical proximity, having found it only with an inanimate object.

Therefore feeding human flesh to her husband, with whom she shares physical intimacy girths the distance between what she lives in the world of human society & what she desires out of life, however much she actively denies it. A collective denial from both parties sees them regaining the pattern they sought to escape all those many moons ago when they decided to get married, & never divorce. Their efforts into consummating a life ignore the ones they have yet to work on, their own. As wishfully wonderful as it may be to imagine birthing pure love, a child is a human being too.

Cal will be born into a world of patterns & fear; with heightened expectations to be the embodiment of cupid’s arrow. Cal, a child, unknown to their parents as much as they are to the reader who spent 288 pages walking through life with them. Cal, searching for the inanimate object that will reflect her emotions kindly, will welcome her into its orbit, & who will substitute as a mother thing for the one lost to the delusion of other mother things. With crass, reflective, vicious prose, Hogarth has entrapped me in the succulent cycle of thinking about everything I have yet to know.

Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, & Ainslie Hogarth for the free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

What a truly wild read! ‘Motherthing’ is a macabre comedy dressed in horror clothing and I loved it.

Ralph & Abby have moved in with his mother, in order to help take care of her, but soon after, Laura takes her own life. Abby soon realized the ghost of her mother in law is hanging around and wants her gone. How do you tell your ghost of an in law to move on? Dealing with her husbands ever growing depression, the anxiety of Laura still making her vicious presence known, and dealing with her own trauma’s, Abby must rid her life of the vengeful spirit.

The writing was fantastic, I couldn’t tell where the story would take me next, and the final act was shocking!

Thank you NetGalley for my ARC!

Abigail “Abby” Lamb is a caretaker at a retirement home and a caring spouse to her husband, Ralph. She, more than anything, wants a baby. When her mother-in-law kills herself in their shared home, all future plans are put on hold as grief begins to absorb Ralph. Laura (MIL) then appears as a spirit to her son. Meanwhile Abby tries to find a way to keep her favorite patient, the mother she never had, in the safety of the retirement home.

This book had twists and turns, ups and downs, and overall the most impressive narrative voice I have ever read. I felt like I was in Abby’s brain and not in a weird way, but in a “oh my god this writing is so good that I feel a little sea sick” kind of way. The bizarre ending really tied off the plot in the best way possible.

This was disturbing and shocking. It's also quirky and heartfelt. You feel terrible for Abby while you also recoil in disgust from her thoughts and actions. This is truly a unique story and it's well written. If you've ever had any lessthanfantastic feelings about your MIL you should read this just for shits and giggles. Special thank you to NetGalley for an ARC.

This was absolutely not what I was expecting but it was delightful. Dark, funny, quirky and unpredictable. An absolute grim delight.

I can't say that I've quite read anything like Motherthing. This was a really entertaining and fun reading experience. While reading I really didn't know if Abby was in danger or she was the one being a terror, but I was along for the ride. This book had a lot of unnerving imagery and the ENDING. Wow. Loved it.

Reading Motherthing was an experience I won't soon forget. It's such a strange darkly humourous, but intensely creepy book!

This book enthralled me and had such a grip on me that I couldn't put it down! I read this while my baby slept on me, in-between cooking dinner, while brushing my teeth etc...

I couldn't decide if Abby was in danger or if she was THE danger and I was guessing right up until the end. And THAT ENDING godsmacked me right in the gullet!

Highly recommend! Just maybe hide it from your MIL...

Enjoying this book requires you to imagine a spite-suicide can be an excellent foundation for a comic romp. I was there for it. I was hooked from the first clause of the first sentence, that being: "The night Ralph's mother flayed her forearms...". This book is incredibly funny to me and I need to admit it even though I'm slightly ashamed to admit it. Only slightly. What can I say to excuse myself? Well, there's the writing, which is delightful. The sentences made me laugh. The sentences zing. I was embarrassed to be laughing at this story which is really very shocking in many ways, but I was laughing. I was snorting, actually. You may need to be in a certain mood for this book, I admit. But it may put you in that mood before you know it. It's consistently written in a manic hysterical sometimes-schizophrenic voice that takes no prisoners. I wish I'd written it. Ainslie Hogarth is the master of surprising verbs.

A good book but the humor was a little lost on me and i like dry humor but for some reason it just didn't hit for me. i did like the satire nature of it thought and the main character was interesting and liked her take on things.

I'm gonna start by saying that I absolutely love that cover, I was really excited for this one because of that cover and the fact that the synopsis sounded really promising.
Right from the start, the writing style wasn't what I expected but I enjoyed it at first, but as the story kept going, it kinda grated on me a little bit. The story itself took a different direction than I anticipated, with the focus being more on the MC's relationship to her different mother figures or her perception of her marriage and her husband, and I gotta say that it took me longer to finish it because it didn't enthral me as much and I kept putting it down and picking it back up.
It was still okay, I didn't dislike it, didn't love it either.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a review!

4 stars!

I was very surprised by this. I laughed, I muttered oh my god, I cringed, I rolled my eyes, I got annoyed, concerned, confused etc. Lol

I was taken back from how things went as I was expecting more hauntings or Laura to be in the story more and we watch Abby struggle with having to deal with fighting her mother-in-law even after everything that had happened.

It went in a completely different way from what I read from the premise, and usually I'd give maybe 2-3 stars but I actually enjoyed how the story went even if some parts didn't make some sense in connection wise.

Regardless, I enjoyed reading this and seeing how unhinged Abby became.

I really enjoyed the plot of this story! I also enjoyed how the main character slowly starts to become unhinged and almost like an untrusty narrative! I also LOVE the cover of this book as well!