BOOK REVIEW: Stone Mothers by Erin Kelly @mserinkelly @minotaurbooks #stonemothers #bookreview #minotaurbooks

Poignant and haunting—Erin Kelly’s latest novel Stone Mothers has an elegance to it that is both poetic and dark.

I read this book as a buddy read with my friend Berit at Audio Killed the Bookmark and we LOVED it! We couldn’t stop texting about this one–everything from the story to the setting to the characters were top notch in our opinions!

Things are not always what they seem in this novel, and it is sort of written as a novel in reverse, beginning in present day and then moving progressively backwards in time, before resetting back to present day. I found the characters in this novel absolutely fascinating, particularly the more we learned about their past. By about 35% I struggled to put this book down!

About the Book

Erin Kelly, the masterful author of He Said/She Said, delivers another irresistible, unputdownable novel of psychological suspense. 

You can’t keep the secret.
You can’t tell the truth.
You can’t escape the past…

Marianne was seventeen when she fled her home in Nusstead – leaving behind her family, her boyfriend, Jesse, and the body they buried. Now, thirty years later, forced to return to in order to help care for her sick mother, she can feel the past closing around her. And Jesse, who never forgave her for leaving in the first place, is finally threatening to expose the truth.

Marianne will do anything to protect the life she’s built, the husband and daughter who must never know what happened all those years ago. Even if it means turning to her worst enemy for help… But Marianne may not know the whole story – and she isn’t the only one with secrets they’d kill to keep.

Reflection

The setting of Stone Mothers really takes the trend of refurbishing old buildings into luxury apartments to a new level, as a former Victorian mental asylum is transformed into luxury accommodations. I thought the descriptions of the hospital, both before and after the renovations, were so vivid. This is the first novel I’ve read by Erin Kelly but she has a way with building a mental image of the scenes she describes. I found this book to be incredibly atmospheric, which really added to the suspenseful feel of this gothic thriller!

We begin in present day, where architectural professor Marianne Thackeray is traveling back to Nusstead, the place where she grew up to visit her ailing mother. Marianne left Nusstead—a town built primarily around Nazareth Mental Hospital—at seventeen, with barely a backward glance. A few years before she left, Nazareth closed its doors for good—sending the town of Nusstead into an economic crisis as the majority of residents were left without work.

But the building itself—called a Stone Mother due to the belief when it was originally designed that the building itself could offer therapeutic benefits to those suffering from mental illness—always held a strange fascination for Nazareth. It is the place she first fell in love, and also the place where her darkest secret lives. A secret shared with her then boyfriend, Jesse Brame, and politician Helen Greenlaw.

Now, Marianne is worried about the secret getting out. She’s returned to Nusstead and it has set off a chain of events that she’s not sure she can stop alone…

That mysterious secret shared by an unlikely trio—I found myself wondering what it could possibly be! The first part of the book is told by Marianne in the present, and then the second part is told be Marianne in 1988—the year she was seventeen and decided to leave home. I won’t spoil anything, but this is where you learn about the secret, and it is quite unexpected! And you also learn about another secret…

Then in the third part we move even further back in time to 1958, when Helen Greenlaw was a young woman, and more secrets are revealed. Helen as a character positively fascinated me. I wish I could talk more about Helen, but I think there is little I can say without spoiling it for readers. And rest assured, you do NOT want to be spoiled on Helen’s story! From the turn to 1988 in Part 2 and 1958 in Part 3, readers will not be able to put this book down. Both storylines are complete engrossing, and tie together with one another in very intricate ways.

I’m going to leave you there with this review… I absolutely loved this book! As some readers noted, it is a bit slow in the first part, because you aren’t really sure what is going on fully. That didn’t bother me at all, I found it very typical for a gothic thriller to begin slow and build up. My recommendation—get to know Marianne and Nazareth in Part 1. It all ties together in a fantastically intricate way!!!

Thank you to the awesome team at Minotaur Books for my copy. This book is out now!