The Push

February 3, 2021 |  No Comments

The Push

by Ashley Audrain

Date Published: January 5, 2021
Published By: Pamela Dorman Books
Page Count: 320


Publisher’s Description:

A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family–and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for–and everything she feared.

Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.

But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter–she doesn’t behave like most children do.

Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.

Then their son Sam is born–and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

The Push is a tour de force you will read in a sitting, an utterly immersive novel that will challenge everything you think you know about motherhood, about what we owe our children, and what it feels like when women are not believed.


My Star Rating:

4 of 5 stars

My Review:

The PushThe Push by Ashley Audrain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was dark and mesmerizing. Whatever questions I had were answered in the final sentence.

As someone with two psychology degrees, I kept thinking a lot of the way through this book about self-fulfilling prophecy. Post-partum depression, attachment styles and how they develop. But in this particular story, which really came first, the chicken or the egg? Just when I thought I’d had it figured out, I would keep reading and realize I wasn’t so sure, and I mean both ways.

Is this book a thriller? No. I think it might brush the edges of one here and there but never quite makes it over the line. But it’s definitely dark. There’s a mood in the tone of the book that persists from start to finish, and that may not be the head space some people want to live in at these present times, just as a trigger warning. There is also the loss of a young child in this story for those sensitive to that subject.

Even so, it had me hooked from the beginning and kept me hooked to the bitter end.

View all my reviews


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