Hi people and welcome to another installment of Book of the Month. Are we going to have two books this month to make up for the lack of last month's? Well, I hope so. So many the great books out there, yet, so little the time to read much less write about them. Hmmph.
Let’s get into it. The Push is a story about Blythe Connor’s reluctant journey to motherhood and how her experience of motherhood is nothing like she hoped, but everything she feared. We are also taken on a journey of the making and unraveling of a family. When we first meet Blythe, a tormented mother (to say the least), she is sitting inside her car at night and watching her ex-husband (Fox) with his new (and younger) wife, their little son, and the daughter Blythe shares with Fox. This daughter, Violet, locks eyes with Blythe in the moment and as we will later realize orchestrates her own mother’s unraveling.
The novel is written as a manuscript Blythe writes for Fox to describe her own version of events leading from when they first met until the current moment. However, the story is interwoven with Blythe’s own maternal lineage and the curse that seems to plague the women in their family. Her own mother abandoned her when she was 11, after years of abusing and neglecting her. Her grandmother was similarly abusive towards Blythe's mom, and left in an even more macabre way: she hung herself in front of the house. So much of this foreshadowing by her progenitors suggests that she never had a chance. But didn’t she? This psychological suspense tale that will leave you on the edge of your seat from the first page to the shocking—or maybe a little expected—end unpacks this amongst several other themes.
