Book Review: The Push by Ashley Audrain

This post contains affiliate links.

I have to say this book is very addictive and I couldn’t stop reading once I started. The author held no punches when it comes to motherhood and this book got very dark at times. After a certain event in the story it did lose a little steam for me, but I had to see how it would all play out. That ending left me stunned. This was a solid debut for Ashley Audrain and I can’t wait to see what she writes next!

This story has content that may be upsetting to some readers.

About the Book:

A 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 feared

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But 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.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. 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.

Then their son Sam is born—and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

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.