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A creepy and compelling peek into the not too distant future, where multiple acts of procreation (from those who can) are prioritized in a beat-up world struggling to preserve alarming population levels. Facing escalating climate pressures and mysterious viruses, (a world not too significantly unlike our own), our narrator, Mathilde Crewson, a thirty-nine year old art conservator (like her now deceased mother before her) grieves for her mother and longs desperately for another child, to accompany her seven-year-old daughter.

Tilly’s dreams may be on a path to come true, when she is assigned work to restore a strange and macabre work of art, entitled “The Mother”, by an equally strange and now-deceased artist, who likes to include biological material (skin, fingernail clippings, and more) to add texture to her horrifying artwork.

Bombarded by impositions from increasingly chilling government programs, and deeply entrenched (and foreboding) cultural expectations, primed to “support” motherhood at all costs, Tilly is a woman with soon-to-become nightmarish challenges, seemingly related to her current (spine-tingling) restoration project.

Not a book to read in the dark, this horror book is a wonderful take on female body oppression, motherhood, grief, hauntings, and the primal need in all of us for biological connection.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.