Such a Good Mom

There’s more medical follow up for a sprained wrist than for having a baby, Brynn Nelson notices. She tells everyone she’s fine after her son’s birth though she’s very far from it. Every other sleepless new mother does just fine, she thinks, so there must be something wrong with her. Her husband, Ross, loves the time he spends with his son but it’s a few moments here and there and he has no idea of the deep pit of fear his wife is in. Brynn has more or less lost touch with her own mother since staying on Martha’s Vineyard with her well-off new in-laws while her poorer parents moved off-island. She’s now firmly a Nelson, and when Ross tells her a family secret after a young woman’s body washes up on the beach, Brynn finds that she has much more facing her than the exhaustion and fear of new motherhood. This thriller excels in portraying the social dichotomy that is life in an expensive resort town, a split that’s echoed throughout the book in breaks between Brynn and her family of origin, the break between the life she could have had if she had chosen another boy and this one, and her life pre- and post-motherhood. Absorbing and satisfying.