Mother is Watching by Karma Brown was an intense and chilling read that delivered a vision of a future that may seem utopian to some but would definitely be dystopian to most women. It was as thought provoking as it was terrifying, and it wasn’t only the horror elements that had me squirming in my seat.

What stood out most, and also scared me, was the idea of the commercialization of motherhood and the heavy restrictions such a system would place on women. Mathilde’s journey through this unsettling world kept me completely hooked, and I especially loved watching her begin to question everything around her while also being pushed further and further into her obsessive need to restore The Mother painting. I won’t say anything more as I don’t want to spoil anything, but try and read this one with the lights on!

If you enjoy books such as Baby Teeth or Sharp Objects, this one is absolutely worth picking up!

💬 What to Expect:
• Tropes: Motherhood, grief, and our tech obsessed world
• Tone: Emotional, dark, and goosebump inducing
• Pacing: A great slow burn
• Best for readers who love: Horror and psychological suspense

📝 Final Thoughts:

This book took me on an emotional rollercoaster, leaving me with so many feelings by the final page. I’d definitely recommend it to readers looking for a thought-provoking story with an eerie edge. It’s the kind of book that lingers in your mind after you finish, and I’d happily pick up more from this author in the future.

The creepy beautiful cover of Karma Brown’s debut horror, Mother Is Watching, is a striking rendering of the story beneath. Tilly, an art restorer, is given the arduous task of restoring the fire-damaged last work of Leclerc, the same artist Tilly’s mother was restoring another work of when she suddenly died. Before long, Tilly experiences what she believes are either hallucinations or hauntings related to the work. She begins to question her own mind and reality, and whether the painting is actually cursed.

The novel is set in a dystopian future, and Tilly, who is also pregnant, joins ‘MotherWise,’ a pregnancy monitoring program, marketed to provide benefits to expectant mothers, but seems to turns more sinister over time. The government overreach, the community group think, and the reproductive control from her own husband, alongside the unexplained events surrounding the painting, cause Tilly to doubt her own judgement and to slowly unravel.

Mother Is Watching delivers the unsettling madness, and unnerving atmosphere, I enjoyed from Karma’s novel: Recipe for a Perfect Wife. Thank you to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster Canada and to Karma Brown for my eARC of Mother Is Watching. I have also pre-ordered my own copy of the novel which is available on March 17th, 2026.

A creepy and compelling peek into the not too distant future, where multiple acts of procreation (from those who can) is prioritized in a beat-up world struggling to preserve alarming population levels. Facing escalating climate pressures and mysterious viruses, (a world not too significantly unlike our own), our narrator, Mathilde Crewson, a thirty-nine year old art conservator (like her now deceased mother before her) grieves for her mother and longs desperately for another child, to accompany her seven-year-old daughter.

Tilly’s dreams may be on a path to come true, when she is assigned work to restore a strange and macabre work of art, entitled “The Mother”, by an equally strange and now-deceased artist, who likes to include biological material (skin, fingernail clippings, and more) to add texture to her horrifying artwork.

Bombarded by impositions from increasingly chilling government programs, and deeply entrenched (and foreboding) cultural expectations, primed to “support” motherhood at all costs, Tilly is a woman with soon-to-become nightmarish challenges, seemingly related to her current (spine-tingling) restoration project.

Not a book to read in the dark, this horror book is a wonderful take on female body oppression, motherhood, grief, hauntings, and the primal need in all of us for biological connection.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

This book was a wild ride! There were so many moments that took me by surprise that I'm still thinking about them. This book touches on so many topics, environmental change, fertility, maternal expectations, and adds in grief, miscarriage, and a possibly-possessed painting.

This book is set in the near future, where climate change is in full effect, and a virus had emerged that makes men sterile. Once the virus has been identified, a new company in the US, MotherWise, aims to help couples have children and the government provides many incentives to encourage couples to have as many children as possible to maintain the population. In this setting we're introduced to Mathilde 'Tilly' Crewson, an art restorer in Savannah, Georgia. She and her husband, Wyatt, have one daughter, and Tilly is still grieving the loss of their second pregnancy and her inability to conceive again. She is hired to restore a newly-discovered painting by a scientist-turned artist, and once she begins work on the painting, she discovers that she's pregnant. She attempts to balance her desire to work with the societal pressure to become a housewife, but also starts to notice that something isn't right with the painting. As she continues to restore the piece, she finds her world isn't as safe as she hoped.

I inhaled this book. Every step Tilly takes had me on the edge of my seat, and her interactions with the painting are unnerving. The nanny-state that Tilly is ushered into with MotherWise is deeply upsetting, with the use of new technology to have her health monitored at every second. There's also the added horror from the painting, and the mysterious death of the artist. Add into this the constant health monitoring, the questioning from her husband and friends, and Tilly's on grip on reality, the general horror from this book was incredibly well-written. This book had me engaged the entire time I was reading, and I look forward to rereading this book soon.

MOTHER IS WATCHING straddles the line between sci-fi and horror, with a dystopian overlay. The conservation of a painting is a unique take on the “spooky painting” horror trope and I loved it!

Honestly, I’m in awe that the author is able to go from writing a hallmark Christmas book cleanser which has the lightness of predictability.. and then go to a dark dystopian horror book like this. I should say that I fell for her writing back with her women’s fiction (if we still call it that?) ; aka her emotional fiction that has given one of them a spot on my forever favourite shelf. But it’s very clear that Karma does not want to be put in a box and is letting her writing take her wherever she gets a nugget of an idea.

Well done.

3 words for this: creepy, terrifying and pulsating

When I first started reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Ghostbusters movie and the painting that was “alive”. So if you want a general synopsis, you could think of this book like this, BUT know that it goes from there into a creepy “what the F” scenes that gave me the chills. I would be more specific but can’t because it would take the experience away.

The ending: wow. I mean I kind of expected it but I didn’t. FYI for horror lite readers. It’s dark but not anything too crazy

Again, just in awe how the authors brain has literally gone from hallmark to horror with the keys of her computer.

4.5 ⭐️