Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Mother of All Secrets

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book!

“Mother of All Secrets” follows new mom Jenn as she navigates the ever exhausting and often thankless world of motherhood. Her husband is often more than useless when it comes to their infant daughter, Clara, and to top it all off she is grieving her mother.

And while her new mom group helps get her out of the house, she often finds herself jealous of how put together the other moms are. Until one of them disappears.

Jenn and the others moms- Vanessa, Selena, and Kira soon find themselves tangled up in a dangerous situation as they discover just what happened to the other missing mom, Isabel. And they soon learn they have more in common than babies.

I noted a few reviews that mentioned finding the first part of this novel slow and actually didn’t find Jenn annoying. I found her incredibly sympathetic and someone who was doing her absolute best to keep her head above water despite numerous difficulties.

With that noted- the motherhood aspects and detailing of Jenn’s day to day life was best part of this book. Everything was going swimmingly up until we discover what secret connects the mothers.

And then things get a bit wonky.

Honestly, I was really into this book up until the exciting parts happen! It seemed as if there was an attempt to make this book super twisty and WOW, but for me personally it fell a little flat. The entire scenario just felt so incredibly contrived. The book was a slow burn thriller that I thought was going to pack a real punch only to be given something that felt hollow.

It also felt like there were simply too many attempts to shoehorn in societal commentary in a way that did NOT lend itself to the story and these moments fell flat instead of being impactful.

“Because as a Black woman, I can’t mess up. You get that, right? Your biggest problem may be that your husband doesn’t help with laundry or whatever, but mine is that my son will be looked at as less than because of the color of his skin. Or that he’ll be arrested for something he didn’t do. Or worse. I have to be very, very careful as his mom, from the day he’s born until the day I die, and God willing that’ll be long before he does.”

The quote above is taken from the black woman in the group, Selena, and the character eventually apologizes for this outburst.

There were also moments in the big climax where the dialogue just felt like a big info-dump. It was meant to tell you why THIS character DOES that instead of showing us these character motivations.

Without missing a beat, Isabel said, “I think you crave the power you didn’t have as a child. I think you measure your worth in bowling pins—deals at work, women—because it allows you to convince yourself that you’re winning the game, in control of everything and everyone. I think it’s a distraction, too—from the fact that you’re a bad person and the world would be better off without you.”

With all of this being said- I’m giving this a three in that I did enjoy the first part of this book and I would probably still recommend this book with notes on issues I noticed.

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