Reviews with content warning for Grief - The Push

4.5 stars
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

No one writes about motherhood and mother-daughter relationship like Ashley Audrain. It took me a while to gather up all of the details together with the ending of the book to really got what they author wanted to tell us. The book was phenomenon. My jaw dropped after I had realized the things, and I had chills down my spine.

To get started, I would say that this book is really "heavy"; not literally, of course, but psychologically heavy. It was not a literal thriller or suspense book either. However, it gripped me from start to end, made me wanted to listen for more. It was written in the first-person point-of-view to make us felt like we were in Blythe's mind. Because of this, I felt more connected to Blythe. I felt her pain, her insecurities, her unstable mind and so on. Throughout the book, the author carefully sprinkled hints here and there for us to really understood the ending. The twist was not hard to guess but it made everything clearer and started to link with each other.

The author succeeded in portraying how trauma can pass on throughout every generations and how hard for the younger generations try to get rid of the toxic cycle.

Not only that, the author also depicts carefully and smartly the gaslighting technique that Fox did to Blythe. Blythe was clearly a victim of manipulation, abuse, neglect, trauma, maybe even mental illness and so on. Maybe I have an unpopular opinion here; I think Blythe might have internalized misogyny for treating Violet worse than Sam from the start or she just suffered from postpartum depression. "The Push" for me can mean the push that Violet did to Sam or the pushes from the society, family or Fox did to Blythe.

Parenting is difficult but I can never imagined it can be this difficult, especially for the mother. In the end, should we love our children unconditionally? How can we deal with both toxic relationship with our partner and the complicated parenthood with our children? The author leaves us readers to find out the answer within ourselves.

Content Warnings

pixelited's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This novel was a quick and easy read. How the chapters are formatted make it easy to want to keep going to the next one. The author does an excellent job with setting tense and disturbing tones throughout the novel, while making you question if the narrator is reliable or not.

I enjoyed the uncertainty of whether we could trust the narrator or not. Obviously, we are inclined to see the world through the lens of the narrator, but knowing that the antagonist of the book is a child we think that the narrator then must be unreliable.

That her perspective is truly that of a confused, grief-stricken woman who has lost everything. But, the ending provides clarity and although we have been witnessing everything through the narrator’s perspective, it all seems to be truly confirmed by the ending sentence.

Overall, a great novel that keeps you turning the page and wanting to find out more while keeping an interesting perspective on motherhood and its darker manifestations.

Content Warnings

breanneporter's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is a hard book to rate; I devoured it, finishing in just over a day, but now that I’ve finished I’m struggling to understand what to take away from it… it follows our narrator, Blythe, as she recounts her experience of motherhood with her daughter, Violet, and her son, Sam, and her tale is interspersed with memories of her own mother as well as her mother’s history with her own mother. It is very dark, so be sure to check content warnings. More than the darkness, it is unsettling. I felt anxious reading it, but was compelled to continue. The pacing is fast, the chapters are short, and it’s very easy to be immersed in the narrative (even as it makes you increasingly uncomfortable).

I kept waiting for evidence of Blythe’s untrustworthiness as a narrator, something to redeem Violet, but I didn’t really get that… and the ending is (horrifyingly) validating to Blythe’s perspective, but there’s no recognition of why only Blythe was seeing this side of her / was the target of her derision for so long…. Idk.

I’m not sure I would recommend or say that it was an enjoyable reading experience but it was certainly an immersive and memorable one!

Content Warnings

More...