The world is not made for mothers.

Yet mothers made the world…

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?

This book contains scenes that depict domestic abuse and child abuse and mentions of infertility.

First, an apology: To the woman whose grocery cart I accidentally rammed into with mine, I’m sorry. But really, it’s not my fault. I was too busy reading Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman, a novel so visceral, so harrowing and propulsive, that I couldn’t possibly put it down long enough to buy my groceries.

This story begins with a mother who is trying not to come undone. Clove has worked hard to build a perfect life for herself. She has a kind and loving husband, two children, and a stable roof over her head. But when she receives a letter from her imprisoned mother from whom she thought she’d never hear again, the devastating childhood memories she thought she’d long buried force themselves back to the surface. Clove is not who she says she is, and what unfolds is a deeply harrowing story of a woman haunted by the violent past she fought tooth and nail to escape.

This is one of the most skillfully drawn portraits of the fallout from long-buried traumas, of cycles of abuse, and of mothers and daughters that I have read in a while. With the pacing and propulsion of a thriller and the humanity of an insightfully drawn character study, Madwoman had me with my heart in my throat. I won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say you won’t end this story the same as when you began. This is a special book, and I hope it resonates with you as deeply as it did me.