Cousins Maeve and Andrea were inseparable as children. They lived together and played together; they were almost like sisters. They made promises that nothing would ever separate them. Except something did, something that was out of their control. Maeve looked for her best friend for years afterward but never found her.
Then one day, Maeve gets a message from a DNA site that says they have found someone related to her. So Maeve and Andrea reconnect, and Maeve can’t believe how successful Andrea has become in the time they’ve been apart. She’s a famous (and expensive) life coach, has a handsome husband, and is well on her way to creating an empire out of her brand. But something is not quite right with Andrea and her friends, and the more Maeve learns, the less time she has.
Just Like Mother is the wildest ride, both because the plot is absolutely bonkers and because of the way Heltzel reveals information to the reader. Information, I might add, that the protagonist doesn’t have even though we’re looking over her shoulder the whole time. It can be a frustrating experience, but my impression is that Heltzel designed it this way. Maeve is someone I should, by all rights, identify with (or at least be friends with)—childless by choice, focused on the career she enjoys, and not making much of a fuss about any of it—but her decisions at nearly every turn are naïve and strange and just…bad. Some of my notes include: “Girl, what are you thinking?”, “Bestie, no.”, “Whyyyyyyyyy thoooooooo.”
My experience reading this book was not unlike being in a midnight movie where everyone is half in the bag and shouting at the girl-before-the-final-girl to look behind her because she should know there’s never been a coatrack in that corner. If this sounds negative, it’s not, but with this caveat—only if this was the author’s intention.
As the title suggests, there is a lot of talk in this book about motherhood and the acts/processes of birthing and mothering. There are also a lot of opinions about motherhood that run from gender essentialism to elective sterility, and those can be tough to work through even when expressed by the antagonists. The gender essentialism isn’t addressed until relatively late in the game, and it feels a little too much like the book was throwing me a bone, like, Oh, we forgot about trans and non-binary people, better throw this short line in! Not great, but at least Heltzel addressed it. Your mileage may vary here, and I don’t want to speak for anyone else’s experience reading this book.
The basic plot and even some of the zigs and zags of Just Like Mother were pretty predictable, but somehow that made it even more fun to read. WE know what’s probably going to happen, so we can watch it all go down from a closer perspective. Kind of like when you’re showing a movie to a friend for the first time, and you watch their face for their reactions to your favorite parts. Yeah, like that. Except you also get mad a little because they laugh at the wrong things and don’t laugh at the right things, and why don’t they remember there’s never been a coatrack in that corner!
3.5/5 babydoll heads
Just Like Mother is available from Macmillan/Tor-Forge on May 17th.
She Reads At Midnight 
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