Christina Reviews *The Good Mother* by Sue Miller

         In The Good Mother, a husband and wife divorce.  The woman moves away with her daughter and falls in love with this new guy who’s a little eccentric.  She rushes into an intimate relationship with him.   She gets pregnant by him, then aborts the baby because he can't be bothered with a child.  The book kind of plods along while we're waiting for something truly horrible to happen.  With a title like The Good Mother, we're almost being challenged to judge the protagonist, right?  So when do I get to be judgmental?  Quit toying with me, Miller!

         And then it happens.  One day, the little daughter walks in on the boyfriend taking a shower and an inappropriate exchange occurs between the two of them.  When the father finds out about the incident, he takes the mother to court in order to get full custody of the child.  The woman finds that her parenting skills are being called into question.  The rest of the book is the woman trying to work out what it means to be a good mother and who gets to make that decision.  Or maybe I'm making the novel's point out to be more important than it is.  I don't know.

         I didn’t really like this book.  I suppose it was well-written.  I just was not invested in the central dilemma at all.  I didn't care if the woman lost her daughter.   I figured she had her turn and now the father deserved his shot at screwing up the child.  It's only fair.

         Seriously, though, maybe the protagonist wasn't the world's worst mother.  I'm sure there are mothers out there who are worse than her.  Sybil's mother was pretty bad. Maybe she wasn't as bad as Sybil's mother.  And she wasn't "Top Mother of the Year" either.  She fell somewhere in the middle where all well-meaning but flawed parents tend to end up.  I admit that I appreciate a morally ambiguous character as much as the next person.

       I just felt that the author was daring me to condemn this woman.  And I admit it was tempting to do so.  What's the point of reading a book if you can't act morally superior to the characters? And yet, somehow, the author managed to ruin that for me.

      Two stars.