My Evil Mother

Kept Me Guessing & Entertained Me

Good and evil can be matters of perspective. Love and hate can have a very fine line between them. Protection can so easily become suffocation. And sometimes, when family is involved, you get all six rolled up into a giant ball of conflicting emotions.

Add to that the thin distinction between selflessness and selfishness, and you've got the family in this story.

Through vignettes told in first-person perspective, the main character offers glimpses into her past from youth and young adulthood through to having children of her own. Readers are offered a glimpse into a world of intrigue and confusion, where a girl grows up ostracized by her peers because of her controlling, eccentric, and self-proclaimed evil witch of a mother. (That's not a euphemism; her mother often proclaims to dabble in magic.)

I had mixed emotions about this story while reading it, mostly because the narrating character is horribly selfish through most of the story and her mother is... hard to handle in large doses. A few times, I had to take a few seconds to absorb and process just how much I disliked their behaviours.

The writing style, however, is very engaging and the underlying drive to figure out more about this peculiar family kept me turning the pages with eager intrigue. Every time I thought I had things figured out, my expectations would be turned on their heads. Every time I thought I had a clear idea of a character's motives, they'd do something - or the story would reveal something - to make me question my judgment.

I'd have never expected to enjoy Margaret Atwood's writing style, having loathed Handmaid's Tale for its lack of quotation marks and meandering, boring prose. But this story is fast-paced, interesting, and includes quotation marks. (Too many of them, actually; it could stand to use single quotes for things that aren't really spoken.) I'd also have never expected to enjoy this story when I first started it, but here we are and I'd call this a delight.

Yes, really, even with the characters and subject matter at hand, I think this story was overall enjoyable and entertaining. I'm glad I decided to give it a chance when Amazon gave me a voucher to have it free after I picked my Prime First Reads book.