THE PUSH by Ashley Audrain

Get ready for a serious page turner that calls into question nature vs nurture.

The story is told from Blythe’s point of view, who had a negligent and abusive mother that had suffered the same from Blythe’s grandmother. As a result, when Blythe gave birth to her own daughter, Violet, she was terrified at the thought of ending up doing the same thing to her child.

At first, Blythe struggled to form a connection with Violet mostly because of postnatal depression and seeing her marriage crumbling while adjusting to the new reality.

She definitely struggled as a new mother, often ignoring Violet’s cries and needs in favour of her own. However, this is where it gets intriguing, ambiguous and frustrating. Violet’s avoidant, sinister and hostile attitude is only displayed when her father is absent.

The uncertainty of not knowing if Violet could really be a psychopath or whether what Blythe sees is heavily influenced by her abused childhood will haunt you until the very last page.

A great psychological thriller that gives just enough to be compelling yet the ending is frustrating and infuriating. Highly recommend if you are a fan of the suspense.

“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . .”