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A review by paulabrandon
Stone Mothers by Erin Kelly
1.0
Well, this was a completely boring and pointless story.
It starts off like a thousand thrillers before it, with Marianne Thackeray returning to her hometown 30 years after this horrible, horrible thing that she did, while never divulging what this thing is. Indeed, for about 100 pages, there are a ton of stilted conversations between Marianne and her ex-boyfriend Jesse from back then that are clumsily designed to keep us in the dark about what actually happened back then. Jesse was also a part of this horrible, awful thing.
Marianne is returning home to help look after her mother, who is suffering dementia. To her surprise and horror, her husband Sam has purchased an apartment at Park Royal Manor, which has been refurbished from the Nazareth Mental Hospital, which had closed down over 30 years ago and is the site GASP SHOCK HORROR of that terrible and awful thing that Marianne was involved in.
After 100 pages, we jump back 30 years to be shown the events leading up to the terrible event. We begin to get a bit more context, in that the town suffered a major downturn after the mental hospital was shut down, putting lots of people out of work, including Jesse's father. There is a lot of anger at Helen Greenlaw, the politician who instigated the shutdown. Marianne is a teen in this section, falling for bad boy Jesse, and they spend all their time at Nazareth. There, Marianne finds documents that revel Helen's past, which sees events spiralling out of control.
The book then jumps back another 30 years to 1958, revealing Helen's past connection to Nazareth and the horrors she endured there. This part of the book is mildly interesting, and quite horrifying when you learn of the simple, treatable, normal things women got institutionalised for back then. But it's mostly pointless. Sure, it provides some motivation for why Helen would want Nazareth shut down, but doesn't provide any further twists or intrigue to the story, other than her thoughts of events that we've already seen played out in the previous sections.
In fact, there are no twists or intrigue to this story at all. It is all very flat and uninteresting with characters straight out of central casting. It ends with a laughably acklustre well-that's-convenient sequence of events that feels as if the author just got bored with what she was writing and did what she could to wrap things up. Indeed, I wondered if this was as boring to write as it was to read.
Seriously, are authors these days sitting down at their desk and thinking to themselves, "How can I make this as similar, generic, flat and uninteresting as the 200 psychological thrillers that came before it?" You could practically check off the list of psychological thriller tropes as they get trudged out.
It starts off like a thousand thrillers before it, with Marianne Thackeray returning to her hometown 30 years after this horrible, horrible thing that she did, while never divulging what this thing is. Indeed, for about 100 pages, there are a ton of stilted conversations between Marianne and her ex-boyfriend Jesse from back then that are clumsily designed to keep us in the dark about what actually happened back then. Jesse was also a part of this horrible, awful thing.
Marianne is returning home to help look after her mother, who is suffering dementia. To her surprise and horror, her husband Sam has purchased an apartment at Park Royal Manor, which has been refurbished from the Nazareth Mental Hospital, which had closed down over 30 years ago and is the site GASP SHOCK HORROR of that terrible and awful thing that Marianne was involved in.
After 100 pages, we jump back 30 years to be shown the events leading up to the terrible event. We begin to get a bit more context, in that the town suffered a major downturn after the mental hospital was shut down, putting lots of people out of work, including Jesse's father. There is a lot of anger at Helen Greenlaw, the politician who instigated the shutdown. Marianne is a teen in this section, falling for bad boy Jesse, and they spend all their time at Nazareth. There, Marianne finds documents that revel Helen's past, which sees events spiralling out of control.
The book then jumps back another 30 years to 1958, revealing Helen's past connection to Nazareth and the horrors she endured there. This part of the book is mildly interesting, and quite horrifying when you learn of the simple, treatable, normal things women got institutionalised for back then. But it's mostly pointless. Sure, it provides some motivation for why Helen would want Nazareth shut down, but doesn't provide any further twists or intrigue to the story, other than her thoughts of events that we've already seen played out in the previous sections.
In fact, there are no twists or intrigue to this story at all. It is all very flat and uninteresting with characters straight out of central casting. It ends with a laughably acklustre well-that's-convenient sequence of events that feels as if the author just got bored with what she was writing and did what she could to wrap things up. Indeed, I wondered if this was as boring to write as it was to read.
Seriously, are authors these days sitting down at their desk and thinking to themselves, "How can I make this as similar, generic, flat and uninteresting as the 200 psychological thrillers that came before it?" You could practically check off the list of psychological thriller tropes as they get trudged out.