THE PERFECT MOTHER by Aimee Molloy

Rating: 4 / 5

As a nod to Mother’s Day, the buddy read I help host decided to pick a mother-ish book for the first half of May. We settled on THE PERFECT MOTHER by Aimee Molloy! This one had been on my TBR, but I didn’t know a lot about it going in!

THE PERFECT MOTHER follows a group of first time moms. They met through an online mothers site while pregnant and started to meet up in person on occasion not long before their babies were born. Being a new mom is not an easy road and they bond over shared experiences and concerns. Feeling like they need some fun, the moms leave the babies with their fathers (or the nanny) for a night out. The evening spins out of control with a little more alcohol than might have been good and when the evening concludes, single mom Winnie finds out that her baby son Midas has been taken.

The book opens with a terrifying scene with a mom alone, going into labor with something clearly wrong. It then jumps into the future with a mom in jail, circumstances unknown. This all had me very intrigued from the beginning. We get chapters from the POV of multiple mothers as they process what has happened and continue to adapt to being mothers.

I thought the author did a great job of keeping the reader questioning what was going on. The mothers form a close knit group, but begin to realize they don’t know each other all that well at all. This also leaves the reader not fully knowing or understanding these characters, so there are many to suspect! Along with the key mystery of what happened to baby Midas, the author blends in the mothers’ own struggles to marry motherhood with the lives they lived before. The media response and the blame thrown at the moms for taking a night for themselves was sad, but realistic.

This was a hard book to put down and I had a lot of fun chatting about it with the buddy read group. I really did not see the ending coming which is always wonderful! This one is definitely TBR worthy!