Madwoman
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4.2 • 52 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER“This book made me laugh and cry. It reads like a thriller and a love song. It’s about being crushed and rising strong.” - Cheryl Strayed
“The rare kind of book that lives in your bones” (Ashley Audrain), this novel tells a gripping story of motherhood and motherloss and the brutal, mighty things women do to keep themselves and each other alive, marking Chelsea Bieker as a major fiction talent. Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation.
But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?
“[Bieker’s] writing is raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence, the constant tension carried by survivors.” – The New York Times Book Review
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A would-be perfect mother’s life unravels in this nail-biting thriller. “Clove” works hard to keep her family happy, healthy, and insulated from her unsavory past. When her mother contacts Clove from prison, her letter brings up bad memories and threatens to unearth everything Clove thought she’d escaped. Author Chelsea Bieker strikes a nerve with this taut psychological thriller, illuminating the dark corners of domestic abuse as well as the challenges and power of motherhood. We especially enjoyed Bieker’s punchy prose and rich characterization as she takes us through Clove’s daily routines and inner circle—even as everything disintegrates around her. Each new page winds the spring tighter and tighter until her carefully crafted happy life threatens to crumble in a climax that will leave you breathless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The uneven latest from Bieker (Godshot) blends psychological thriller tropes with a meditation on motherhood. On the surface, protagonist Clove leads a picture-perfect life: she's a mother of two, her husband works in finance, and she's often seen pushing her double stroller around their tony neighborhood in Portland, Ore. Clove's parents died in a car accident when she was 17, or so she's told her trusting husband. The truth, she admits to the reader, is that their life is built on a "foundation of lies" she told him on their first date. But when a letter from Clove's mother arrives from the California women's prison where she's serving time for the murder of Clove's father, Clove's flawless life threatens to unravel. Scenes from the present day alternate with chapters from Clove's childhood in Waikiki, Hawaii, where her father would often beat her mother, sometimes to the point that she coughed up blood. Bieker builds suspense by parsing out key bits of information, though some of the twists strain credulity and veer into melodrama. She's better with the character work, especially in her exploration of how Clove's childhood trauma causes her to worry she'll be deemed unfit for parenthood. It's a mixed bag.
Customer Reviews
A lot to unpack
I am an avid reader, but I read suspense novels. And this book was listed as suspense. I didn’t understand it. In fact, I nearly gave up on the book, put it to the side and let it sit, unfinished. But I kept at it. After the book was over 90% complete, it did get suspenseful for maybe one chapter.
But overall, it is a good book and told a good story. An important story to someone.
But the person who listed it as a suspense has no freakin idea. They would likely lose their mind if ever reading something I like to read.
Mind blowing - couldn’t put down!
I read this from cover to cover without any breaks and as fast as I was devouring this harrowing violent and terrifying life that Cala Lily and her mother Alma had endured. They’d been imprisoned and abused in a vicious and brutal domestically abusive environment at the hands of her father. The escalation was terrorizing and the attempted escapes thwarted by his stalking, obsessive rage and had diminished his wife and Cala Lily’s mother so badly that it was impossible for her to form a coherent and effective plan to save herself and her daughter. It was always Cala Lily getting between her father’s physical beatings and demanding he get her to the hospital. The years and years of medical records and obvious abuse she was subjected to wasn’t unknown by the medical community. Yet this kid and her brutally battered mother had no one on their behalf speaking up for them, assisting them to leave and the times they’d tried, he’d found them and the beatings would be worse than ever, they were stuck. Until one light her father landed over the balcony, 33 floors down, she immediately hopped a bus and would learn her mother went to prison bc of biased police reports of her mothers alcoholism and refusal to press charges. She changes her entire life from 17 years old and has a husband and a child Sam and her life has been better for remaining secretive about her past never even telling her owl husband. Until she receives a letter from her mother in prison. She was supposed to think she was dead. She had changed her name etc how had she found her and what does want? The world she so desperately curated was about to implode and so she puts into motion a plan to stop it from being revealed and destroying her family.