The Good Mother by AL Bird – a review BLOG TOUR

I was lucky enough to be given a copy of The Good Mother from the publisher and am very pleased to be taking part in the blog tour.

The Good Mother starts with Suzan waking up realising that she is being held captive in a bedroom and her daughter is missing. Soon she hears her daughter Cara in the next room who is also being held. Their only way of communicating is via pencilled letters pushed through a grate. Suzan is desperate to escape and between them they try and hatch a plan. Firstly though they need to work out who is keeping them prisoner and why?

I absolutely sped through this and couldn’t put it down. To me it seemed quite an original storyline. You know that she is being held and we hear a bit from the voice of the captor but it’s hard to pin point exactly who is telling the truth. The majority of the story is told from the viewpoint of Suzan with occasional words from the captor. This gives quite a claustrophobic atmosphere as you almost feel you are the one being kept locked up.

My only slight criticism of this book is that the actual motives and actions of some of the characters did seem slightly unrealistic. It is hard to explain as this is an incredibly difficult book to review without giving away any of the plot. However I’m not really sure that people would act in the way that they did in this story even with the best of intentions at heart. However we never really know how far people will go to protect their loved ones.

This was one of those novels that you start to question once you have finished it and wonder what you could have missed along the way. The style of writing is probably not for everyone as it’s very fast and written in very short sharp sentences. To me this was perfect for conveying the fear and desperation that Suzan was feeling. It does start off quite confusing and some of the bits seem rather unbelievable. However once you hit the twist towards the end suddenly with hindsight everything starts to make sense. It wasn’t a twist I saw coming which makes this book all the better.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and look forward to reading more from AL Bird.

Author biog

AL Bird lives in North London, where she divides her time between writing and working as a lawyer. The Good Mother is her major psychological thriller for Carina UK, embarking into the world of ‘grip-lit’. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London, and is also an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course, which she studied under Richard Skinner. She’s also a member of the Crime Writers’Association. For updates on her writing, you can follow her on Twitter, @ALBirdwriter, or by visiting her website, at www.albirdwriter.com

The Good Mother is out on the 4th of April and will be available from Amazon.