Motherthing lured me in with its cover and its premise of being a “darkly funny take on mothers and daughters” as well as a ghost story, but this novel was not at all what I was expecting, and I did not enjoy it.

Motherthing is about a woman named Abby whose mother-in-law, Laura, has just taken her own life. Laura was one of those toxic mothers-in-law who have strangely co-dependent relationships with their sons and hate their daughters-in-law for no good reason, so Abby is not really upset over her death, until Laura’s ghost begins haunting Abby and her husband, Ralph. Motherthing is also about Abby’s childhood with her own mother, which the reader eventually learns was also toxic and extremely traumatic for Abby as her mother valued her relationships with her shitty boyfriends over her daughter to the point where she shockingly offers Abby up to one of these boyfriends, just so he won’t leave her. Seriously, this is not “darkly funny”. Abby’s childhood was so messed up that as an adult she has become desperate for a mother figure, as she also becomes desperate to be a mother herself, and this leads to her developing a strangely intense attachment to Mrs. Bondy, her favourite resident at the care home where she works.

I did not enjoy Motherthing because, as I think I made clear, it is not funny. It is also not the ghost story I was hoping for because it is not clear that there even is a ghost. Laura’s “haunting” of Ralph and Abby manifests in different ways. Ralph falls into the same depression that Laura suffered from and that he witnessed his whole life, so it could be explained by his own childhood trauma. Abby feels like Laura is still terrorizing her from beyond the grave and trying to destroy her life because Ralph is pulling away from her. When Mrs. Bondy’s daughter decides to move her to another care home, Abby’s behaviour becomes extremely unhinged, and she commits a shocking act of her own to save Ralph from his mother’s ghost that had me going WTF and not in a good way.

Motherthing is definitely a dark novel, though, because it is about generational trauma and how we find ourselves emulating the negative behaviour that we learn from our parents, whether we want to or not. Both Abby and Ralph find themselves falling into the same patterns as their mothers and must find a way to get past it, even though it does not necessarily make them better people once they are on the other side of it. I love dark humour and I love irreverent humour but this just isn’t it.