Book Review – My Mother’s Choice by Ali Mercer

After a long time I am back with a book review! Just received an advanced copy of My Mother’s Secret by Ali Mercer and many thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for giving me an advanced copy!

Nobody talks about my mother. Absolutely nobody. I have no idea what she was like. I’d always thought they kept quiet about her because they were sad. But what if it was because they were guilty?

I watch them at the school gates, all the mothers with their daughters. I see the hugs and all those thoughtful little adjustments to scarves and ponytails. How their love seems to overflow, they have so much of it to give.

And then I walk home to my aunt’s cold house, where there are a hundred rules for me to follow and only a single photograph of my mother to look at.

She is never spoken about in this house. They tell me that it will be easier if I don’t think about her.

It is strange though, isn’t it? That I know nothing about my own mother?

But they don’t know about the diary I’ve found up in the loft. Maybe they even forgot it was there. It doesn’t matter anymore if they won’t tell me anything. Because within these pages is what I’ve waited fourteen years to find out. And maybe some things I wish I could forget.

All I wanted was to bring our family closer together, but could what I find tear us apart instead?

No. of Pages:- 325 pages

Date Published:- 29th July 2020

Genre:- Women’s Fiction/Litarary Fiction

li decided she wanted to be a writer early on and wrote her first novel when she was at primary school. She did an English degree and spent her early twenties working in various jobs in journalism, including as a reporter for the showbusiness newspaper The Stage. She started writing fiction in earnest after getting married, moving out of London to the Oxfordshire market town of Abingdon and starting a family. She has two children, a daughter and a son who is autistic and was diagnosed when he was four years old.
Ali is fascinated by families, their myths and secrets, and the forces that hold them together, split them up and (sometimes) bring them back together again. She always travels with tissues and a book and has been known to cry over a good story, but is also a big fan of the hopeful ending.
For updates and pictures, follow Ali on Twitter (@AlisonLMercer) or Instagram (@alimercerwriter), or on her Facebook page (AliMercerwriter).

A beautiful story about family drama and secrets, the lies and deceit. Dani is a fourteen-year-old girl who only vaguely remembers a little about her mother, who is dead. Both her father, Jon and her aunt, Aunt Carrie, with whom she is living doesn’t tell too much about her mother. The only memory that Dani has of her mother is a picture of her mother, wearing a brown colored dress that is on the window sill of her bedroom.

Then one day, Dani discovers a diary, belonging to her mother, hidden in the attic. And while reading her diary, Dani discovers all those secrets and lies that her father and her aunt had been hiding for years from her.

So let’s start with the ones I liked about the book

• This is the first book I have read from this author and I must say, I really like her style of writing. Beautifully woven, realistically, and engaging the reader into the book.
• The story is told from the perspectives of Dani and Laura, her mother, when Dani starts reading her diary. You can actually understand all those angry emotions, feelings that Dani as a teenager is feeling especially towards her father and her aunt. Laura’s diary was somewhat a bit sad to read, those emotions she is going through when she discovered something she shouldn’t have discovered, all those inner feelings that she is going through, as her husband is having a daughter from his first marriage and how she is going through with those feelings and emotions in her life.
• The vivid descriptions of the ocean and the Cornwall, made me feel like I am in Cornwall.
• The ending was a bit sad and emotional to read for me and there was an unexpected twist and turn towards the end–it was so unexpected that I didn’t even expect that!

Overall, this is truly a heartbreaking, wrenching book, truly emotional and gripping, a page turner. I would give this book a rating of five stars!