Review by Booklist Review
Clove is experiencing a hormonal tornado as she weans the younger of her two children off breastfeeding. She's an all-organic Instagram momfluencer on the brink of self-destruction. Her past is rising too, threatening to drown everything. Clove's husband believes that her parents died in a car accident. In reality, Clove's mother is in prison for pushing her father off a high-rise balcony. Clove cannot let her husband uncover this fundamental truth she has built her life around avoiding. But trauma, as it always does, gets shaken to the surface. Clove unfurls the truth of what happened for readers, recounting the violent physical, verbal, and emotional abuse her father inflicted on her and her mother. She divulges how she managed to escape on the night of her father's death and then make a new life for herself, with a new identity built on "clean" eating that would purify her from the inside out. Bieker (Heartbroke, 2022) takes readers on an ultimate hero's journey, one of mystery and intensely complicated characters, dripping with truth for all who have known an abuser. A masterpiece about the poison of violence, how it infects us all, and how it cannot be ignored away.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The uneven latest from Bieker (Godshot) blends psychological thriller tropes with a meditation on motherhood. On the surface, protagonist Clove leads a picture-perfect life: she's a mother of two, her husband works in finance, and she's often seen pushing her double stroller around their tony neighborhood in Portland, Ore. Clove's parents died in a car accident when she was 17, or so she's told her trusting husband. The truth, she admits to the reader, is that their life is built on a "foundation of lies" she told him on their first date. But when a letter from Clove's mother arrives from the California women's prison where she's serving time for the murder of Clove's father, Clove's flawless life threatens to unravel. Scenes from the present day alternate with chapters from Clove's childhood in Waikiki, Hawaii, where her father would often beat her mother, sometimes to the point that she coughed up blood. Bieker builds suspense by parsing out key bits of information, though some of the twists strain credulity and veer into melodrama. She's better with the character work, especially in her exploration of how Clove's childhood trauma causes her to worry she'll be deemed unfit for parenthood. It's a mixed bag. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
After receiving a letter from her incarcerated mother, a Portland woman's shocking past comes crashing into her present. Granola mom Clove is doing her best to keep it together. She's trying to wean her 3-year-old son, adjust to summer break with her school-age daughter at home, and grab a moment or two with her finance-world husband when he is finally able to hop off work calls. She soothes her anxiety with compulsive shopping, elaborate wellness regimes, and copious trips to the organic grocery store, "the safest place on earth." She had thought that her lifestyle and having a family would help her escape a brutally traumatic childhood and grant her safety. But then one day, a letter comes from a California correctional center: Clove's mother, Alma, convicted for the murder of Clove's father after years of suffering harrowing physical abuse at his hands, has discovered Clove's whereabouts. Alma is part of a #MeToo wave of women whose cases are being reevaluated, and she needs Clove's eyewitness account of that night to be her path out of prison. Clove--who has told almost no one the truth of who she really is--needs to make a decision: help Alma and expose her secrets to her present family or turn her back on her own mother. Bieker is trying a more conventional plot with her third book, stuffing this story in the container of a thriller when it doesn't quite fit. But what Bieker has always been best at is creating female characters with vivacity and precision, and she does that again in Clove, painting an indelible portrait of what living with intergenerational trauma and a legacy of abuse can look like. In the guise of a suspense story, Bieker delves into the heart of what it really means to survive violence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
