Ghost Mother: A Novel by Kelly Dwyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
Ghost Mother was an engaging and heart-filled story. It’s highly-readable, simply told and feels like it could be enjoyed by a wide-variety of Readers.
I would especially recommend it to Supernatural Horror (Light) Readers, who may be looking more for vibes, than anything too scary, or disturbing.
This story follows Lilly Bly, who is married and desperately wants to have a baby. She’s suffered losses in this area already and it’s a sensitive topic for her.
Her husband, Jake, has just gotten a new job and they are moving from Chicago to a small town in Wisconsin because of that. Lilly is okay with it. She’s ready for a fresh start and when she sees the decrepit mansion that could be their potential new home, she falls in love.
It’s well out of their price range, but Lilly is able to convince Jack to purchase the dilapidated property. She swears she’ll get a job to help make the payments. It’s worth it to her, she just knows she’ll finally become a mother in this house.
After they move in though, Lilly has a tough time getting herself together and motivated. Jack travels a lot for work, so she’s on her own quite a bit.
It’s not long after they move in that Lilly learns their new home was the site of a gruesome triple homicide in the 1950s. They don’t call it the Murder House for nothing…
As she experiences more unexplained phenomenon at the house, she’s led to believe it could be haunted. It would make sense, right? Terrible things have happened there.
She begins to research the house and its dark past, determined to get to the bottom of what she is experiencing.
While she is doing so though, the rest of her life is being neglected. Her husband, the household, she’s making poor choices, she’s losing time. Is the house really haunted, or are these all signs of an escalating mental breakdown?
As mentioned above, I really enjoyed my time with this story. I felt for Lilly. She wanted to be a mother so badly, and as things were spiraling, I wanted to just give her a hug, to tell her that everything was going to be okay.
At the same time, she was making choices that simultaneously made me want to shake her back into reality. I think the fact that I felt so much for this main character, who was going through something that I’ve never personally experienced, but felt so much for, is a sign of great writing.
I’ve never read from Kelly Dwyer before, but she’s found a fan in me, and I hope to get more from her.
I was impressed with how quickly I became immersed and attached to this story. There’s been a few other ‘expectant or want to be’ mother books that I’ve read in the past year or so that have driven me absolutely batty.
Full disclosure, I have no children, by choice, and have never, ever had that want. So, for me, it’s generally hard to connect with the characters who that is their sole desire.
I didn’t feel that with Lilly. Even though she was wanting to be a mother more than anything else, it was presented in such a way where she didn’t lose her identity to that want. I could connect to her and feel for her, even though our lives are vastly different.
Again, I think this is due to the quality of Dwyer’s writing; the way she created this character. Lilly wasn’t just pigeon-holed into the fact that she wanted to have a child. She had layers, which I appreciated.
Additionally, this novel has my favorite thing, atmosphere. That’s my number one. The thing I look for most in my Dark Fiction. I want atmosphere, a true sense of place, I want to feel like I’m there, to see everything in my mind’s eye and that was definitely the case here.
With this being said, and this doesn’t negate from anything the author has done here, but I do feel like this will work best for Readers who are either newer to the Horror genre, or who want the vibes, but to not actually feel scared.
I’m not saying I need Horror to be scary, because I completely recognize that there is so much more to this nuanced genre than that one parameter, however, this did feel way more about the vibes to me than anything else.
With this being said, I would recommend this to anyone who loves a Supernatural Mystery with a lush Haunted House setting. I would also recommend the audiobook format, fabulously narrated by Renata Friedman.
Thank you to the publisher, Dreamscape Media, for providing me with a copy to read and review.
I had a lot of fun with this story and look forward to more from Kelly Dwyer. I hope she stays in this wheelhouse, because it was really well executed!
