Leanne Olson

Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel
Releasing May 17, 2022 from Tor Nightfire

Just Like Mother is a batshit crazy horror-thriller about a woman who escapes a “motherhood cult” as a child, and reconnects with her long-lost cousin as an adult.

The book starts out reading like a domestic thriller (I wondered at first how it fit in the Nightfire lineup), but there’s enough delightful nastiness by the end that I think it easily qualifies as horror. It’s fast-paced, addictive, and very unsettling. It’s also quite funny and truthful in places — as a childfree woman I related to a lot of the dialogue Maeve had to deal with from other women who just knew she would want to be a mother one day.

One of my favourite tropes in thriller/horror novels is when you as the reader can see the evil coming, and the protagonist is so close to figuring it out…Just Like Mother had me stabbing a finger at my e-reader’s screen turning pages and reading as quickly as I could.

I highly recommend this book if you want a paranoid, fun, strange thriller that goes off the deep end in the best way.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for my review copy of this book.