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Book World: Why is The Push so popular? Perhaps because it plays into a mother s worst fears.
Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
Jan. 21, 2021
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By Ashley Audrain
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The new year s first blockbuster novel is The Push, by Ashley Audrain, a psychological suspense tale about a mother s fears that her preschool-age daughter may be a psycho killer. If this premise sounds familiar, you may be recalling The Mother of All Evil Spawn Stories, the 1956 film The Bad Seed. (When I was growing up in New York, occasional reruns of The Bad Seed would play on The Million Dollar Movie, which featured the same classic film every afternoon for a week, thus imprinting it on malleable viewers brains.) The Bad Seed, which was inspired by a 1954 novel of the same name by William March, also was a psychological suspense tale about a mother who suspects her young daughter is a budding Ted Bundy in pigtails. In The Bad Se