Reading Journal 2024: Mothered

Reading Journal 2024: Mothered
Author: Zoje Stage

Stage is one of my favorite horror authors. This is probably my least favorite of her books. Great premise, less than stellar execution. 

I have to hand it to her though- she knows how to write dysfunctional families and messed up mother-child relationships like it’s no one else’s business.

So what makes the premise great? It was written during the pandemic, and the pandemic plays into the story in a way that proves the perfect set up for the mother-daughter interplay. Over the course of the pandemic Grace has just bought a house and just lost her job. Her mother Jackie has just lost her husband and her health but gained some money. She makes a suggestion that she move in with Grace so that she can help Grace to keep the house. Grace agrees.

But there are questions surrounding the obvious tensions that are inherent in this relationship early on, questions that play into who is good and who is evil. One of the key questions concerns a dead twin sister who was born with cerebral palsy, a death that seemingly drove a wedge into their relationship. Thrust back into close and closed quarters, how will the past reemerge and what will the past tell us about their conflict and how or will it be resolved?

Great premise with tons of potential. And truth be told, it starts off strong. So why didn’t it ultimately land for me? It was the use of an unreliable narrator and dream sequences. Dreams are fine as a plot device, but when they are used to keep you uncertain about what is real and what is not, things can fall of the rails pretty quickly. Which is exactly what happened here. The ending, taken on it’s own, is actually decent. The problem is the entire middle of the book is taken up by these slight of hands. So much so that nothing really happens. It becomes a bit of a game that is being played on us as readers, and one that ultimately is intended to mislead. It’s like we are stuck being pulled back and forth and back and forth, and where we land no one knows until the final chapters. And where we land in terms of dream or reality we might never know. Or at least thats how it feels going through the process.

I did like the characters however. I like that all of them had the potential to occupy different spaces at different times in ways that rewrite their narrative. I also liked the underlying subtext of grief and trauma. As the blurb on the back says, “home is where the ghosts are”, and there were a few sections where these ghosts from the past come out to play where I found it genuinely effective and unsettling, frightening even. It’s too bad the author couldn’t have honed in more on an actual progession of plot and story. It needed something to ground it for the relational dynamics to have their impact.