Mothered: A Novel

Zoje Stage is officially one of those authors that are hit or miss for me. This is the third book I’ve read by Stage and I would put it at the bottom of my list, I really did not enjoy this novel. Grace is in the middle of a pandemic with no job and struggling to meet her mortgage for the house she just recently bought. With an offer to help ease the financial stress, Grace allows her mother to move into her spare room in hopes of mending their relationship and also easing the financial strain of being a homeowner in a pandemic. Soon Grace realizes her decision was a mistake as she begins to lose clarity and her mother becomes more nefarious. This book honestly was a mess. The characters were boring and not compelling in anyway. All of the horror scenes were dreams and had no real impact so they were honestly boring to read. The dreams were so frequent I got to a point where I would just skip entire paragraphs if the dream was obviously there for scares and not to reveal anything relevant. If you took out all the dream sequences this novel would be half its length, but you can’t even do this because the dreams are part of the plot unfortunately. Because of all these no se cual dreams the pacing was way too slow and nothing interesting was ever really happened because it was all just dreams. Even the ending fell flat because the lead up to it was so disjointed and Grace as a character was flat and not compelling. When your main character is boring and unlikeable in a mundane way that’s a problem. Even Grace’s close friend Miguel was boring, he felt like a cardboard version of a real person only there to trigger Grace’s “growth” as a character and act as a springboard for the story to progress at times. Honestly none of the characters were likable or interesting and pair that with slow pacing and a boring plot, you get a novel that was very hard for me to finish. Seriously, the only character I was invested in this whole novel was Coco the Cat, and yes she remains unscathed at the end of the novel thankfully. I still love Stage’s novel Getaway and recommend that to anyone looking for a survival horror/thriller with strong female characters, but Mothered will not be one I recommend.