Title: A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery
Length: 352 pages
Book Rating: B
Complimentary Review Copy Provided by Publisher Through Edelweiss
Summary:
A riveting page-turner that lets us inside the secret world of therapist and patient, where boundaries get crossed, and events spiral out of control. . .
Ruth Hartland is a psychotherapist with years of experience. But professional skill is no guard against private grief. The mother of grown twins, she is haunted by the fact that her beautiful, difficult, fragile son Tom, a boy who never “fit in,” disappeared a year and a half earlier. She cannot give up hope of finding him, but feels she is living a kind of half-life, waiting for him to return.
Enter a new patient, Dan–unstable and traumatized–who looks exactly like her missing son. She is determined to help him, but soon, her own complicated feelings, about how she has failed her own boy, cloud her professional judgement. And before long, the unthinkable becomes a shattering reality….
An utterly compelling drama with a timebomb at its core, A Good Enough Mother is a brilliant, beautiful story of mothering, and how to let go of the ones we love when we must.
Review:
A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas is a character driven psychological mystery.
Ruth Hartland is a psychotherapist with an NHS trauma unit. She takes on the tough cases and her newest client, Dan Griffin, is clearly in need of careful handling. She is initially struck by his uncanny resemblance to her missing son, Tom, whose disappearance she has kept from her co-workers. Despite her realization that she is not maintaining a professional distance, Ruth continues treating Dan. Will she help Dan make peace with his traumatic past? Or is Ruth on a collision course with disaster?
Ruth is a caring, compassionate therapist and she is highly respected by her peers. What no one knows is how difficult her personal life has been since the birth of her twins, Carolyn and Tom. Over the years, she has struggled to help Tom who, unlike his popular and smart sister, has never quite fit in. Ruth’s compulsive need to make things better for her son puts a huge strain on her marriage to David. Tom’s disappearance right before his eighteenth birthday hangs over Ruth as she tries to settle into her new “normal”. After meeting Dan, she is overwhelmed with memories of her son’s childhood leading up to his disappearance. On some level, Ruth realizes she is in over her head with Dan. Yet she passes up numerous opportunities to be completely honest about their sessions. Ruth also has stunning lapses in judgment, including not being more vigorous in obtaining her new client’s medical records.
A compelling character study of a therapist and patient in crisis, A Good Enough Mother is a gritty mystery with an clever storyline and interesting characters. Ruth is a frustrating narrator due to her inability to recognize her fallibility with Tom and Dan. Each revelation from Dan results in a corresponding memory about Tom. The deeper Ruth is drawn into her past, the less effective she is as therapist. Bev Thomas’s slow parceling of information keeps the pages turning until a staggering choice late in the story culminates in tragedy. I enjoyed and highly recommend this engrossing, suspenseful mystery to readers of the genre.
