BOOK REVIEW: A Mother’s Sacrifice by Gemma Metcalfe

Format: ARC, NetGalley
Links: Goodreads | Amazon UK
Blurb: God ensured she crossed my path. And that is why I chose her.

The day Louisa and James bring their newborn son home from the hospital marks a new beginning for all of them. To hold their child in their arms, makes all the stress and trauma of fertility treatment worth it. Little Cory is theirs and theirs alone. Or so they think…

After her mother’s suicide when she was a child, Louisa’s life took an even darker turn. But meeting James changed everything. She can trust him to protect her, and to never leave her. Even if deep down, she worries that she has never told him the full truth about her past, or the truth about their baby.

But someone knows all her secrets – and that person is watching and waiting, with a twisted game that will try to take everything Louisa holds dear.

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Review: Flipping heck, what a roller-coaster. This review may contain some small spoilers… But nothing major. So you know, read at your own will. Just wanted to get that out the way before someone shouts at me! This is my first Gemma Metcalfe read and from the blurb, it certainly sounded like my kind of book. You know I love a good Thriller and this seemed like the epitome of a good Thriller. The book opens with Louisa giving birth to the baby her and her husband have gone to great, painful lengths to conceive. Having a history of mental illness, when strange things start happening which lead Louisa to believe someone is trying to take the baby, nobody believes her, not even her husband.

Louisa loses grip with reality more and more dramatically over the course of the book and after going backwards and forwards between her past and present (which was done well), we begin to build up a picture of Louisa’s life and mental state until she completely unravels and even we, as readers, don’t know what’s real and what’s not or who to believe. There’s an awful lot going on in this book and dare I say a little bit messy at times? But on reflection, Louisa’s state of mind is being portrayed well in the writing. If she’s confused, then so are we. This was a very easy to read book, although I had a lot going on in the time I read it, I got through it in about 3 sittings which to me, a fairly slow reader, is brilliant. It doesn’t take very many chapters for the “just one more” to settle in. 

I have a lot of thoughts about this book; both good and not so good but I don’t want to ramble too much and it’s incredibly difficult to say anything without giving too much away. I’ll start with my immediate thoughts which is everything seemed a bit unrealistic. And I’m the first person to say how much I hate it when someone says that in a book review of a Fiction book (because like, duh, it’s Fiction, it’s not supposed to be real?!) but I just mean like the dialogue and the reactions of people – including Louisa – I just felt were a bit too OTT. There were also far too many exclamation marks which is a little pet peeve of mine in novels.

This definitely isn’t what I would call a slow-burner, it’s very much full steam ahead that you almost don’t have time to breathe. I do enjoy that in a book occasionally and with this focusing very much on Louisa’s mental state, I think it was done well but some parts were awfully dramatic which I did find myself ‘hmmm’ing’ at on occasion. I also found some parts a bit “telling not showing” (again, another phrase I hate in a review but I can’t think of a better way to put it, ugh!), particularly in the beginning but this soon fizzled out as we got right into the action.

One thing I really did like was the ending (this is where there’s small spoilers, in case you wanna skip this paragraph). I can imagine this ending being a bit hit or miss, depending on who the reader is but personally, me and my dark soul loves an ending which isn’t all flowers and rainbows and this one definitely isn’t. There’s a lot of unanswered questions and the ending wasn’t clear cut to the point where you can almost make up what happens next yourself. It surprised me, when I turned the page and was faced with the acknowledgments instead of the next chapter. But it certainly made a nice change to the endings I’m so used to reading in Thriller’s.

The last few paragraphs had some nice messages about being the hero of your own story which on reflection, was a nice way to end and otherwise extremely dark story. It certainly ended up being a lot darker than I expected but again, another element of the book I liked because I like dark and miserable things! I’m rating this book 3.5 stars on the basis that, I enjoyed it because I read it so quick and was eager to find out what was going on and it was something a little different, which is always welcome. But I personally found it a little messy and unorganized in places, unrealistic and all too convenient. But otherwise, not a bad book at all.