Blog Tour Review: The Good Enough Mother by Anoushka Beazley

The Good Enough Mother by Anoushka Beazley

Published: 3rd July 2016

Publisher: Anoushka Beazley

Pages: 330

Available in Paperback and on Kindle

Order now from Amazon

Rating: 3/5

Blurb

Gatlin - a leafy affluent town; Chelsea tractors and ladies who lunch. However, all is not as it seems. Drea, a most unnatural mother, struggles to find private school fees for her step-daughter Ava after her boyfriend leaves her for another woman. Watching the yummy mummies she becomes inspired, hatching a daring and criminal plan...unleashing all hell in the quiet town of Gatlin. Can Drea survive the fallout and the wrath of the PTA? A satirical and hilarious black comedy about love, motherhood and the human condition.

Review

Drea’s long term partner Alex has left her and moved to France to live with his research assistant Penny. Drea is devastated as she has been planning her perfect suicide for a while but now she will have to put her grand plans to the side and care for fourteen year old Ava, Alex’s daughter from his previous marriage. There’s just one small problem Ava goes to the best private school in Gaitlin and with fees of over £17,000 pounds to find now Alex has gone Drea is in trouble. But she does what any mother does makes the most of the resources available to her, only Drea doesn’t have so many skills so carrying out armed robbery on some of Gaitlins richest yummy-mummies seems like the best plan. Until one of the yummy mummies is found murdered. Can Drea find out who the real killer is before the police work out who committed the robberies and pin the murder on her too?

I found Drea a very hard character to connect with emotionally she’s up and down, one minute she’s depressed and on the verge of suicide the next she’s in some angry whirlwind intent on bringing down anyone who gets in her way. Her erratic behaviour mostly just left me confused and this hampered my enjoyment of the story. Her relationships throughout the book were also strange, she seems to have very little contact with her elderly father who lives with her which I just found odd. She has no aspirations to be part of the community around her, particularly to have any involvement with Ava’s school PTA. She does however seem to have a good relationship with Ava who seems closer to Drea than her own father. Drea obviously loves Ava as that seems to be the driving force behind her crazy antics.

Anoushka definitely has a distinct writing style, its fast paced, surprising and in places very funny. This was a book that was full of unexpected twists, some of which were believable and some which were not so. My favourite little twist I think was finding out exactly what Drea’s father had been up to.

This is a book which highlights the extremes mothers will go to, to give their children what they believe is the best. It’s a book about finding our place to belong and making the best of what we’ve got. It’s a book which I enjoyed in parts but there were parts I felt could be better. Anouska has created an interesting collection of characters and her descriptions of the town of Gaitlin really brought it alive for me, I just found that the plot could have been tighter.

Thank you to Anoushka and Neverland Blog Tours for inviting me to be part of this tour.

Giveaway

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