313 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 17, 2022
4/5 Stars
Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel is a wild journey through cults, motherhood, creepy AI dolls and relationships that should've stayed buried.
When I first picked up Just Like Mother it was mainly due to the creepy doll face on the cover. Afterall, I'm a sucker for doll horror. What I got was so much more than that though. Heltzel wrote a complex book that tells us the story of Maeve, who escaped a crazy cult and is doing the best to live her life normally in NYC as an editor. When her long lost cousin Andrea suddenly finds her on a ancestry site, things seem perfect for a while. But something isn't quite right with Andrea, her husband Ryan and their friends. The successful power couple seems to want more from Maeve than they are letting on.
Oh my, what a ride! I devoured this book and I couldn't put it down. It's just the right mix of crazy relatives, cults and weird old houses to keep me going. What was really interesting was that every character in this book is broken, and finding out their "issues" kept me interested the entire time. I wish the book would have told us more about the cult, since it was a bit of an afterthought. We know the cult existed, but why and how would have been interesting to know. Other than that, I truly enjoyed this book.
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