Mother, Mother opens on a quiet Saturday morning in small-town New York. A young boy wakes up with his mother standing over him, waiting to start their day. He is a little odd--we soon learn he's been recently diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and epilepsy--and his mother seems to be wound a little tight, but she's also concerned and loving. Next, the perspective shifts to that of his older sister, a rebellious teen who has just been hospitalized in a local mental institute. We learn that the father is cheating, and the eldest daughter ran away with a boyfriend several years ago. These are the perceptions presented in the first few pages of Koren Zailckas's startling debut novel.
As the story of the Hurst family unfolds, the reader will learn to question every "fact" exhibited. The youngest child, Will, and the middle daughter, Violet, continue to trade off the first-person relating of their family drama. One is on the autism spectrum and the other is drug-addled; thus the reader has to parse not one unreliable narrator but two. Josephine, the titular mother, starts off coldly Stepford-like and quickly takes a turn toward chilling. Absent eldest daughter Rose remains ghostlike and disembodied for most of the book. From the start, the reader senses that something is amiss, but will have to puzzle for a time over which of these troubled characters to trust. Koren Zailckas exhibits a nuanced understanding of psychological drama, combined with a wry tone that brings surprising humor to such an unnerving story. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia