Reading With Tyler

Name: Love, Mom
Series: Stand Alone
Author: Iliana Xander
Publisher: Penguin
Format: Kindle
Genres: Adult, Psychological Thriller, Mystery, Contemporary
Spice Rating: None

Rating: (Actual Rating 3.75)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Review:

I think Love, Mom is another example of where I went into the book thinking it was something else based on the tagline and snippets of reviews I’d seen. I thought this was going to be about a mother passing on a secret of murder to her daughter – and I did honestly believe at one point that this was going to be secret society type reading. Let me be clear – it is not!

What we get instead is a story about a daughter who is having to figure out the truth about her mother after she starts receiving letters possibly from her mother after her untimely death. These letters reveal a less than clean past which has Mackenzie questioning whether she knew her mother at all…

I really enjoyed this thriller! I wasn’t on the edge of my seat due to suspense or anything like that, but I did continuously find myself wanting to turn the page, wanting to find out more – needing answers, just like Mackenzie. It was well written and it was genuinely quite the easy read, fast paced read. I do think there is a difference between a fast paced read and an on the edge of my seat read (I’ve yet to experience this in a thriller, I’m on the hunt for one!) so Love, Mom is definitely just the former.

When Mackenzie starts receiving these letters, we actually get to read them too! I thought that was a really cool way of alowing us to go through what Mackenzie was going through without it just being told to us. I think a trick was missed as there was a cool chance here for mixed media if these appeared like actual letters rather than just more story told from another character’s POV (who would write out entire conversations using speech marks in a letter to someone?). It did feel a bit odd and they missed the mark slightly for me, but still I liked them!

We had a surprisingly large cast of characters in Love, Mom – some that we spend a lot of time with in the present, some in the past, but regardless there are definitely a lot of names to keep straight! I personally didn’t struggle with this, but I have seen a few comments since finishing where this was mentioned as a problem for some people. Despite the large cast of characters, we don’t actually have a huge amount of POVs!

I’m very comfortable the 3.75 rating on this one – most of the plot twists were guessable, and like I said there was a missed opportunity for the letters to have actually felt like mixed media. All in all, I’m so glad I picked this one up. I missed it when it was picked in The Final Chapter fable book club! So, I’m glad I got the chance to prioritise it due to the prompt “pick a book you missed from a fable book club, chosen this year”!

“Punishment is white, revenge is red. Mine is bloody black.”