All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman
A mom will do anything to save her kid. Anything.
There are many sub-genres in mystery fiction: minimal-violence “comfy ones”; English village dramas; bumbling detectives whose pets point them to clues; noir; and so on. One of my favourites are those that blend comedy with a wicked plot, affording both laughs and chills as the plot unwinds. The late Sue Grafton’s protagonist Kinsey Millhone often blended wry observations of humanity with detecting feats. Carl Hiassen’s wild Florida novels feature characters like a former Florida governor cooking up roadkill as he lives way off the grid in the Everglades, and a hit-man who has his shark-eaten hand replaced with a working weed whacker.
I’m happy to announce a new writer in this category: Sarah Harman. A journalist and American living in London, her first novel is the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize-winning All the Other Mothers Hate Me. Her protagonist and amateur gumshoe is a memorable creation: Florence Grimes, coincidentally an American living in England, a unemployed divorcée, and the former lead singer for Girls’ Night, a girl band that decided it would do better without her. This in some ways is a relief, as “touring with Girls’ Night was like being inside an estrogen pressure cooker.”
Florence doesn’t fit in with the wealthy, snobbish moms she meets at her son Dylan’s private school, St. Angeles: “The kind with glossy brown hair, a Hurlingham Club membership, and a two-hundred-acre horse farm in Norfolk.” Instead, Florence has Red Bull for breakfast, and a lot of self-doubt at her lack of success in life, especially compared with her hatefully self-assured sister. She enjoys a drink or four, and has casual sex with a revolving roster of men. Her self-perceptions often sting: “I catch a glimpse of myself in the three-way panel mirror: my orange puffer coat, glittery crop top and bra-length, honey-blond hair extensions. When I put this outfit on this morning, it had felt fun, playful—but suddenly I feel like a slutty troll doll.”
The only thing she seems sure of is that she will do anything to protect her shy, intelligent son Dylan, who is being bullied by another boy at school. But that boy goes missing on a school field trip, and she worries that her son is somehow involved. The novel’s opening sentence both sets the sardonic tone throughout and starts to fill in Florence’s portrait: “The missing boy is ten-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.” The longer Alfie stays missing, the more Florence finds clues that her son is hiding things from her…. And what is he doing hiding Alfie’s backpack under his bed?
To help question witnesses and solve his conundrum, she enlists the one school mom she kind of gets along with, lawyer and hyper-achiever Jenny Choi. The two make a good team as Jenny is hyper-logical and knows the law, while Florence is instinctive and given to sudden insights, even if she can’t back them up with proof. That’s sufficient of the plot to give you a picture of the book’s storyline. I have held back some good twists and surprises that surface. I recommend this as a highly entertaining summer read. There’s just enough darkness and doubt in it to balance the funny portrait of English upper-crust society as seen by a bitter American amateur detective.
About the Author
Sarah Harman is an American living in London. She worked most recently as a foreign correspondent for NBC News, reporting on-air for Today, Nightly News, and MSNBC. She’s a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her debut novel All the Other Mothers Hate Me won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2023.
About the Reviewer
John Oughton lives in Toronto and has retired as a Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College in Toronto. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Universe and All That (Ekstasis Editions), the mystery novel Death by Triangulation, and over 400 articles, reviews, and interviews. John’s studies include an MA in English Literature, where his teachers included Irving Layton, Frank Davey, Eli Mandel and Miriam Waddington, and non-credit courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs and Robert Duncan. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash Poetry Group. He is also a photographer and guitar player. https://joughton.wixsite.com/author
Book Details
Publisher : G.P. Putnam's Sons
Publication date : March 11 2025
Language : English
Print length : 384 pages
ISBN-13 : 979-8217046256