The Mother

By: Anya Mora

Narrated by: Jennifer Jill Araya

On Friday night in the clay fields of Bethel Creek, 17-year-old Daniel Reyes is found brutally attacked and left for dead.

On Saturday morning, Cora Maxwell finds her teenage son’s clothes covered in blood. A small town torn apart by a horrific hate crime. An investigative reporter hell-bent on finding the truth. A mother’s worst nightmare. What really happened to the Reyes boy?

In the heart-stopping and timely suspense novel Secrets Mothers Keep, widow and mother Cora Maxwell faces the hardest decision of her life. In a world where there are few second chances, do you grant one to your child? And if so...what is the cost?

©2021 Anya Mora (P)2021 Vibrance Press

Really, really bad

The narrator's performance is over the top. There is a lot of repetition of the mother's inner thoughts in this story, which becomes tedious, lines like..."the person I had been is no longer the person I was", and "facts are not truth and truth is not fact". Huh??

The plot is thin and not well developed. The author just randomly adds in a veritable clown car full of tired plot tropes. The writing style is cheesy and trite.

The characters were not well developed and their interactions were not convincing. Some of the dialogue is cringeworthy....teenage son to mother..."you were upstairs sleeping with your boyfriend in the bed dad built!" Mom's response..."we weren't in the BED!" Aack! Make it stop.

I had to force myself to finish this one.