A review by marilynw
Stone Mothers by Erin Kelly

4.0

The story is told from the viewpoint of Marianne in the present and then when she was seventeen, from the viewpoint of Helen from the time she was a teenager until her eighties, and from the viewpoint of Honor, Marianne's daughter, in the present. During the first section of the book, I was having a hard time getting into the book but once we got to Marianne's younger years, getting more background to the story made it more interesting, and then by the time we got to Helen's viewpoint, I was hooked. Helen's story is a sad one but I had trouble deciding if her cold parents led to Helen's inability to connect with people or if she would have been that way anyway. Whatever the case, what happened to Helen when she was young, was the catalyst for the things that happen later in the book.

A lot of the story takes place in and on the grounds of an old asylum, while it was still in use as an asylum, while it was a decrepit and dangerous mess of rubble, and lastly rebuilt as luxury apartments and cottages. A young Marianne and her young boyfriend Jesse, blackmail politician Helen and this leads to the three being tied to each other for decades to come. So many lies tie them together and each are haunted by what happened in the past and the secrets that they try to keep under wraps. The character of Helen intrigued me the most but for all she had in her life and all she accomplished, the fact that she could not connect with other people meant she had nothing at all.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.