Another Mostly-Okay Mystery

Three Mothers by Hannah Beckerman

Pages: 325 Genre: mystery

Rating: 3 Star

Kindle Highlights

Seventeen-year-old Isla Richardson's sudden death in a hit-and-run accident rattles her community. Her own mother, Abby, is thrown into deep grief and suspicion after she begins to learn more about Isla's life. Her best friend, Nicole, is trying to be supportive, even as Isla's death has unexpected consequences for her family. For Jenna, Isla's ex-boyfriend's mom, this tragedy threatens to dismantle the secrets she's worked so hard to run from. All three mothers are forced to face the realities of their children's lives and decide how far they'll go to protect their loved ones.

I was actually really into this book for the first three quarters or so. It wasn't perfect, but I thought it was a well-constructed and generally well-written story. Unfortunately, the final 25% lost me. Without spoiling it, this is one of those mystery books that relies on outright lying to the reader. I think that's such a lazy way to conclude your story, and I hate how many books fall back on it. But ending aside, the book was mostly okay.

Jenna and her son were the most disjointed part of this book. They had many potentially-interesting aspects to them, like their class struggles in their community, but all of this fell away by the end. As it was, they were barely related to the overall story (I think Jenna only talked to Abby and Nicole once at the very beginning). Either they needed to be built up more or just dropped altogether.

Abby was arguably the main character (it was a pretty solid ensemble, but if I had to pick — it is her daughter who is dead, after all), and I couldn't stand her. She has a younger daughter, Clio, who she treats horribly. It's a whole plot point, but it never goes anywhere. Just like with Jenna, it was frustrating for the book to bring up all these tough and engaging topics without being prepared to fully see them through. It almost seemed like the book was stumbling over itself to defend mothers and prove that as long as they love their children all transgressions will be forgiven, when reality is so much more complicated than that for so many people.

As far as the mystery goes, it was mostly fine. I did sort of know who it was, and after the one big reveal near the start, it was more of "unpacking a timeline" than "solving a mystery." I wish it had committed more to either being a mystery or being a literary fiction exploration into class conflict, motherhood, and the dangers teenagers face. As it was, it made both aspects feel half-baked.

The ending was a letdown. As I said earlier, it sucks for a mystery to just be lying the whole time. Aside from that, I thought everything wrapped up too nicely. It wasn't a perfectly happy ending for everyone, but we were definitely lacking consequences. Instead of seeing genuinely character development, for better or for worse, we just got a series of dramatic inner-monologues from each other and then an epilogue that explained why everything is mostly okay now. It cheapened the whole thing.

Maybe moms will tolerate the ending more than me, who was reading this because I am a fan of mysteries. But overall, I was really let down by this book. It had a lot of potential and then failed to follow through on anything it promised.