Rieger did such a masterful job of writing a story about the complete complexity of motherhood. Following multiple generations of a family where the characters were all so flawed but so relatable, the story was a honest depiction of what being a mother is like instead of painting a rosey perfect picture like most books do. I loved the characters of Lila, a self-proclaimed “bad mother” who never quite got over the disappearance of her own mother as a kid. There is so much to this story that would be impossible to summarize here but it is definitely a story that will stay with me for a long time.
Thank you to Netgalley and to the publishers for allowing me to read this advanced copy for my honest review.

I enjoyed this multi-generational story. The characters are interesting, yet sad, complicated and depressing. A real look at the struggles of motherhood. and how your own mother can completely shape your outcome. I found it mostly sad for all the women in the story but felt especially sad for Lila. A woman whose life could have been completely different if she had a “present” mother. Grace and Zelda’s storyline were real, emotionally raw, and lonely.

Overall I enjoyed this and will think of them often. I think it will make for great discussion at book club.

Thank you NetGalley, Random House for the ARC. like Mother Like Mother publishes 10/29/2024

This was such a beautiful and impactful story full of important conversations and experiences shared between multiple generations of women. Diving into these mother/daughter dynamics and emotions feels just so deeply impactful and important. I truly enjoyed the way the author wove these stories, experiences, and traumas together in a cohesive way for the reader to take in . Thank you so much for the eARC, The Dial press!

Like Mother, Like Mother is one of those books that takes you into a part of family dynamics that is often times the most difficult dynamic to understand. The conversations and interplay between the two main characters we first meet, Lila Pereira and her youngest daughter Grace Maier, are sometimes comical, sometimes frustrating, but mostly priceless. It is easy to see that these two are quite a bit alike - but also have some very strong differences. Lila shares much of her own dysfunctional family back-story; but the story of her own mother, Zelda, leaves Grace yearning to discover the truth....did she die or did she abandon her family? As the story evolves through the timelines of Lila's childhood and present, we pick up the peripheral family and other characters of their lives who add much to the story and character of the family dynamic. But Grace's friend, Ruth, becomes like a member of the family and in turn, sometimes is the drive behind the direction their story takes in discovering long-held secrets, and moving forward into relationships that at times may be surprising. A very enjoyable character-driven story. hank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - ,Random House | The Dial Press for the opportunity to read and review this advance reader copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. #NetGalley #LikeMotherLikeMother

This is going to be a very popular book, there’s some great hot button topics, a dynamic mother daughter relationship and some really excellent dialogue.

It’s broken into three parts and I devoured the beginning and the end but the middle was a bit of a struggle for me, there are alot of characters to follow and the glossary at the beginning is super helpful for this but in the middle we turn focus onto one character that I just didn’t quite care about enough and my engagement waned. However, it is all integral to a really interesting story and plot.

This is a great book about women, from all generation and it felt like a triumph in that regard.

Beautiful story of a multigenerational family saga. Left me thinking between readings and long after the story was finished.

Like Mother, Like Mother is a powerful story about mothers and daughters and the difficult choices we make as women that affect our daughters. The book is very character driven with very strong secondary characters (like Ruth- I loved Ruth). Once past the first third of the book, it was hard to put down especially as the mystery with Lila's mom unfolded. Equally compelling and heartbreaking, Like Mother Like Mother is a great read. I will say the political aspects of the story didn't really add much to the plot and could have used a little bit of a tone down. While one name in particular was changed (all the others were not), we ALL knew who this author was referring to. I get it was to show that Lila was a absolute rock star of a journalist and editor, but it might be a turn off for certain readers (but it wasn't for me).
Thanks to #NetGalley and #RandomHouse for the ARC.

Like Mother, Like Mother is a complex generational story centered on three women and their maternal bonds. The author does a great job exploring multigenerational trauma and domestic violence, adding depth to this family saga. Admittedly, it took me a couple of months to read, as it was slow until near the end, and the timeline was occasionally confusing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dial Press for allowing me to read and review this eARC.

I enjoyed this book a lot. It was very interesting. I did find it a bit heavy on the information and it felt more like a memoir than a novel. It kept me interested though. I will try more by this author.

Multigenerational story and one of the best books I’ve read this year. This book has been graciously provided by the publisher in exchange for a review .

2.5 ⭐️ read for me. This book was character driven, involving generational views from strong willed women. There were many political topics discussed that lost my interest in the book. It was a very complex story/plot but each character was fully represented.

Thank you NetGalley and Susan Rieger’s team for providing me the opportunity to read this ARC.

I could not put this book down! It is fascinating. How do daughters turn out like their mothers when they aren't raised by them? This story focuses on the women of two families and the families they made. Human, imperfect, and loved.

Like Mother, Like Mother is about three generations of women. I typically like family sagas but was disappointed with this book. The book is divided into three parts, concentrating on the three women, Lila, Grace and Zelda. Zelda,mother to Lila, died in a mental hospital when Lila was young. Lila valued career more than motherhood and Grace, her daughter, writes a book about her well-known mother. There is also speculation that Zelda did not die in the hospital but instead ran away.

This book did not work for me for several reasons. Lila was an extremely successful publisher. Her story starts when she is forced into retirement at 65. Her story is all over the place. The timeline jumped all around and never seemed to cover a particular time frame completely.

The second part of the book was about Grace. Grace flounders around trying to figure out her life. However, in this part of the story, it also becomes political. Today's political climate was a part of the book. Some names were changed, some were not. It was not difficult to know the author's political views.

The third part of the book was about Zelda and the family investigating what really happened to her. This part of the book was the most interesting to me. I feel we were just given snippets of each women's life. I have read and enjoyed other books by Susan Rieger, but this one was just OK.

My thanks to NetGalley and Dial Press for the opportunity to read an ARC of this novel.

The book’s structure is multigenerational, with three parts that each cover the lives (and deaths) of three of the main characters, with the necessary overlapping in order to show their impact on each other. The style is intriguing, and the writing is brisk and witty. Much is revealed about the characters of each, how they are similar yet in some ways vastly different, and why the title succinctly tells all. Powerhouse journalist Lila Perreira rises from poor working-class Detroit to Jewish high society when she marries Joe, scion of a wealthy automotive industry family, whose mother, Frances, fully accepts the lowly girl from the wrong side of town. Career-obsessed, Lila quickly becomes the editor of an important Washington daily in the wake of the Watergate scandal. This happens during the 199Os, the last gasp of print media’s hold on the news. Watergate reverberates through the Lila-driven expose of President Chick Webb, a felonious type drawn from more contemporary times. At one point I thought that the frenetic, smart, fast-talking Lila was an obvious amalgam of both Woodward and Bernstein and maybe every whistle-blower since. Shortly afterward, this is almost literally confirmed.

I confess the investigative journalism ‘bring ‘em down’ element didn’t enthral me. There’s just too much of it, it’s almost cringingly cliched at points, and the detail and repetition lend themselves to skimming. More interesting, though still occasionally both stereotypical and overwrought, is the impact of Lila’s choice to have children but provide them little in the way of mothering. Having lost her own mother, the beautiful Zelda, in early childhood, she survived her brutish father and his equally unloving mother seemingly by sheer force of will. Her two older daughters, so close in age and looks that they are called ‘the twins,’ have each other and their saintly father and loving maternal grandmother for emotional sustenance. The youngest, Grace, openly referred to as a ‘mistake,’ takes after her sensitive and devoted father and builds an obsessive case against her mother, even taking notes as a young child. She then publishes a ‘scandalous’ (as it is repeatedly called) thinly-disguised ‘tell all’ novel.

The joint legacy of Zelda’s forced committal (by her husband) to the mental asylum in which she died, without ever again seeing her three young children, and Lila’s motherless/loveless childhood, are visited on Grace. But there is a twist. Unlike Lila, who accepted her father and grandmother’s story about Zelda’s early death without ever seeing her grave, Grace is consumed by her belief that this was a pretext. Zelda’s story in the third part is centred on her quest to find out.

There is a huge cast of characters, thankfully listed in a character map. Many of them, like the fictive but familiar president, get too much ink. Of the three main female characters, only Grace, barely 30, is alive when the story begins. But even dead, Lila dominates, which is entirely the point.

The story has plenty of emotional and social resonance, asking ‘big questions’ about motherhood, family, intergenerational trauma, dirty politics and the role of media. The big question for me is why the dauntless Lila, unafraid to tell Joe, on the eve of their marriage, that she didn’t want children, then seemingly just capitulated and had three, one an ‘afterthought.’ The ostensible reason is that Joe and the best domestic help their money could by made it feasible. Lila is nothing if not self-obsessed but she’s too smart not to realize how and why their agreement would affect all concerned. Not to mention that late 20th century women had far more options in terms of pursuing careers and having or not having children than this story suggests. By Lila’s time, working mothers were the majority, and childless marriages were fast becoming so. This was certainly even ‘more true’ among those as privileged as this family. A Lila who could fight tooth and claw a long distance away from her difficult childhood would not have been so passive, and then so indifferent, even ruthless, about the choices in front of her. I wanted to sympathize with Lila, Grace and Joe, who get the shortest end of the stick, while Zelda was the truly tragic victim. But I ended up thinking only that circumstances may shape character but they don’t make it.

This is a complex novel, following the women in one Jewish American family across three generations. It also left me with complex feelings. It’s the sort of book that draws you in and keeps you reading, but the emotionally-repressed characters left me emotionally uninvested.

I didn’t love the opening, but this quickly became an engaging read told with a unique, dialogue-heavy writing style.

Lila’s mother was put into an asylum by her abusive father when she’s just two years old. She grows up without a mother and with a horrible father. Her older brother and sister are scared, but differently.

The very driven Lila sort of lucks out in finding a wonderful husband who is a successful lawyer and is also all right with being the primary caregiver. The two oldest children, just a year apart, deal better than their younger sibling, Grace. As Lila becomes more and more consumed with her wildly successful career as a newspaper editor, she becomes more and more resentful that Lila isn’t the kind of mother Grace wants her to be. Lila was told that her mother died in the asylum in 1968. Grace doesn’t believe it.

This is an interesting story about how family shapes us and, of course, our expectations of mothers.

NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES OCTOBER 29, 2024.

From the publisher: An enthralling novel about three generations of strong-willed women, unknowingly shaped by the secrets buried in their family’s past.

Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.

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This one sat on my shelf for a long time and I hesitated to pick it up for some reason, but my sister read it and said it was great so I finally started it. I really enjoyed this with the relationship between Lila and Grace as we explore how their pasts influence their present day lives and each other. The writing is beautiful and the characters are well-drawn and realistic. I would definitely read more by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Available October 29, 2024.

A multigenerational story about three ambitious women starting with Zelda and Lila back in 1960 Detroit. What happens next changes the trajectory of Lila's life forever, shaping the way she raises her own family.

It deals heavily with abandonment, either by a mother or father and the fall out that occurs from it. There is no individual out there who has experienced abandonment as a child and not had it shape whether or not they have children, and if so how they raise them.

The characters were very easy for me to relate to, and I became invested in how Lila and Grace's lives would turn out.

Another stark reminder that family secrets rarely stay secret, especially now that DNA tests and genealogy tracking are as popular as they are today.

There is a section at the beginning titles Cast of Characters, bookmark it because you will want to refer to it. There is a large cast and multiple POVs. This definitely helped me keep everyone straight.

Such a compelling novel not just in terms of the abundant character development, but the amount of culture references that are brought about by Lila's job with newspapers over the years. I really found it fascinating.

The age old question of nature vs nurture and the guilt inducing theory that mothers can have a successful career or a family life is fed throughout this story. Three generations of women from the same family will raise questions and hint at answers. Will their circle complete a link or forge another chain in the family's complicated history?

Lila's mother, Zelda, is committed to a mental health facility when Lila is young. She will have no interactions with her mother and eventually will come to believe she died in the facility. Lila is raised by her father, a man whose anger teaches Lila to be independent. She will use this to rise quickly in the publishing world, becoming the executive editor at the Washington Globe while her three daughters are young, leaving their care to her husband.

Lila's youngest daughter, Grace, feels the same abandonment that Lila felt as a small child. She does not understand why her mother does not have time for her. As an adult, Grace will work as a journalist and write a book on her life as the child of a successful, but absent, parent. She also discovers that Zelda's story was not what they had always been told and that her grandmother is still alive.

Susan Rieger tells the story of this family and their pain with an understanding touch. She writes with her heart, leaving readers at times with a sense of loss and other times tinged with hope for their future. Life is complicated but no one gets out unscathed by the people they love. The pain can be forgiven but can it be forgotten?

I really enjoyed this book! It was both a sweeping family drama and a look at what it means to be a women. I thought the characters were fully drawn, I loved the friendship between Ruth and Grace. And although the mystery was somewhat secondary, it was a thread throughout the novel that made me keep turning the pages.

Lila and her 2 siblings are abandoned by their mother when they were young children. They were left in the care of their abusive father and his mother who tries to give them some stability. They were always told their mother died in a mental institution. Through the years Lila looked for her mother but never found her on her deathbed she left her daughter a letter to find out what happened to her mother. Lila left to go to college and never returned to her childhood home or her father’s abuse. She became the executive director of the Washington Globe and married her college boyfriend but strikes a deal with him that he will raise the children and basically become the mother in the relationship. Whereas becoming like mother like daughter.
Interesting concept for a book but drug on a bit.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book.