'After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market.
'It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive local fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise. As she follows the thread of these visions, Madi discovers a terrifying nightmare waiting at the centre of the labyrinth—and it’s coming for everyone she holds dear.'
What Kind of Mother tells the story of Madi, a single mother who's been doing her best for her now teenage daughter, but has to return to her hometown due to circumstances outside of her control. Brandywine is a small, sleepy place where nothing much really happens and people have hardly changed in the years that Madi has been gone. It's slow and dull, and Madi hates it. Having to find a way of supporting herself and her daughter, Madi decides to open up a palm reading stall in the town's market, faking her 'psychic' abilities for any who're willing to pay for a reading.
However, when Madi reconnects with her high school sweetheart, Henry, she learns that she does actually possess powers when she gives him a reading and has visions of his son Skylar, who went missing several years previous. Determined to find out what these visions mean, Madi discovers dark secrets lurking just beneath the surface of Brandywine.
What Kind of Mother does well in its early chapters, and the set-up that Clay McLeod Chapman creates is an interesting one with some decent, engaging characters. Madi is a struggling single mother with a lot of issues, most of them stemming back to her time in Brandywine; and as such when she returns to her old town those issues come racing back to the surface. Some of the personal struggles that Madi has, the relationships with people who used to be in her life and how she reconnects with people are the best parts of the book, and I can't help but feel that if this was just a story about that I'd have liked it much better.
However, once the supernatural and horror elements are introduced to the book things kind of fall apart bit for me, whereas that's the stuff I'm normally excited to get to. The book has a lot of body horror in it, which is one of the areas that can be a bit hit and miss with me, either being absolutely fine or too gross. Sadly, more than once What Kind of Mother strayed into the second category, and left me feeling sick more than anything else. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood for it, but it led me to wanting to put the book down and not come back to it; forcing me to have to power through.
The end of the book has what I've seen others refer to as a 'twist', and I'd agree with that to a certain extent. It's not the kind of twist where it feels like the book played a clever reveal that was carefully hinted at chapters before, but a twist in logic. The characters make some unusual choices in the latter half of the book, choices that seem to be made with little reasoning or explanation given. Again, perhaps I wasn't in the right mind to enjoy these twists. I just didn't like the ending. I wasn't a fan of where the story went or what the characters did, and I've seen a few reviews online that share that sentiment.
What Kind of Mother is an unusual read, one that I think will divide audiences very clearly into those who loved it and hated it. This is the kind of book that some will even put down and not finish. Trying it out might be something of a gamble, but I think that if you do like it you're going to get a lot out of it.
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