Just for clarification I would give this book 3.5 stars if possible!

This book encompasses all things eerie, circling around a cult that the main character, Maeve, escaped as a child. Along with the plot's creepiness, there are many points of gore and is riddled with CW (rape, cults, death, abortion, fertility).

I would have given the book a simple 3 stars, as the middle portion of the book seemed to drag on and the reader could anticipate what the main character was not seeing, but the end twist left me audible saying "damn damn damn", which is what I want out of a horror/thriller.

This book has a vast array of characters, twists and turns in its plot, and a great theme of cults for readers that are interested. If this was made into a movie it would haunt my nightmares, but the ability to read past the gore was a benefit for me.

This book is creepy AF in the best way possible!

Maeve and Andrea, cousins that grew up together, are separated when the girls are 8 and 11, respectively. Maeve tries to search for Andrea endlessly, almost an obsession. When she’s in her early 30’s, Andrea finds her through a DNA sight and the girls reunite.

Andrea is the antithesis of Maeve: she’s rich, married, and the CEO of a company. Part of Andrea’s company makes life-like infants that are used to help grieving mothers heal and prepare new mothers for motherhood. Maeve is originally disturbed by this, but understands it’s part of Andrea’s own healing process.

As Maeve and Andrea begin to bond again, Maeve is hit by setback after setback and finally relents to moving in with Andrea and her husband. Maeve quickly learns that Andrea has not healed from their childhood and finds herself trapped in her worst nightmare.

Poor, poor Maeve! She has witnessed and endured so much, yet is a bit on the naïve side. She wants so badly to feel connected to her blood family that she overlooks so many red flags. Andrea and Rob are truly horrible people.

Without giving too much away, I will say that this book is timely and more terrifying due to the political Roe v Wade turmoil in the US. While the females supposedly hold all the power, they’re viewed as having no other purpose than to become mothers, even by members of the same sex. The author shows the horrors that can come about when obsession with who we’re supposed to be goes too far.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for a copy this book.

This was fantastic. From the first chapter, I was absolutely hooked. Heltzel does a fantastic job weaving in character backstories while moving the main plot forward. I felt invested in what was going to happen, and found myself speed reading this, because I was so into it. A fun read for sure - highly recommend!

The nitty-gritty: Anne Heltzel brings several tried and true horror tropes to her latest novel, including cults, creepy dolls and motherhood.

Just Like Mother was creepy and shocking, and yes, over-the-top at times. But I have to admit, despite it’s flaws, I had a lot of fun with it. Parts of it made me mad, some parts confused me, and others were genuinely unsettling, but overall it was a fast-pace story and I never once wanted to stop reading. 

Maeve has a pretty good life. She works at her dream job as an editor for a publishing house. She has a boyfriend named Ryan who she enjoys being with. When she was a young girl, she managed to escape the cult she was raised in—the Mother Collective—and afterwards was placed in a loving foster home. But she’s always wondered what happened to her “cousin” Andrea, her dearest friend from her early years growing up in the cult. When the cult was raided by the police, the girls were separated, and Maeve has been searching DNA websites for years, hoping to reconnect with Andrea.

And then one day, she finds her. Andrea suggests they meet, and Maeve is surprised to discover that her friend has flourished. She’s the CEO of a profitable tech company called NewLife that makes AI baby dolls to help women prepare for motherhood or overcome grief over the loss of a child. Andrea is happily married to her husband Rob, and despite the tragedy of losing a baby herself several years before, she seems confident and put together. 

Maeve accepts Andrea’s invitation to visit her upstate New York mansion for the weekend, but when she arrives, things get weird. Andrea’s coworker Emily seems almost angry when the subject of motherhood comes up and Maeve admits that she never wants to have children of her own. The mansion itself is full of creepy, hidden passageways and spiders, and the plumbing doesn’t work. But Maeve will do almost anything to have a relationship with Andrea, and so she decides to put up with these small inconveniences for the sake of that friendship. And by the time she’s realized her mistake, it’s way too late to leave.

There’s some dark stuff going on in Just Like Mother, and most of it has to do with sex, consent and rape, so once again I’m forced to mention these trigger warnings for those that need them. Maeve seems to be obsessed with sex, and there are some unexpected and pretty explicit sex scenes in the book. Maeve’s behavior ends up making sense later in the story, but it took me a while to figure out why the author included these scenes.

I happen to enjoy cult stories, and the Mother Collective is pretty creepy, although it felt familiar in a lot of ways. The author gives us flashback chapters that show Maeve’s experiences growing up in the cult, and she teases out the important information little by little, so the story had a nice tension throughout. We know something horrible happened and that Maeve was able to get out, and I liked the way these chapters kept me guessing. 

I liked Heltzel’s take on the more sinister parts of motherhood, and I thought it was the perfect backdrop for a horror story. Andrea and Emily both have radical opinions about how a woman’s greatest gift is to create new life, which doesn’t go over well with Maeve, as you might imagine. At the same time we are learning about the Mother Collective from the girls’ past, which mirrors some of what’s going on in the present. I just wanted Maeve to clue in sooner to the dangerous situation she finds herself in, especially when her thoughts on motherhood don’t line up with Andrea’s and Emily’s at all.

And speaking of Maeve, she was an interesting character. On one hand, I understand she’s been through trauma and still hasn’t recovered from it, but on the other, she doesn’t have much agency and seems almost resigned to letting others make decisions for her. She’s upset when she loses her job, and yet she jumps at the chance to do freelance work for the company that just fired her! She knows something weird is going on with Andrea, Rob and Emily, and yet she continues to go back to them, even after she and Andrea have a fight over a very delicate subject (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers). She finds herself in a terrible predicament, and yet she doesn’t try very hard to get out of it. I found myself exasperated by her actions, although I get it. None of the horrific parts of the story would happen without all these bad decisions, lol.

Maeve’s story reminded me a lot of a particular horror classic (trying to avoid spoilers!), so in that respect the creepiness of the unfolding events worked really well, as long as you can suspend your disbelief over some of the sillier things that happen.

I know many of you are curious about the cover and how that plays into the story. Like many readers, I find dolls in horror stories to be unsettling, and the NewLife babies were extremely creepy. There are a couple of scenes in the mansion revolving around these dolls that made my skin crawl, but ultimately they ended up being little more than props and didn’t have much to do with the story at all, which was a little disappointing.

At about the halfway point the story veers into crazy territory, with all sorts of over-the-top events taking place, some that made sense and some that didn’t. There’s an almost dreamlike quality to what’s happening to Maeve, and despite the “runaway train” climax, I actually loved the ending. Negatives aside, I really did have fun with this book, and I’m very curious to see what Anne Heltzel does next.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

Ah, cults. So deliciously creepy, and such great fodder for a thriller story! Maeve and her cousin Andrea escaped the cult in question as kids, and as such were separated, and urged never to ask questions about what went down in their lives before. While Maeve did seek out answers, she also didn't want to upset her new family, so she let it go. Well, as she's come into adulthood, she finds herself unable to forget the past completely, and lucky (or unlucky) for her, DNA sites are easy to use. She and Andrea reconnect immediately, and she is thrilled to have her cousin back in her life.

Andrea has done really well for herself, and lives in a creepyass perfectly lovely old mansion in upstate New York with her husband. After some very unfortunate events befall Maeve, her cousin convinces her to stay on a more full time basis. The more Maeve gets pulled into Andrea's life- and her friend circle's belief that a woman cannot be fulfilled without children- the more she notices that everything is not really what it seems.

I didn't fully connect to Maeve, honestly, but I felt sympathetic toward her which was good enough for this sort of novel. Obviously, the reader can tell that something is amiss with Andrea and company from early-ish, but exactly what is not clear at first. I was able to figure out some of the twists before Maeve, but it was still exciting wondering whether Maeve herself would figure things out in time.

The second half of the book especially is very thrilling, with a lot of excitement and twists. The first half is more of a set up for what is to come, and I suppose the psychology behind why Maeve doesn't run for the hills at the very first signs of shadiness. The end is fairly satisfying, and while I wasn't sure whether I loved it, hated it, or both, it certainly was well crafted. I would have perhaps liked a little more backstory about the cult itself, but it's definitely a messed up one, which I loved!

Bottom Line: Certainly delivered on levels of messed up, just as the creepy disembodied baby head cover promises!

Just Like Mother is a fantastic thriller .
The characters are well written .
The story is twisty with a perfectly paced plot .

I really did not like this book at all. It's manipulative and not at all believable, and absolutely should come with trigger warnings regarding rape, imprisonment, and abuse. Not an enjoyable read.

Just Like Mother is a combination of familiar premises: an involuntary cult, a thirty-something struggling with relationships and her career, unsettling AI, and an attempt at redefining family. Maeve, the flawed but trying protagonist, escaped an all female cult centered around motherhood as a child, yet she continues to feel its effects 25 years later as she struggles to connect with those around her and form trusting relationships. She reconnects with Andrea, her cousin who grew up in the cult with her, trusting her childhood memories to rekindle their connection. Of course, nothing goes as Maeve planned.

Heltzel writes a successful suspense tale with plenty of twists and turns. The characters are believable and lively, though the women are much more developed than the men (likely intentionally). The prose flows well and the story is very readable both linguistically and how the story develops. Maeve is very relatable and likable, despite her shortcomings stemming from her childhood trauma, which the reader learns more details of as the novel progresses via short chapters that flash back to her time as an eight-year-old living with the cult.

My main difficulty with this text was the pacing. Maeve is a fiction editor, a profession she adores because it allows her to be very detailed, observant, and controlled when she feels very little of that in her personal life. How was it that she missed every single warning until her story is nearly finished? She usually doesn't even have suspicions to drop, but the foreshadowing of twisted events to come is so direct that I was able to guess every major plot point long before it was officially revealed. Granted, I spend a lot of time in the horror/thriller/sci-fi genre, so it is possible I am more tuned in to the trail breadcrumbs tend to leave.

In this case, it severely warped the pacing of the text and left me focusing on how long I'd slough through normalcy before I got to a scare. There were a few twists that were extra surprising or horrifying, but the overall plot was pretty easy to decipher from early on. That being said, it didn't detract terribly from my enjoyment of the novel. It was well written, suspenseful (even if oddly paced), and kept me chugging along through its conclusion. I'd certainly read Heltzel again, though I hope there are more surprises to find next time around.

The Mothers' commune/cult had me hooked early on. I loved the plot twists, but sometimes things got a bit predictable. The ending was well done and overall, it was a quick, good read. Thankful for the ARC.

Maeve endangered her life twenty years ago by fleeing the cult she was born and raised in. Maeve was quickly adopted by a loving couple after that, but the adjustment to life on the outside was challenging. Maeve was terrified of boys and men. She had never attended a public school or interacted with students of the other gender. Now an adult, Maeve has done her best to build a normal life for herself in NYC.

BUT......


An ending that felt distinctly frightening thrilled me. This tale also borrowed extensively from a horror classic that I like.

Thank you for this copy. I was very much looking forward to reading this and being able to hand sell the book in my store. This was a fairly quick read because it was so engaging. I think this would be a summer horror beach read for some people and for others a pretty chilling autumn spooky season read! Some parts of the book are not for the faint of heart both in graphic sex and gore, but that's also why I liked it!

Maeve was a young girl when she escaped a motherhood-focused cult by exposing its practices to the outside world. But since then she's been alone in the wider world, no family to speak of. That is, until her cousin, a fellow cult escapee, reaches out via an Ancestry-type site to reconnect for the first time in years. Maeve is overjoyed and learned that her cousin has been mega-successful, running a life coaching business and buying a mini-mansion in the Catskills. Maeve goes to visit, but soon things begin to get weird, as Maeve realizes her cousin still has a huge fixation on motherhood and feminity. But Maeve feels herself pulled into Andrea's world, and can't seem to let go.

I've mentioned it before, but I love cult books, and this was the best kind, because you're not sure if there even is one, there's just a weird vibe, so you're sitting there the whole time just observing as this creeping feeling of red gets bigger and bigger until it's practically slapping you in the face. I loved that pervasive sense of dread that just hangs over the entire novel. It's so creepy and just overwhelming.

And there's a bunch if really great twists that just kept me on my toes the whole time. And they go all the way until the very end. It's really amazing. I don't want to give anything away, but I was like "Holy crap! What was that!" all the way up until the very end. It's was jaw dropping. That's how I would describe the whole novel. Just each turn was jaw dropping.

If you like suspenseful, horror-filled, cult novels, you'll love this one. I did.

📖 I love when you discover a book, think you know what’s happening every step of the way and then the ending still surprises you a bit. For me, I recognize the fact I read a lot of thrillers so I pretty much expect them to follow the same formulaic method, and I’m pretty used to congratulating myself on seeing what is coming along the way. This one definitely had enough of that, where you’re like ok main character, you aren’t thinking this is a little weird or coincidental? But I stayed along for the ride and felt like this was a well-written, nicely developed story that still managed to reward the reader with a 1-2 punch at the end and really isn’t that the best kind of thriller? 

I went in blind and I would recommend you do the same, but here’s a brief background for those who like to have some idea of what they are getting into– 

👩 Maeve lives a reclusive life, mainly due to trauma she endured as a child. She grew up with her cousin Andrea, as part of a cult (female empowerment group gone over the top) up until her escape at 8 years old, when the two were separated. 

“we were so much alike, she and I. It was hard to tell, sometimes, where one of us ended and the other began.” 

Much of her life, Maeve has been grieving the loss of her cousin, searching for her, wondering where she is, if she was ok. This prevents Maeve from having healthy relationships of her own, but she is doing her best as an editor in New York City. One day, the two cousins find each other. Desperate to reconnect, Maeve is swept up in Andrea’s orbit and off to her historic mansion in upstate New York (complete with hidden passageways). Andrea has a loss of her own, which leads her to create a business that offers workshops and uses life-like babies to support mothers (grieving and soon-to-be). 
Told in alternating timelines, Heltzel gives some background on the girls’ upbringing in the cult with present timeline. I absolutely loved the eerie vibe, damaged characters and overall WEIRDNESS of this book.  

🎧 The audio was fantastic! Narrated by Elizabeth Evans, she captured the suspenseful tone of the book perfectly. 

🌟 Thanks to @tornightfire  and @netgalley for the early digital copy and @macmillanaudio for the audio narration.

Out now! This book was WILD! Seriously crazy and a fun ride.

Maeve and Andrea grow up together in a misandrist, women-led cult. They manage to escape, but lose track of each other in the process. Thanks to the wonders of DNA sites, the cousins find each other again and try to reconnect. But not everything is as it seems in the plush, moneyed world of Andrea and her company.

I enjoyed the craziness of this novel, especially in the latter half. I found the foreshadowing a little heavy-handed - there was no real mystery about whether bad things would happen and who was behind them, but I was intrigued to see how it would all play out and more importantly, WHY. I found some of the timelines a bit confusing as well - at one point Maeve says she's been dating a guy for two months and then a page later, "it's only been a week."

I would have loved more about the original cult - the piece of info about Maeve dressing up like one of the Mothers to go out and how they lured victims was more intriguing to me than the current day plot line. That said, this is a super creepy quick read and pulls no punches!

3/5 stars. Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Don't you just HATE when you see things coming from a mile away? You're all like c'mon girl... I know you're not that stupid and clueless. Wake up. Wake Uuuuuuppppp!

Girl grows up in a cult run by Mothers. Girl escapes cult. Girl pines for her best friend. Best friend finds Girl twenty years later. Best friend and Girl begin to hang out and it's like old times but they don't talk about old times. Bad things start to happen in Girl's life. Best friend invites Girl to stay with her till she gets back on her feet. Girl gratefully takes her up on the offer because Girl is a dumb stupid Girl.

If this had been a print copy, I totally would have wall-chucked it a handful of times.

That said, the book was highly engaging and messed up on so many levels, so I forgave it for being so blantantly obvious. If you're into cult fiction, you may really dig this one.

This book grabbed me with the cover and promise of a cult story! But the unbelievable circumstances and super easy to guess twists made it fall flat for me. This book was not for me. Down to the epilogue when I was almost at peace with the book, and then just furious.

3.5/5

I'm not going to lie to you, Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel is a very strange book, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. The cover grabbed me immediately since it is just so dang creepy, and I loved the remote setting and overall creepy vibes. This is a cult-based book that is on both the side of a bit of a miss and the side of a bit of a win for me. The cult itself was a unique and weird one, and there are some great gothic elements as well. I really enjoyed Heltzel's decision to mix Maeve's present-day with back when she was a little girl in the cult, and I also loved how everything ended up tying together, even if it was a little heartbreaking at times. I totally understood Maeve's wish not to have children and her fear of men once she was placed in another home, so I did feel like I had a bit of a connection with her.

Elizabeth Evans was an incredible narrator for the audiobook, and I think it is a great option for reading this. I was able to speed through Just Like Mother on audio and I thought Evans was a great pick for not only Maeve as a character but the overall feel of the story as well. I would have enjoyed a bit more focus on the cult itself in the past tense, and I feel like we really only got a taste of what that was like for our MC. She was also rather frustrating as a character since it seemed really obvious to me what was happening, but she basically just refused to come to terms with it and stay as oblivious as she could. I was a HUGE fan of the ending, but I just wanted a bit more from the story overall. I will definitely be here for whatever Heltzel writes next!

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Wow what a wild and infuriating read! As a married woman who has chosen not to have children, this story elevated A LOT of emotions within me.

I thought Maeve was a fantastic character, and I love that she had no problem standing up to Emily when she kept pushing the issue of motherhood on her. For years, society has led us to believe that it is a woman’s duty to procreate and raise a family, but now women are taking charge of their lives and no longer feeling obligated to have children (which I love!).

I do have to note that I felt horrible for what Maeve had to go through, first with The Mother Collective and then when she was reunited with her cousin, Andrea. As soon as she came back into Maeve’s life, I knew there was something off about her; it was just too good to be true. But Maeve was such a strong character, and I was so proud of her throughout this story.

Highly recommend this book!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4721177783

Just Like Mother is a creepy crawly plot-heavy gothic tale featuring two girls born into a cult.

Maeve and her cousin Andrea are part of The Mother Collective, which reveres motherhood above all else. At a young age, the girls are separated when the cult is broken up by law enforcement.

Twenty years later, Maeve is still looking for Andrea. Eventually, a DNA site reunites them. Andrea is a successful CEO of a tech company that creates lifelike baby dolls. She and her husband Rob have a spooky old mansion in upstate New York. Maeve, who is barely making ends meets in her editor job with her rundown studio apartment in NYC, jumps at the chance to visit. Has Maeve finally found her family again? Or has twenty years of life irrevocably changed the relationship between the two cousins?

Just Like Mother is a genuinely scary read. You never know where the author is heading. It’s like being blindfolded on a rollercoaster! The ending was great too. If you want to read an updated and cinematic gothic mystery, this book is a must read. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5 stars!

Thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for a digital review copy of the book.

THIS BOOK YALLLLL. A cult about motherhood? What could be more timely? I was thoroughly creeped out in a way I wasn’t expecting and even though some of the things were predictable, the execution was 10/10. Highly recommend.