My thanks to the Pu3lishers via NetGalley for the opportunity to read the story in exchange for an honest review.

Telling the story of a young married couple, Blythe and Fox on the surface appear to have it all. A new born daughter Violet is the icing on the cake so to speak. However, things aren't always as they seem and as you scratch the surface of this book the layers soon start revealing more than you expected.

Motherhood doesn't come easy to Blythe and she soon begins to feel aloof from her daughter. Is she imagining things or is she justified? When her son Sam is born, her life changes in an instant. Her emotions and relationship with him are completely different to how she was with Violet.

This was a great psychological read that will have you turning the pages as you try to make out whether Blythe the young mother who is having doubts about her daughter and how she behaves around others, is she justified in those doubts or is it all in her head? As others around her don't appear to be taking her doubts seriously and can't see what she is worrying about, she begins to think that it's all down to her and not anything to do with her daughter.

To find out more, you need to grab a copy of this for yourself. You will soon be immersed in their lives and realise what relevance The Push has as a title.

This would make a great reading group read, as there is so much that you could discuss with others as to how you may feel if you had been Blythe,.

Horrifying and brilliant. Great for every new parent who doesn’t scare easily and wants a horror thrill.

Raw, very raw. Sensational read, excellent writing. Raw topic but worth it.

Thank you to NetGalley for gifting me the book

I love a book about family bonds whether that be siblings or mother and daughter. A hard hitting read which had me gripped.

Oh My Goodness! I will never forget this book. My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Definitely not an easy book to read, but definitely one that everyone should!

Gripping, disturbing and Nicely written with a great pace , it reminds me of we need to talk about Kevin. New mums please avoid. Great character relationships.

This book is stunning. There's really nothing else I can say about it.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for the opportunity to read this.

Absolutely fantastic! This book tied me in knots. I started out thinking one way, then another, back to the first and then the end, and by then my head was spinning. What a twisty story. Loved it, would highly highly recommend.

Can a mother's past life make her daughter evil? Is the daughter really evil? Is the mother evil? Exploring the twisted relationship between a mother and her young daughter following "The Push". Was it an accident, was there a push and if so who pushed?
A gripping dark story that will keep you riveted.

Going completely against all the reviews her3 but I found this book tedious and over hyped. The premise and all the social media posts I had read meant I was excited to start it but once I had started it I was only excited to finish reading it.

Thank you to the publisher for my eARC copy of this book. Unfortunately I didn’t love this book and therefore didn’t finish, I just didn’t connect with this one. Not for me, sorry.

I have tried to pick up this book so many times but unfortunately I had to give up every single time. I don’t even know what actually made me do it but there were definitely many things that I couldn’t cop with and I had to stop reading.
Very grateful to the publisher for my review copy

Aaaaahhhhhh! Another hyped up book that’s the emperor dressed in new clothes. This a mega cliched novel that regurgitates The Seed. We’ve seen it done with We Need to Talk About Kevin and Baby Teeth, but these books were actually compelling and creepy. The Push, however, is not.
First of all, The Push is NOT a thriller, so don’t go in with such expectations.
The entire novel basically is a woman writing letters to her ex-husband, who has custody over their daughter and has now remarried. So, the narrative is second-person with her referring to her husband as you. She basically is retelling her life biography. We have flashbacks to her mother and grandmother and we see a generation of women suffering from post-natal depression. There are triggering scenes of neglect and child abuse here. Our protagonist herself becomes a mother around 20% and we see repeating her mother’s patterns and indulging in neglect behaviour. Until the child gets older and you wonder if the child is inherently evil...
The ending is abrupt. Nothing is wrapped up satisfyingly. To be honest I found the book boring. It takes while for things to get moving, which is why I believe this book has incorrectly sold as thriller. Again it’s not. A tedious character study about the burdens of being a woman and a mother.

Maternal instinct is an amazing thing. It will let you love the source of your months-long sleep deprivation. It will bring you out of a deep sleep a second before your baby wakes up. It will give you the reaction speed of a trained ninja. But what if your maternal instinct doesn’t kick in the way everyone talks about? What if you despise the source of your sleep deprivation? What if you don’t hear your child’s cries even when you’re awake? What if you don’t react fast enough?

Blythe never wanted to be a mother. Her own mother, Cecilia, left when she was a little girl after years of neglect. Cecilia’s mother was the same except that she added abuse to the mix until finally committing suicide out in the front yard.

Yet when Blythe marries Fox, life seems perfect. The only thing needed to complete the picture, is a baby. So Blythe decides to make Fox happy and she falls pregnant. From the moment Violet rips through Blythe, she resents her daughter. This child who needs constant attention, who won’t stop crying, who doesn’t sleep, who seems to only love her father. Where is that bond that is supposed to grow? Where is that love that should be tying them together? Why does this look so easy for everyone else?

As Violet grows, the distance between them grows as well. Blythe sees things in Violet that no-one else does. A calculatedness, a coldness. Then Blythe falls pregnant with Sam and suddenly she gets it. THIS is what Motherhood is supposed to feel like. This all consuming love and devotion that she feels for her little boy. Sam is Blythe’s world...until one fateful day.

This is a story of the dark side of motherhood. The feelings mother’s don’t share with each other for fear of being judged. It’s a story of maternal instinct but in no way that you have read before. It is a story of love and motherhood in its most raw form.

If you suspected your child of murder, what would you do?

A compelling but disquieting read that will have you questioning Blythe, Violet and her family throughout. I found her to be a rather engaging character and felt her pain as if it were my own.

Society tells us what we should expect from motherhood and more importantly what society expects from us. Everywhere we look, media portrays perfect mothers with cherub faced children, but what if sometimes that's not what we get? or what we receive from our families?

Last line of this book...no words.

Thank you to publishers for this ARC

Blythe is determined to be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby that she herself never had. But during those exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter.

What happens when your experience of motherhood is nothing what you hoped for, but everything you feared? That’s the question Ashley Audrain’s standout debut asks. Guaranteed to send a chill down your spine, this is a must-read that’s pacy, absorbing and incredibly hard to put down.

It took me a little while to get into this story and the style of writing- but it was well worth the effort. I’ve just finished the book and am still wiping the tears. Although extreme the author really understands the thoughts and questions and doubts that every mother has. She puts n to words the many emotions we have. Do read this excellent novel.

The Push is an extremely engaging and immersive psychological thriller, but it is SO, SO MUCH more than that. Its a book about motherhood, the brutal, raw truth of the trials and tribulations of it, the roller-coaster of emotions it brings, and the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. In a way, its more of a complex, character-driven psychological drama than a thriller.

The plot spans across four generations of far from perfect mothers and daughters, but its far from a family saga. The central character is Blythe, and stories of her mother and grandmother are told through flashbacks and highlight the legacy of dysfunctional and problematic mothers in the family. Determined to not repeat history, Blythe gives her everything to her role of a mother, but struggles and fails to develop that bond with her daughter Violet. Over time, she feels that there is something terribly wrong with her daughter, but no one believes her. Things turn very dark very soon, and from there the plot moves into the realms of a classic psychological thriller where you don’t really know what and whom to believe and who is really the victim.

The Push brilliantly explores the dark, terrifying and far from perfect realities of motherhood and the relationship between parents and children. Blythe comes across as a very relatable character as she describes her struggles with Violet and how she deals with crippling self-doubt and paranoia. The book also explores the dark side of mental illness and bringing up children with psychopathic tendencies.

The highlight of the book has to be the brilliant storytelling – it was unbelievably unsettling and unputdownable at once. Even though it was intensely dark and terrifying, I basically inhaled this book in less than two days, and was amazed at the plethora of emotions it generated in me. Till the very end of the book, I was second-guessing everything in the story along with the narrator. Ashley Audrin does an impeccable job at giving life to these incredibly complex and damaged characters without letting go of the pace and suspense of the plot even for a minute.

In all – The Push is easily one of the best psychological thriller/drama I’ve ever read!

I first tried to read this book when I was 8 weeks post partum and had a touch of post partum depression. Wisely, I soon put it down with a view to return to it when I was feeling slightly more stable.

I am so glad I gave this another go because it's one of the best books I've read this year and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I finished. It was so powerful and chilling.

I found it an uncomfortable read because it plays on all the usual ways you think you might fail as a mother and mixes them with failures you hopefully wouldn’t even dream of, and adds in another dynamic of what would happen if your child might be inherently bad. The mix of this normal against the very abnormal was so emotionally effective and I found this a very dark book but an incredible read.

I'm very glad I didn't read it during night feeds in the dead of night when my hormones were all over the place though!

Rating: 3 stars⠀
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Thanks to the publisher Penguin Michael Joseph for my complementary Netgalley copy.⠀
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“The Push” is a very dark, realistic account of motherhood in all of its dimensions. Told from the point of view of the main character, Blythe, the book takes us through the difficulties of being a mother, daughter and wife, in an experience where nothing is as she expected. Through the birth of her first daughter, who is unlike other children, to the grief she experiences after her world is turned upside down, the story is incredibly engrossing and tense. It has made me re-think and change my perception of womanhood and motherhood, having a family and what it must be like when others do not believe you.⠀
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This was a book I was really excited to read and eagerly went into it believing I would enjoy it thoroughly. But it’s really hard to “enjoy” a book that deals with mental illness, grief, adultery, the dark side of motherhood. It was hard to get through some of the parts, being able to predict what was going to happen, then read the character going through the trauma later. Some moments in the book have greatly upset me to the point I have had to stop reading - something which has never happened for me before. This is also a book that should come with content warnings slapped on the front and back - the list of triggers I have compiled about this book will be at the end, so if you believe that this book might be one to cause you distress, please read through my list of triggers. ⠀
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I cannot begin to imagine what the experience of reading this book must have been like for someone who went through similar trauma in their life. I’m not sure if I would recommend this book simply because it has caused me emotional distress, but there might be readers who will appreciate the story for how deeply explorative of motherhood it is. However, please beware that it does touch upon many sensitive topics without any warning.⠀
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TWs:⠀
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child death (multiple), mental illness (psychopathy), postnatal depression, grief, sexual intercourse, adultery, mention of suicide, mention of parental death, self harm