About the Book:
The residents of Point Heed keep nice houses and sign up as parent help at the local school. Occasionally they cheat on their taxes. Sometimes they fantasise about having sex with someone other than their partner. And every now and then they do drugs. But that doesn't make them bad people, does it?
When a local father is convicted of the possession and distribution of child pornography, the tight-knit, middle-class community is quick to unravel. He is granted permanent name suppression, and soon friend turns on friend, neighbour delivers up neighbour, and hysteria rapidly engulfs them all. Who among them was capable of such moral trespass?
Bridget, Roz and Lucy have been friends forever. Their lives revolve around their children, their community, each other. With their husbands and kids, they holiday together every year. Every year, until last summer, when everything went so terribly wrong.
They tell you things are never as bad as you fear, but what if they're worse? Worse than you could have ever imagined.
Were they all complicit? Certainly, they were guilty of looking in all the wrong places.
Published by Allen & Unwin
Released March 2023
My Thoughts:
One of Those Mothers is my book club read for the month and what a pick it is! An absolute page turner, I read it in a single day - which doesn't happen too often with me. It sits within the domestic drama/noir sub-genre, alongside authors such as Liane Moriarty and Sally Hepworth, but offers a fresh voice, from New Zealand, and this set it apart for me. I enjoyed the New Zealand experience, kind of same, same, but different, if you know what I mean.
This story orbits around Bridget, her family, and her friend group. It's a close examination of female adult friendship, the dynamics that evolve with balancing close friendship as parents with different expectations, different values, and very different children. Less concerned with the big reveal or twist, this one unfolds in pieces, a back-and-forth narrative that is headed in a direction you become vaguely certain of early on in the story. The shock comes from the attitudes expressed and the implications more than any twist of who or what.
There's plenty of thought-provoking material in this one, making it perfect as a book club read.
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