THE WRONG MOTHER!

I picked up the Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah hoping for something really satisfying, a violent demonstration of motherly problems often written about more quietly in novels. "Say something nasty about a child-- even if it's true, and even if it's your own child-- and there's hell to pay" (NY Times). There's plenty of punishment in the Wrong Mother, in which three women-- one dead, one missing, one narrating (sometimes)-- find themselves in maternal entrapment that goes unseen and unexperienced by their husbands. Enslaved by unreasonable and helplessly selfish children, these mothers are forbidden to strike back when wronged. Their private systems of martyrdom and punishment start to become real with the murder (or suicide?) of model mother Geraldine Bretherick and her daughter, Lucy. As the grisly mysteries are parsed, so is the grisly career of motherhood. Sophie Hannah's book is carried along by its light and nasty humor. Even though The Wrong Mother is extremely funny, it successfully disturbed me.