“I think the baby hates me,” she says just days after giving birth to her first child, a daughter named Violet. Blythe is primed, perhaps even genetically programmed, for maternal struggle. Her grandmother, also abusive, departed in a more gruesome way: by hanging herself from a tree in the front yard. Her own mother abandoned her when she was 11, after years of cruelty.
Does the preschooler with a predilection for hitting need a professional intervention, or maybe just a taekwondo class? Is the kid who drops naps but not tantrums a future rageaholic? This sort of hand-wringing, at its most extreme, is at the center of Ashley Audrain’s taut, chilling debut novel, “The Push.”īlythe Connor is reluctant to become a parent - understandably so. The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.Is my child’s behavior normal? It’s a parenting question for the ages, particularly at a time when a certain type of parent (present company included) frets over every childhood quirk, no matter how mundane. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child.
The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.
Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. –Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE NIGHTINGALE A NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES & #1 GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLERĪ tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family–and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for–and everything she fearedīlythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.īut in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do. “Starkly original and compulsively readable, The Push is a deep dive into the darkest nooks and crannies of motherhood.”
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