Sarah Zettel is an award-winning author. She has written more than thirty novels and multiple short stories over the past twenty-five years, in addition to hiking, cooking, stitching all the things, marrying a rocket scientist, and raising a rapidly growing son.Her new novel is A Mother's Lie, a "compulsive family drama about a mother’s desperate search to reclaim her daughter from the horrors of her own past.
At CrimeReads, Zettel tagged ten books "that contain that most emotional and involving of themes: a parent with a secret." One title on the list:
The Other Mother by Carol GoodmanRead about another entry on the list.
Mothers keep secrets. Mothers have to. If a mother is not perfect, caring, strong and constantly emotionally available for her child, she’s a failure, right? And to be a failure as a mother is to be a failure at, well, everything. It’s the unforgivable sin. So every mother must keep her true feelings secret, especially if those feelings involve the urge to harm their own child. That’s the secret no one must ever learn. The only thing to be done is to hide those feelings and soldier on. Because that’s what mothers do, right? Except as we are shown in Carol Goodman’s rich, intense gothic (complete with a country house with a tower!) that cure can sometimes become very much worse than the disease.
--Marshal Zeringue
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