What I’ve Been Reading

What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

I’d previously read Ghost Eaters by Chapman and enjoyed it immensely. So I was stoked to pick up another book of his. Unfortunately, the book didn’t quite land for me.

Madi left Brandywine, Virginia as a teenage mother, determined to never come back. But hard times and the father of her daughter, who has since found Jesus and started a new family, has brought Madi and her daughter, Kendra, back to Brandywine, a town dominated by one of the many rivers that empties into Chesapeake Bay. Madi is barely scraping by as a palm reader, working out of a motel turned strip mall and at the local farmers’ market once a week. When her high school flame, Henry, comes to the market with fliers for his missing son, Madi offers him a reading out of sympathy, wanting to offer this desperate man some hope. But when their hands touch, a spark passes between them, showing Madi visions which show that Henry isn’t what he seems.

I thought that I would enjoy this story more than I did. It was in first person which, if this is your first time here, I don’t care for in novels I read. I also feel like the story wasn’t sure what it wanted to be.

When Madi has her first vision of Henry, it seems to indicate that it might not be as simple as his son is missing. The story felt like it was made of red herrings. Madi suspects that Henry’s wife, Grace, killed their son, then killed herself out of guilt. But that doesn’t make sense to Madi because why would Henry need to cover up for her if she’s dead. At this point, the story felt a bit like Shutter Island.

Then, the story shifts and is told from Henry’s point of view, but still first person. This is where it kind of started to fall apart for me. He’s talking about falling in love with Grace as a teenager, their summer romances, growing up and getting married, trying to have children, finally getting pregnant with Skyler, then losing the baby. But then he miraculously revives, I think. To be honest, this story took me a month to get through, and I don’t remember that part well. Henry is overjoyed at the seeming miracle, but Grace is never the same.

I thought that the story was going to shift gears into being about changelings, which was cool and interesting. And maybe, in the end, it was. Because after we come back to the present day, Henry and Madi find baby Skyler on the river, in a duck blind. This is never really explained, except for Henry saying that he and Madi thought hard enough about Skyler and basically wished him into existence.

Then, there’s a part of the story in which the characters seem to run around in circles and body horror stuff happens with Skyler. Because he’s not a normal child, he’s a creature spawned by the river who sheds his skin like a crab, eels and minnows erupt from his mouth, and jellyfish erupt from his eyes.

Through this, Madi goes from thinking that Henry has kidnapped a different child to replace Skyler, believing she needs to save him from Henry, to seeing Skyler as a monster that she needs to escape, to the being the thing’s mother that needs to give everything, all her energy, to this creature so he can continue to exist. These changes happen with very little narrative reinforcement, which left me struggling to understand her changes of heart.

Then, as the story winds to a close, the chapters become brief intimations of story, rather than anything of real substance. The feeling I was left with was a Ron Swanson moment, when he’s at a diner and he says in response to a tiny, badly cooked piece of meat on the plate the waiter has just place in front of him, “This isn’t a steak. Why would you call it that on your menu?”

In my opinion, the best chapter is the epilogue, in which an unrelated character is given a great backstory and characterization, and finds the crab trap that Henry used to dispose of baby Skyler’s body.

In the end, I don’t know if I didn’t like the story because it wasn’t good or if it just didn’t fulfill my expectations. Probably a bit of both. But perhaps I just took too long to read it. Clocking in at under 300 pages, it should have taken me less than two weeks at my usual pace. But I also found myself skipping reading at night because the story wasn’t grabbing me. But it happens, so on to the next book: Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig.