FICTIONWhen Two Feathers Fell from the Sky by Margaret VerbleTwo Feathers, a young Cherokee horse-diver on loan to Glendale Park Zoo from a Wild West show,
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We expect to have good mothers, and to marry, and to be good mothers. The arrival of baby Violet was meant to be the happiest day of my life. I would be different. I would be like other women for whom it all came so easily. I would be everything my own mother was not.
But as soon as I held her in my arms I knew something wasn t right. My husband Fox says I m imagining it. He tells me I m nothing like my own mother, and that Violet is the sweetest child. But she s different with me. Something feels very wrong. Is she the monster? Or am I?
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THE WHISPERS
By Heidi Perks (Century £12.99, 400 pp)
Grace is a young mother who moves back from Australia to the English seaside village where she grew up.
She encounters sinister barriers when she tries to rekindle her childhood friendship with Anna, who is under the spell of a new group of friends.
Things get weirder when Grace is the only one worried sick about why Anna has vanished after a night out with her girlfriends. All the while, the leggings-clad Greek chorus of school gate mothers provides its own toxic commentary on events.
This is a beautifully calibrated vision of all the jealousy and manipulation that can animate some groups of female friends and the strange power that turns the school gate into a battleground.
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We expect to have good mothers, and to marry, and to be good mothers. The arrival of baby Violet was meant to be the happiest day of my life. I would be different. I would be like other women for whom it all came so easily. I would be everything my own mother was not.
But as soon as I held her in my arms I knew something wasn t right. My husband Fox says I m imagining it. He tells me I m nothing like my own mother, and that Violet is the sweetest child. But she s different with me. Something feels very wrong. Is she the monster? Or am I?