3.5. Ending felt a little rushed but loved Mary’s character & dealt with a lot of tough subjects beautifully

I understand where the book was going and what Annie Mac was trying to say regarding being a mother but I didn’t feel like it was very well executed. It kept my attention because of the different time periods and I did enjoy following Mary through the years and watching her life change irrecoverably. The ending also made sense in a way as we watch Mary struggle through her life due to her taking the “motherly” role not only with her son but also her father and brother and such a role is an incredibly demanding one. She never takes time for herself and so in the end her own breakdown almost seems inevitable.

Despite this, I just didn’t enjoy the book as a whole. It might be a cliche to say that maybe I would understand it better if I was a mother myself but I don’t think that should be the case. We can all empathise with characters that have trials and tribulations completely different to our own lives so that I didn’t feel any real care for Mary or TJ makes me feel like the book was simply not that well written.

Annie Macmanus has made a prosperous career for herself as a DJ under the name Annie Mac, and in the recent years, she has used her full name as an author. Mother Mother is her debut novel, a beautiful story about family, loss, addiction, and mental health.

Mother Mother starts when Mary McConnell, a woman in her late thirties who has lived her entire life in the same home in Belfast, walks into a cemetery in the dark of night. The next morning, her son TJ wakes up to find her gone. The timeline of the novel then begins flashing back to Mary's childhood and past, while occasionally returning to the present moment (that is 2018 in the novel) where TJ looks for Mary and Mary is gone. This timeline structure works extremely well, as it gives space to build a solid backstory for Mary and TJ while simultaneously progressing the plot through the chapters focused on present day. The chapter headings indicate the central character as well as the year of the chapter's setting, making the structure flow clearly and neatly.

What I loved the most about Mother Mother is how Macmanus is the epitome of "show, don't tell". This book is entirely devoid of the kind of writing that spoonfeeds emotion and tone to readers. The writing is very matter-of-fact, allowing for the reader to make their own inferences about things instead of having everything already chewed and digested for them. For example, Mary's mental health, both in the past and in the present moment, are never overtly described, never given a lot of attention. Still, the reader completely believes her mental breakdown, because everything she has been through has slowly piled up to bring her to this state. The prose is very simplistic, and because it is simplistic, it is real and poignant and therefore makes the characters feel real and poignant.

What also felt real and poignant to me was how Mary was portrayed through her womanhood, her role as a young mother, a sister, a daughter, and a person without a mother of her own. Mary was always the mother figure in a house otherwise occupied by men, whether those men were her father and her brother Sean, or her son TJ. The men in her life used violence in a lot of ways, emotional and physical, and for many means, whether that be sexual violence or revenge for sexual violence. Her experiences, opportunities, and close relationships were tied to men, yet these ties never made her seem less-than. Instead, these ties fleshed out her experiences as a girl and as a woman in a male-dominated family and, on a larger scale, society.

Needless to say, I absolutely loved Mother Mother, as it was the exact kind of book I always want to read: simple, beautiful, cohesive, and a book that trusts in its readers to figure things out without telling them exactly how to feel and exactly how to read the book. There is nothing forced here, no stilted metaphors, no overwrought emotional manipulation, none of that. Just a simple story of a life that resonates and feels rooted in reality. That is what I seek in books, and that, and so much more, is what I found on the pages of Mother Mother.