Before I start on this week’s prompt, I have a bookish question—or more like a book issue. Since Goodreads changed its reading challenge, it’s been doubling my books, but once I remove the doubled copy, I can’t add that book again to the challenge. Am I the only one dealing with this? It’s annoying, so if you know how to fix it, please let me know. My Dewey’s 24 hours ended a few hours ago, and I managed 10 books, but I will expand more on that in my wrap-up tomorrow. Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Artsy Reader Girl, who has a new weekly topic.
April 29: Books with the Word “[Insert Word Here]” in the Title (Choose a word and find ten books with that word in the title.) In honour of Mother’s Day, which is celebrated in May, I’m picking books that have mum in the title.
Goodreads Blurb:
At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of his clients only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter’s numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.
Ann, his mother, who runs a women’s retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.
Goodreads Blurb:
June Thomson and Giselle Ross are inextricably linked by two unspeakable acts of evil. On the same day, a few miles apart, their estranged husbands slaughtered their children. The murders were not driven by rage, or committed in moments of madness. They were planned, and carried out with chilling precision, to inflict the worst pain imaginable.
June and Giselle did not know each other. Tragedy is all that binds them; they were destined to come together as ‘sisters’, united by pain, grief and a sense of loss so immense that it would drive both to the brink of madness.
June’s life with Rab Thomson had been a dark and turbulent existence, characterised by mental torture, physical violence and rape. Giselle’s relationship with Ashok Kalyanjee had been a strange and distant affair, of lives spent apart before, during and after marriage.
But both relationships had produced two beautiful children, and the women believed that their misery was in the past. Both mothers believed it was important to allow the fathers’ access to their children. On that fateful Saturday in May 2008, neither could have conceived that the men they had once loved would do anything to harm their children. But they were wrong, so terribly wrong.
Nothing can bring their children back. But June and Giselle have one solitary comfort: they are no longer alone. Their lives may have been torn apart, but they have each other. Together, they are stronger.
This is the story of their parallel journeys: of the dreadful days before, during, and after the murders of their children. Told in their own words, with searing honesty of their pain, and guilt, it is a story of endurance, friendship, and survival against the odds. It is not a story for the faint hearted, but it is a story that must be told, for in the end, it is a testament to the human spirit.
Goodreads Blurb:
Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause—despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss—until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris’s will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of.
In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter’s sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris’s second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents’ perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall?
Goodreads Blurb:
From the world’s leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest–a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery.
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths–that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Simard writes–in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways–how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies–and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them–embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey–of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.
Goodreads Blurb:
Meet Karen.
Married to her childhood sweetheart.
Loving mom of thirteen-year-old Jenny.
It’s Mother’s Day and her perfect day becomes a perfect nightmare.
A woman turns up at her door claiming to be Jenny’s biological mother.
Two days later the woman’s bloody body is found in a dumpster.
And the prime suspect is Karen’s own husband . . .
A seamless blend of high domestic suspense with a shattering final twist.
Goodreads Blurb:
I might be a grandmother. But I’m not some sweet, harmless old lady who people can push around.
Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince.
They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by.
I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.
Now he wants his daughters back.
Over my dead body.
Goodreads Blurb:
I’m wondering how many more f*cking ‘phases’ I have to endure before my children become civilised and functioning members of society? It seems like people have been telling me ‘it’s just a phase!’ for the last fifteen bloody years. Not sleeping through the night is ‘just a phase.’ Potty training and the associated accidents ‘is just a phase’. The tantrums of the terrible twos are ‘just a phase’. The picky eating, the back chat, the obsessions. The toddler refusals to nap, the teenage inability to leave their beds before 1pm without a rocket being put up their arse. The endless singing of Frozen songs, the dabbing, the weeks where apparently making them wear pants was akin to child torture. All ‘just phases!’ When do the ‘phases’ end though? WHEN?
Mummy dreams of a quirky rural cottage with roses around the door and chatty chickens in the garden. Life, as ever, is not going quite as she planned. Paxo, Oxo and Bisto turn out to be highly rambunctious, rather than merely chatty, and the roses have jaggy thorns. Her precious moppets are now giant teenagers, and instead of wittering at her about who would win in a fight – a dragon badger or a ninja horse – they are Snapchatting the night away, stropping around the tiny cottage and communicating mainly in grunts – except when they are demanding Ellen provides taxi services in the small hours. And there is never, but never, any milk in the house. At least the one thing they can all agree on is that rescued Barry the Wolfdog may indeed be The Ugliest Dog in the World, but he is also the loveliest.
Goodreads Blurb:
From eldest daughter Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral 8 Passengers family vlog and the hidden abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing.
Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.
As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.
Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.”
For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.” No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.
Goodreads Blurb:
Single mother Hanna Driscoll struggles to raise her “bridge daughters,” twins born pregnant with Hanna’s children. In six weeks the girls will give birth and die, leaving Hanna with two infants to raise.Then Hanna’s busy life is shaken when an activist threatens to rescue her daughters from their fate and kill the children they bear.A thriller of twists and turns, Hanna faces challenges from all sides to protect her infants-to-be…only to discover she too questions the mortality of her bridge daughters.
Goodreads Blurb:
Alice finds herself suddenly widowed in her early forties, leaving her with an empty house and a lonely heart.
Laura and Evie, her twenty-something daughters announce their separate and unexpected news, which ploughs Alice straight out of grieving and into the prospect planning a wedding and becoming a reluctant – yet glamorous – granny, to not one, but three grandchildren.
Frank, an old family friend returns to give his godchild Laura away at her wedding.
A whole host of secrets unfold that rock the family’s foundations and set Alice free to finally begin a new, exciting chapter of her life with no regrets.
Three of the ten books are from my Kindle TBR, and I haven’t read them, but I will read them in May.
Alex
Mybookworld24 
Beyond All Evil sounds heartbreaking. Those poor moms.
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