Sadly, I had to DNF this one after ~15% in. the premise was alluring, but ultimately, the build-up was too slow for my liking—since I'm reading shorter books at the moment, being impatient is 100% my fault.

Thank you so much to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC; it is greatly appreciated.

I have had this e-ARC since July, and since then I have seen this book everywhere. It seems to be on everyone's most anticipated list for the year, or at least it is in the horror community. There is definitely hype building for this book, but since this was my first read by this author I went in with no expectations, and an open mind.

Unfortunately, I was immediately confronted with something I don't wish to read about: the pandemic. There's actually an author's note stating how this did not start out as a pandemic book, and so that would not be a large part of the story. However, I'd have to argue that it is. Nothing in this book would have happened without the pandemic. It really seemed to be used as a plot point to put the characters in their appropriate places and mental states. The pandemic was prevalant throughout the entire story to where I'd say it was a character itself.

Most of the horror in this was subtle, which I've discovered recently is something I quite enjoy. That build up of tension, anger, and confusion is done well, and transfers as anxiety to the reader. Because of this I did not mind the slow plot, as I thought that the payoff, or "reveal", would bring everything happening into a satisfying conclusion. Unfortuantely, that didn't happen.

The last few chapters of the book felt incredibly rushed compared to the rest. We go from a slow, gradual build up, to entire personality changes overnight. I did not understand what was happening or why, and since we don't get any solid answers in the end, I finished this book feeling confused.

Overall, I'd say I enjoyed the first 80-90% of this book. It wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, but it was enjoyable and pretty quick to read. However, the last 10-20% just felt like a different book entirely and sucked my enjoyment out of reading it. If you are not a fan of dream sequences or reading about the pandemic, then I would pass on picking this up. If you enjoy a slow burn with little to no twists, and don't need answers to any questions, than give this a shot. I just don't think this author's style is for me.

Mothered is the second book I’ve read by author Zoje Stage. Just like the first, I’m not really sure what to think about this story. The author tends to write really creepy, eerie type reads. After finishing it, I’m still not sure if I understand it any more than I did when I started. It’s about Grace who was a twin. Her twin, Hope, was born with cerebral palsy. She is now dead. Grace believes she had a seizure and died but her mother is telling her that she smothered her. Who do you believe? This is a really messed up story written by a very clever and creative author. Zoje Stage must have a fantastic imagination. Although I did enjoy reading it, I was left puzzled as to what really happened and what to think of it all. I did like how the story takes place during the pandemic. It made it all the more real and relatable. Grace having her mom move in with her when they were never all that close to begin with was bound to cause conflict. But financially it would help them both during this strange time. But, was the mother out to drive her crazy? Although it left me somewhat confused, I’m sure many will really enjoy reading this. I’d like to thank NetGalley for the arc to read and review. I’m giving this a 4 star rating because it held my interest and the writing was really good. This is a book that I think would be very interesting to discuss in a book club to hear everyone’s take on the subject matter.

"Grace felt something tearing—her skin, unzippering from her neck down. When it was loose enough, she pulled her arms out of the skin sleeves. Freed each leg like she was peeling off a pair of itchy tights. She left the skin facade on the sidewalk, with its crumpled facial features and limbs like flesh-colored noodles. What did she look like now? Pink tissue and red blood and white bits of bone ?"

Set in the height of the COVID quarantine, Grace's mother Jackie asks her if she can come stay with her, and Grace reluctantly agrees. Their relationship is strained at best, full of pain after the loss of Grace's sister. But soon after her mother arrives Grace starts having very strange dreams, And then the dreams start blending in with reality and it's hard for both her and us reading it to know what's really happening. This is a story full of psychological horror. The tension build steadily throughout the whole story.

I really enjoyed the story. Thank you netgalley and Thomas & Mercer for giving me an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

Okay... prepare yourself! This is the post-pandemic book I've been waiting for. Thrilling. Covering many topics that I shared worry over, but making my trip through 2020 look like an all year spa vacation in comparison. But, importantly, highlighting where that year took many Americans and others mentally but with a horror/supernatural twist.

Grace has just bought a house when the pandemic begins. She is frustrated with work and even more so when her mom kind of forces her way into her home. Her mom seems to go between a manic overwhelming kindness, helping vibe, to being more sullen and hateful. Grace experiences some horrifying dreams during this time, all while once again facing her childhood past with her dead twin.

So, yeah, it's a hard read but it also kept my eyes glued to the pages with this need to figure out the puzzle of what is happening. Grace seems to be an unreliable narrator leaving me confused at times but riveted to the story.

Definitely recommend this as a dark thriller/horror!

Out March 1, 2023!

Mothered was a fun read and had me constantly questioning my own expectations of what was going to happen. After so many different takes on mother/daughter relationships in books and movies at the moment (Run came to mind on Netflix), I always like it when they all take a slightly different perspective.

I'm a fan of unreliable narrators but unfortunately the "is it/is it not a dream?" narrative was too played out for me in this novel - it took away from the true creepiness of the plot. The ending was fantastic though.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book gave me a visceral anxiety reaction everytime I picked it up! Not that anything was so overtly disturbing or grotesque but the way Stage writes just leaves me with an unease that is hard to replicate or explain. The characters are fully fleshed out and you aren’t sure what’s going on or what is going to happen, even WHILE it’s happening.

Highly recommend for fans of domestic claustrophobic thrillers!

I loved Zoje's Baby Teeth. Absolutely loved it. The weirdness between the daughter and mother was so appealing. MOTHERED also focuses on a daughter/mother relationship, but the focus, for me, was unfortunately elsewhere. The pandemic. COVID. A character on a ventilator. It's just too soon.

When I requested MOTHERED I was so excited because Zoje Stage was the author. I admit, I did not read the description carefully enough. I have a rule to not read any fictional books that mention lockdowns, the virus, restrictions, masks, hospitals... I am so fatigued from the real-world event the last thing I want to do is read about it, even in a fictional setting.

I tried to dismiss the references from the start. But when one of the character ends up on a ventilator it was skimming time. I was curious to see how the story ended, but I checked-out halfway through the book.

I also thought the plot started off so strong and then lost it's way. It became confusing and didn't make sense at times.

I still think Zoje is an amazing writer and I'll certainly read more of her books. It sounds like she was closely impacted by the pandemic, I absolutely understand why she wanted to write about it. But, for me, I'm still not ready to read anything pandemic-related in 2023.

Thank you Thomas & Mercer for an e-copy of MOTHERED to review.

I rate MOTHERED one out of five stars.

This was such a unique read, twisted , fast, and kept me guessing until the end. I have read this author before and think this was even better then Baby Teeth!

ARC REVIEW

Mothered
By Zoje Stage

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Publishing Date : 3/1/2023

Grace is from Pittsburgh and is trying to navigage the nee Covid world. Her mother, needing a place to live, comes to Pittsburgh and moves in with Graces. They have never had a great relationship, but add in the stress of a pandemic, quartening in close quarters and the added stress of sharing your home with someone else.....things start to unravel.

Everything seems to be progressing fine, but Grace starts having odd dreams about her disabeled sister who died when she was a child.  She starts sleepwalking, and is having a hard time seperating her dreams, from reality.  When her mom makes a VERY shoccking accusataion against her, Grace starts to unravel. Will she be able to seperate reality from delusion and figure out why her mother has it out for her?! ........and try not to get covid.

Review:

Iam not a huge fan of dream sequences, so that wasn't my favorite part of the book. However, I loooooooved the creepy, ominous vibe. 

This book was an adventure! I was dieing, to know what the heck was going on! It was decently paced and kept my interest. It had me saying " what the heck" on multiple occasions. I didnt mind the covid element.  It added to the stress.

If you liked, Sharp Edges or books with dark tones, this one is good! I could also see fans of The Push and Verity reading and enjoying this one.

I will say...I'm a tad confused on the ending. If you have read this, I would love to talk about it with you! ( but I think the confusion regarding the ending was intended!)

I can see this book being very popular after its released!

A big thanks to @netgalley and Thomas & Mercer publishing for this wild adventure!

This book was absolutely bonkers but I’m on the fence about if it was good bonkers or just straight bonkers. Grace was an interesting character who I sometimes felt was a little shallow despite the many facets of her we see and the backstory we get. There are lots of dream sequences which are not my favorite.

Some of the horror imagery was great and what I want when I pick up a horror novel (but not always what I get). The decision to set this during the early days of the pandemic really added to the tension, paranoia, and claustrophobic feel of the novel. I didn’t want to put this down because it always felt like something crazy was right around the corner.

I’m not disabled myself but something about the way the disabled character was portrayed kind of rubbed me the wrong way. While I like that the book shows that disabled people are just like able bodied people in terms of variations in temperament and personality, the decision to make the disabled sister a bit of a villain might not be well received. I don’t think there’s anything egregiously bad about the portrayal but again, I’m not disabled or have a disabled person close to me.

Holy crap, what did I just read??? Mothered was a WILD ride, and completely triggering if you have any kind of strand mother-daughter relationship. A fucked up fever dream right til the end.

Thank you to net galley and Thomas and Mercer publisher for letting me read an arc copy. I have read books by Zoye Stage before and I love her "wow" factor when she writes her thrillers. This book was written about the pandemic that did not bother me but, i felt like I was reading and nothing was happening.

A claustrophobic, pandemic-set thriller that has you questioning what is going on and which character you can trust.

I think there are a lot of people who would say that having their parent move in with them would be a nightmare-but add in a sprinkle of unresolved childhood conflict to a bowl of forced quarantine and you're bound to end with a disaster.

I enjoy the writing style of Zoje Stage and LOVED Baby Teeth, but this one was an average thriller to me. (I am a self-diagnosed thriller snob though, so take that with a grain of salt).

MOTHERED is a tension filled novel taking place during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Full of twists, turns and an unreliable narrator, I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out who had committed the crime that was revealed within the first chapter!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for my #arc!

Thanks to NetGalley as well as Thomas & Mercer for this eARC. The book was well written. This was my first Zoje Stage book and I enjoyed reading it. The book was not what I would call a horror but it was horrible in a sense. I was enjoyable to read and if her books are all like this I need to read more of her work. I will rememeber this book for a long time as I enjoyed the memories for the co-vid issues but I like book that cover everyday life experiences...well..some of them...haha..

It feels a little silly to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this book that it's not specifically written about the COVID-19 pandemic, because it's absolutely about the COVID-19 pandemic even if that's never said on page.

MOTHERED was a quick read, and while the writing was more straightforward and conversational than what I'm usually into, it did keep me engaged. The horror elements of this book were particularly enjoyable, and to me some of the best writing in the book came out in Grace's nightmares/hallucinations. Uncertainty about what's real and what's not can be so hit or miss in fiction, but in these instances I felt it was done well.

Overall, though, I found this really disjointed and even nonsensical at times. I think the intention of this was to mirror the uncertainty of the earlier COVID years and how on-edge we all were, but most of the time it just felt like it was preventing the book from developing any of its characters well. Grace's character took such a dramatic shift in the last few pages of the book that left me with no sense of how she got from A to B. There was also not much suspense here for me because all of the assumptions I made in the first few chapters of the book turned out to be correct, but that could just be a me problem.

A lot of the discussion surrounding the main character's deceased twin sister also felt ableist to me. I don't know that I am really the person to speak to this because I don't have a visible disability, so I'll just say I wasn't comfortable with it.

I had high hopes for this book. It is my first one by this author, but I had heard such great things about previous books. The book started out great – the prologue was fantastic. However, it went downhill from there. The book was just boring and there wasn’t enough dialogue. There wasn’t an “OMG” moment until Chapter 35! That’s when it started to get a little better, but by then it’s more than halfway into the book. I personally feel like that moment should have occurred sooner so that the author could explore more. The book never felt settled or complete for me. The best part about this book was Miguel; everyone needs a Miguel in their life! I realize that I am probably an outlier, and that a lot of people will love this book. It just wasn’t for me.

when I started this book I didn’t have any idea of what I was diving in, the cover shows a scissor like the ones that hairdressers use, cutting in half the word mothered, I really empathize with Grace, I guess everyone that had a sort of distanced relationship with their own mother could relate with the grace at the start of the book, after things start happening and Grace starts to be a unreliable narrator, even in third person, we don’t really know if what she is living or seeing is the reality or is a dream, and that was what made me come back for more, through the end it gets really disturbing, and lets just get that in the out, I stopped relating to Grace.

I really don’t know what is true or not, what really did happen to Holy, grace sister, or what really happen to Jackie husband, but after reading all the events that led to the ending, I can possibly deduce maybe he didn’t have a natural death… but who knows… this is really a weird family story, and you know what I still recommend it, it is spooky, relatable in may ways, not only with the dysfunctional family situation, but quarantining with people that annoy us, afraid for loved ones, etc., its kind of a punch under the belt.

Thank you NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the free ARC and this is my honest opinion.

“It wasn’t an emergency. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”

Grace had everything going for her until the pandemic. She worked at a great salon and had just purchased a house before “2 weeks to slow the spread.”

Her workplace closes for good and though she can pick up work at a chair here and there, she’s going to need some help with the bills.

Funnily enough, her estranged mom Jackie needs somewhere to heal while she’s on the mend from an injury, plus she’s lonely because her husband died. Grace reluctantly agrees, thinking maybe things can be different now that so much time has passed and she’s on her own turf.

Things start off fairly well but take a sharp turn downhill quite suddenly, as Jackie reveals herself to still be the mean-spirited woman who raised Grace and her now deceased twin sister Hope. Optimistic names for children doomed to grow up in dysfunction. With the pandemic and lockdowns straining their already feeble mental health and grasp of reality, we start to see that not everyone will make it out of this alive.

I’m torn on this! It had a lot of dream sequences and I don’t really like that or to feel tricked. Let’s be real: No one wants to hear about your dream. Someone had to say it. Any dream stories need to be pretty short. While I’m not a big fan of it, it did take you inside the mind of Grace as she’s slowly losing it in this pressure cooker environment. It took me back to those hazy days of early 2020 when none of us knew what was going on.

Being cooped up with someone you love is hard enough, let alone a narcissist mother who wears you down. Grace was an interesting, complex, and flawed character. I like that there weren’t too many characters to learn and it was fully driven by the main character.

This was unique, original, and made me feel something. This is a great piece of pandemic fiction and this author continues to surprise me with her bizarre situations!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read and review!