All My Mothers - Book Review

Genre: Fiction | Contemporary fiction | Literary fiction | Coming-of-age story
Author: Joanna Glen
Year: 2021
Pages: 480

I started off 2023 strong when I decided to read All My Mothers. Seven months on and I’m still thinking about this stellar book. At the beginning of the year, I hit a bit of a reading slump, picking up and putting down books that I just wasn’t interested in. I was thrilled when I started reading this book – I knew I was onto a winner, and I wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t pick up another book for a couple of weeks afterwards, I genuinely hadn’t been enthralled by a book like this in a long time.

All My Mothers is a tender story about love, longing, female relationships and a girl’s desire to find out where she belongs. Eva Martínez-Green has a lonely upbringing with her emotionally-distant mother and physically-distant father. She has an intense feeling of longing that plagues her throughout her young life in a cold household. Why are there no baby pictures of her, and why do her parents refuse to speak about her early years? Eva’s journey of self-discovery spans countries and years, as she searches for information about her birth and begins to understand the true meaning of family.

Now I do love a good book about female relationships and complex relationships, and All My Mothers didn’t disappoint. Familial relationships don’t necessarily have to be flesh and blood, but can be forged with the closest of friends. Female characters play a big part of Eva’s story and it’s such a joy to read.

There’s just something about Glen’s writing that I love to read, much like Taylor Jenkins Reid and Genevieve Novak’s writing styles. I absolutely adored the prose in this book – the humour, the short, sharp sentences. I was hooked from the very beginning, and even kept repeating that one phrase that all bibliophiles say to themselves: “just one more chapter”. The story itself is so poignant and beautifully told – it almost brought a tear to my eye, which only a handful of books have ever done.

All My Mothers is truly an amazing book, one I’m looking forward to rereading again in the not-too-distant future. It’s definitely one of my favourite reads this year, and it was one of the first books I read. I think that speaks for itself.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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