A KNOCKOUT!

This story paints a vivid picture of motherhood, especially early motherhood where things are beautiful and <i>you should be grateful, she’s perfect</i> and also so damn hard and lonely and you start to question was this worth it and then, right on time, here comes to guilt for even thinking that.

We this all unfold in our MC, Flora. She loves her newborn baby girl, Iris, fiercely. No, love can’t even begin to explain it. The word love just isn’t enough for this situation. She can’t help but feel, however, that life has been… less than perfect since Iris showed up. Flora is having a difficult time breastfeeding, she’s barely sleeping, and being a mother isn’t at all what she imagined it would be. Add to that that her husband is on military deployment so Flora is acting as a single mother while he is away. Severely sleep deprived and losing her grip on reality, Flora is desperate for help which winds up on her doorstep in the form of her mother who she hasn’t seen or spoken to in four years. But her mother isn’t the only visitors from her past that are beginning to pop up. Flora begins to wonder why all of this is happening now…

Liked:
-Look at that cover!
-Short chapters are a god-send
-The twists had me literally yelling out loud: <b>WHAT?! are you kidding me!?</b> They were so good.
-The writing is perfect; building and revealing in exactly the right spots
-Living inside of our MC’s mind. Even if she was going a little insane, I couldn’t look away.

Disliked:
-We hear an <u>awful</u> lot about the protagonist’s breasts and nipples and milk in the first parts of the book. Arguably too much but I can overlook it since everything else was so good.

Overall, an insanely great debut that is definitely worth the read. Thank you Mulholland Books and NetGalley for the digital copy! Out 09/17/2024!

'Rosemary's Baby' meets 'The Exorcist.' This was sinister. A wild ride that tips into madness. I think any woman, mother or not, can relate to everything in these pages. And I think that deepens the fear of Flora's experiences. I had no idea where this story was headed, and by the end, I was blown away.

Dearest was the mother-daughter horror story of my dreams. Vivid story telling that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight. Flora might just be my new favorite unreliable narrator. Nothing could have prepared me for where this story was heading and where it ended up.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Mulholland Books for this e-arc!

Thank you @netgalley for the ARC of Dearest by Jacquie Walter’s. This was one of the creepiest books I’ve read in a long time. Walter’s storytelling was superb. She completely captured motherhood and the emotions of being a first time mom. Then she added the layer of complicated parent relationships and unexplained occurrences. I love books where you don’t know if the events are reality or a figment of the character’s mind. The book starts with events that could be hallucinations of an exhausted mother and then turn sinister. The book has a lot of twists and turns that keep you turning the pages. It was one that I couldn’t put down.

Flora is a brand new mother, whose husband is overseas on deployment. She struggles with all things new Mother’s struggle with like breastfeeding, not sleeping. Soon, unexplained occurrences start happening and she is concerned for her baby’s safety. Her childhood imaginary friend comes back to her and her estranged mother turns up on her doorstep. As more unexplained events start to happen, Flora needs to get to the bottom of it in order to protect her child from them and from herself.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy of Dearest by Jacquie Walters.
Based on the description, I really, really wanted to enjoy this book. Sadly, that was not the case. For me, the storyline moved at a snails pace. About 66% into the book, it started to get interesting and then it just got really weird. At 91% I had to force myself to finish. This one was not for me.