Kate’s Review: “Dearest”

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Book: “Dearest” by Jacquie Walters

Publishing Info: Mulholland Books, September 2024

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from a panel at ALAAC24.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: A new mom in need of help opens her door to her long-estranged mother—only to invite something much darker inside—in this “fast-paced and frightening debut” (Rachel Harrison) about the long shadows cast by family secrets, perfect for readers of Grady Hendrix or Ashley Audrain.

Flora is a new mom enamored of her baby girl, Iris, even if she arrived a few weeks early. With her husband still deployed, Flora navigates the newborn stage alone. But as the sleepless nights pass in the loneliness of their half-empty home, the edges of her reality begin to blur.

Just as Flora becomes convinced she is losing her mind, a surprising guest shows up: Flora’s own mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken in years. Can they mend their fraught relationship? Or is there more Flora’s mother isn’t telling her about the events that led to their estrangement?

As stranger and scarier events unfold, Flora begins to suspect the house is not as empty as she once thought. She must determine: is her hold on reality slipping dangerously away? Or is she, in fact, the only thing standing between a terrifying visitor and her baby? 

Review: Thank you to Mulholland Books for providing me with an ARC at ALAAC24!

I’ve touched on here about those early days of being a new Mom and how stressful it can be. I was actually very lucky during those first few months of being a new parent, as I have a great support system in town, my husband was able to take a fair amount of time off of work, and we were able to split care up pretty evenly between us (though once COVID hit a few months after she was born the isolation and stress did get to be a bit much!). But I know that I was very lucky, and that even though it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t a nightmare, like it can be for some. I love that more books are talking about this, especially horror novels, and “Dearest” by Jacquie Walters is one of the newest to take motherhood and turn it into a horror story.

There is a bit of a supernatural bent to this book that I don’t really want to spoil, but I will say that this was surprisingly the weaker thread of the novel. That’s not to say that it was bad or poorly done. I did enjoy the way that Walters brought in these elements and how she built it up, specifically an element regarding sleep paralysis and Night Hags, and how she wove them into the story at hand. It also led to a pretty well done twist that I didn’t see coming at all, which made me go back and look for the clues. But I do think that it undercut the power of the horrors that were about Flora dealing with a newborn as a new mom while also dealing with her estranged mother whom she called for help, and who has always had a cruel streak that is popping up again as they reunite.

But what really worked for me were the themes of postpartum depression, the stresses of new parents, specifically mothers, and generational trauma that can fester and pass down from person to person. I found Flora’s experiences as a newly postpartum mother with a newborn and little to no support (as her husband is deployed and delayed getting home) to be heart wrenching, incredibly tense, and in some ways pretty relatable. Walters shows how much it can be a struggle, and how mothers feel like they aren’t supposed to see it as a struggle and therefore it just gets worse and worse until, in some very tragic instances, the unthinkable happens. She also puts very realistic problems like the pressures to breastfeed (even with painful infections), the way that some people dismiss a mother’s stress, the sleep deprivation, and the societal pressures to be a perfect loving mother from the jump, at the forefront and pulls out the tension and the horrors of simply being a new mother in a culture that doesn’t offer as much support as it could. Add in the way that Flora’s mother, whom she reaches out to in desperation, needles, picks at, and has damaged her adult daughter, and it made this reader very, very tense. I’ve said it many times in the past couple of years, but with many women in this country being forced into pregnancies and motherhood due to a lack of reproductive rights, these kinds of stories are especially chilling these days.

Overall I enjoyed “Dearest”. I would have liked a little more, but it’s another effective horror story about motherhood.

Rating 7: A haunting tale of motherhood, generational trauma, and how a lack of support can drive a mother to do things she’d never dream of, “Dearest” is a tense book that felt all too real at times.

Reader’s Advisory:

“Dearest” is included on the Goodreads list “September 2024 Horror”.