JUST LIKE MOTHER by Anne Heltzel – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel
Published by NIghtfire on May 17 2022
Genres: Adult, Horror, Thriller
Pages: 320
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Anne Heltzel brings several tried and true horror tropes to her latest novel, including cults, creepy dolls and motherhood.

Just Like Mother was creepy and shocking, and yes, over-the-top at times. But I have to admit, despite it’s flaws, I had a lot of fun with it. Parts of it made me mad, some parts confused me, and others were genuinely unsettling, but overall it was a fast-pace story and I never once wanted to stop reading. 

Maeve has a pretty good life. She works at her dream job as an editor for a publishing house. She has a boyfriend named Ryan who she enjoys being with. When she was a young girl, she managed to escape the cult she was raised in—the Mother Collective—and afterwards was placed in a loving foster home. But she’s always wondered what happened to her “cousin” Andrea, her dearest friend from her early years growing up in the cult. When the cult was raided by the police, the girls were separated, and Maeve has been searching DNA websites for years, hoping to reconnect with Andrea.

And then one day, she finds her. Andrea suggests they meet, and Maeve is surprised to discover that her friend has flourished. She’s the CEO of a profitable tech company called NewLife that makes AI baby dolls to help women prepare for motherhood or overcome grief over the loss of a child. Andrea is happily married to her husband Rob, and despite the tragedy of losing a baby herself several years before, she seems confident and put together. 

Maeve accepts Andrea’s invitation to visit her upstate New York mansion for the weekend, but when she arrives, things get weird. Andrea’s coworker Emily seems almost angry when the subject of motherhood comes up and Maeve admits that she never wants to have children of her own. The mansion itself is full of creepy, hidden passageways and spiders, and the plumbing doesn’t work. But Maeve will do almost anything to have a relationship with Andrea, and so she decides to put up with these small inconveniences for the sake of that friendship. And by the time she’s realized her mistake, it’s way too late to leave.

There’s some dark stuff going on in Just Like Mother, and most of it has to do with sex, consent and rape, so once again I’m forced to mention these trigger warnings for those that need them. Maeve seems to be obsessed with sex, and there are some unexpected and pretty explicit sex scenes in the book. Maeve’s behavior ends up making sense later in the story, but it took me a while to figure out why the author included these scenes.

I happen to enjoy cult stories, and the Mother Collective is pretty creepy, although it felt familiar in a lot of ways. The author gives us flashback chapters that show Maeve’s experiences growing up in the cult, and she teases out the important information little by little, so the story had a nice tension throughout. We know something horrible happened and that Maeve was able to get out, and I liked the way these chapters kept me guessing. 

I liked Heltzel’s take on the more sinister parts of motherhood, and I thought it was the perfect backdrop for a horror story. Andrea and Emily both have radical opinions about how a woman’s greatest gift is to create new life, which doesn’t go over well with Maeve, as you might imagine. At the same time we are learning about the Mother Collective from the girls’ past, which mirrors some of what’s going on in the present. I just wanted Maeve to clue in sooner to the dangerous situation she finds herself in, especially when her thoughts on motherhood don’t line up with Andrea’s and Emily’s at all.

And speaking of Maeve, she was an interesting character. On one hand, I understand she’s been through trauma and still hasn’t recovered from it, but on the other, she doesn’t have much agency and seems almost resigned to letting others make decisions for her. She’s upset when she loses her job, and yet she jumps at the chance to do freelance work for the company that just fired her! She knows something weird is going on with Andrea, Rob and Emily, and yet she continues to go back to them, even after she and Andrea have a fight over a very delicate subject (which I won’t reveal due to spoilers). She finds herself in a terrible predicament, and yet she doesn’t try very hard to get out of it. I found myself exasperated by her actions, although I get it. None of the horrific parts of the story would happen without all these bad decisions, lol.

Maeve’s story reminded me a lot of a particular horror classic (trying to avoid spoilers!), so in that respect the creepiness of the unfolding events worked really well, as long as you can suspend your disbelief over some of the sillier things that happen.

I know many of you are curious about the cover and how that plays into the story. Like many readers, I find dolls in horror stories to be unsettling, and the NewLife babies were extremely creepy. There are a couple of scenes in the mansion revolving around these dolls that made my skin crawl, but ultimately they ended up being little more than props and didn’t have much to do with the story at all, which was a little disappointing.

At about the halfway point the story veers into crazy territory, with all sorts of over-the-top events taking place, some that made sense and some that didn’t. There’s an almost dreamlike quality to what’s happening to Maeve, and despite the “runaway train” climax, I actually loved the ending. Negatives aside, I really did have fun with this book, and I’m very curious to see what Anne Heltzel does next.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.