This is a strange little book. It wasn’t to my taste. It was badly written. I wasn’t a fan of this at all.

Thank you for the ARC! Okay wow this book is so addictive, You can’t put it down as once you read it, you want to know more. I would say the experience of reading this book is akin to a rollercoaster ride where you can’t tell what’s going to happen.

A spellbinding read that captured my attention and was heart wrenching. A baby is kidnapped and raised by her abductor as her own. Told beautifully with compassion and honesty.

This novel resonated with me on a personal level. Who are we and what forms us? It was a captivating read.
I was gifted a copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

After her mother's death, a woman finds out about a shocking truth. That her mother was not her mother because she kidnapped her from a nursery in the US and brought her to Australia. Although it's an interesting concept with regards to the story, I struggled getting through it. I did like the perspectives of her biological family members that were addressed later on in the book.

In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor. "When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own."
Told from the perspective of Nella upon discovery, her husband Alex who had an adoption experience, her sister in the USA and her birth mother suffering from Alzheimer's. It is an interesting concept, beautifully written but not quite gripping enough for me.

A beautifully written, heart rending book. Thank you to the author, Publerati and NetGalley for the ARC.

A novel that tackles identity and loss. The main character at the beginning of the book finds out that she was stolen as an infant from a hospital in Pittsburgh and taken to Australia. The book is told from different perspectives and the writing has a dreamlike quality to it. What is identity? I am so glad that I picked this one up.

I struggled with this book. The different voices really didn’t mesh well together. The story plot was very interesting: a baby snatched from the hospital and then whisked halfway around the world.
I just couldn’t connect with any of the characters, except feel sorrow for Deborah for having her child stolen from her.
I did like the cover since I’ve always liked nesting dolls.

I’m not sure why but I struggled to follow the story. For me, it seemed all over the place. However, I did find some of the writing to be poetic. I may attempt to finish at a later date but not at this time so I inevitably stopped reading at the start of Chapter 12.

Beautifully written but extremely hard to follow. I had a hard time getting into the story partly because it is outside my typical genre, but also just because of how confusing the style made it. Maybe it just went over my head. It was an interesting story nonetheless.

«Who could warm us when those wordless memories rose like ice-water in the veins?

Here is a scene, a fragment, a vignette.

Such writerly words for anguish. Easier to remember the pain through the prism of craft, I suppose. The writer is larger than the sorrow she is remembering. The artist a mother who can hold the bereft child.»

A novel that feels like anything but, Mother Tongue is a sort of meditation on identity & self, with the barest hints of nature vs nurture and epigenetic inheritance. Mother Tongue is focused on the life of Aussie-raised Nella Pine as she reels from the death of her mother and reckons with a startling truth uncovered in a letter from mother to daughter: that Nella is not her real name; that she was stolen from a Pennsylvania hospital; and the life that she's lived in a continent miles away from her birthplace is never going to look or feel the same ever again.

The novel's prose is poetic and flowing, a tidy version of a stream-of-consciousness narrative as Nella née Naomi grapples with the textured memories of her childhood. Nella visits and revisits pivotal life moments, conversations with herself and others, times where her heritage seems to suffuse her understanding of the world and her feelings, even though she was never raised in it. (Nella's birth parents are Jewish; her mother, before she renamed herself Eve, was Ruth, daughter of Jewish survivors & refugees from WWII, haunted by the loss of their first daughter in the chaos of war.)

Kornblatt makes connections between Nella's forced adoption and that of other ethnic groups, from Jewish refugees forcibly adopting Anglicised surnames to the indigenous 'Stolen Generations' of Australia—but those forced adoptions & abductions have some sense of context. Mother Tongue as a whole is a woman's attempt to grapple with a violence she never knew was inflicted upon her, and we only get the barest hints of the more immediate aftermath of said violence on Nella (Naomi)'s family, namely her birth sister & mother. The book offers no easy resolutions or peace, no sense of closure or understanding for the abduction beyond a vague gesture at trauma as a possible reason. In that, it does echo reality and very real human messiness.

A slow-paced, mellifluous read.

After I finished this book, I went back and read the publisher’s description and confirmed what I had suspected: the description had very little to do with the book I had just read. I was expecting a narrative that “reads like a true story” and that gradually gives us more and more information about the crime. In reality, the abduction of the baby that starts the book off has very little to do with what unfolds. Through the voices of Nella/Naomi and others close to her, we learn not what happened but how the abduction affected and changed everyone it touched. If I had realized this sooner I might have enjoyed the book more, but in reality this was a hard book for me to get through because of the author’s nonlinear, introspective style and (to my mind at least) excessively poetic language. All of the characters were broken; all had experienced loss, even beyond what they experienced when Naomi was abducted.

Ironically, the chapter I most enjoyed was the last one, written in the voice of Naomi’s birth mother. Deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s Disease, she relives Naomi’s birth over and over again with a mother’s joy, and receives visits from other lost loved ones as well. That the one who should have been the most hurt ends up being the one experiencing the most joy is an outcome I didn’t expect. It made me think that there was more to this book than I was able to discern on one reading.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor. “When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own.”

In four voices of those whose lives were changed forever by the abduction, the mystery of Nella’s kidnapping emerges. Why was she taken? How was the secret kept for so long? What became of the family she was stolen from? Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.

Mother Tongue is the story of Nella. After her mother’s death, she finds a letter of confession telling her that she was kidnapped from the hospital as a baby. The book is Nella’s perspective of working through that traumatic revelation.

Through the course of the story, Nella describes her childhood in Australia, her relationship with the woman she knows as her mother, and her marriage to Alex. We also see Alex’s perspective of his own trauma and Nella’s sister Leah’s perspective of the aftermath of the kidnapping. Finally, we see the perspective of Deborah, Nella’s birth mother.

This book is about mothers and children. It’s about the complex relationships we have with our mothers and the trauma children experience when they are separated from their mothers. This book is also about lost children and the effect that has on their mothers. Are we formed by our DNA or are we formed by the relationships we have? Or perhaps a bit of both?

Mother Tongue had me riveted. The author, Joyce Kornblatt, does an amazing job of weaving an intricate tale of complicated relationships, both lost and found, broken and reforged. The prose is beautiful. The characters are intricate and believable.

“What if?” It’s a question we always ask ourselves and others, but how often do we find the answers we need? The novel begins with the discovery that sets itself into motion, later on leading to a series of revelations concerning such incident. Joyce Kornblatt explores certain queries on life through a lyrical and thought-provoking way in her novel. The insights one can excavate from it are downright philosophical, most especially the ones about identity. I like how every part of the plot is substantial, not merely throwing out questions for the reader without helping them make sense of those. How, indeed, do we distinguish reality from perception? Or is the line so blurred that we can’t tell which is which? In summary, I enjoyed the profound prose; the feelings manifested by the characters (both fleeting and long-lasting) also evoke the readers to feel the same way. We are like Russian dolls, after all.

Thank you, Netgalley, for this ARC!

This is a beautifully-written and thought-provoking novel, centered upon a middle-aged Australian woman who finds out that she was stolen from a hospital nursery in Pittsburgh, and her whole life has basically been a lie. The novel is primarily from her point of view, although we do hear from other characters who have been impacted.

TW/CW: Kidnapping, family death, Alzheimer’s disease

REVIEW: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

Mother Tongue is the story of Nella/Naomi, a woman who was kidnapped three days after her birth and finds out the truth only when the kidnapper – the woman who had pretended to be her mother – writes her a letter to read upon her death.

While an interesting concept, this book was way too…flowery for my taste. Metaphors and similes were drastically overused and I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if the author had simply told the story with a little less “flourish.”

While it might appeal to some readers, this book is not my cup of tea.

MOTHER TONGUE by Joyce Kornblatt is superbly written novel, although exceedingly slow, about an infant stolen from a Pittsburgh hospital nursery in 1968 by a nurse who escaped to Australia and raised the baby as her own child. Many years later after her mother’s death, Nella Pine learns she was kidnapped when she reads a letter the kidnapper/mother left her. The book is primarily about how Nella works through her shock that nothing is as she believed and searches for clues from her happy childhood. I kept waiting to learn about Nella’s biological family, and that does happen in the final chapters.
The novel is written in the first-person point of view of Nella, her husband, sister from birth, and birth mother. All the chapters are quite similar instead of being distinctly different, even though some are from another character’s perspective. I wish a chapter was included from Olivia’s point of view, the older woman in Australia who took in the kidnapper/mother and baby Nella.
MOTHER TONGUE is a serious, thoughtful novel. Although the police knew who took the baby and the abduction was widely reported, including in Australia, the baby was never found. Could a crime like this happen today, even with increased hospital security, improved technology and information shared between police across the U.S and in other countries?

This is well-written and often compelling. I enjoyed the pacing and the characters, and this story to be quite interesting. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!