Books like Like Mother, Like Daughter — picked by fans

I’m drawn to characters whose emotional wounds from childhood affect their determination as adults to make the world a more caring place.

I found Jenna Stone, a dedicated investigative journalist in this book, a particularly appealing character. Abandoned as an infant in an apartment building’s hallway, Jenna doesn’t want any child to experience the same fate and doggedly works to uncover the identity of a mother who has left her abandoned baby in a “safe haven” at her local fire station.

Alarmed by the note the mother left indicating that her baby is “in danger,” Jenna hopes to unravel the mystery of what led the new mom to fear for her infant’s safety and reunite her with her child. This is yet another psychological thriller that I had trouble putting down!

I loved this book for its exploration of shock, grief, and denial on the part of two adult daughters whose mother inexplicably ends her own life by drowning in the sea. At odds for many years, the two very different women slowly mend their relationship as they discover a long-buried secret their mother had been keeping.

I especially related to the healing of their relationship as it was in adulthood that I drew much closer to my own sisters. As children, they associated my arrival with the loss of their mother, which did not make for an easy relationship.

Having grown up in a waterfront community, I couldn’t resist this atmospheric thriller featuring a young woman drawn back to a small Southern town built around a lake. Years ago, her mother had abandoned her, leaving her with her stepfather. Or so she’s always been told.

But as she peels away family secrets and lies, she discovers that her mother never intended to leave her, and she has no idea who hurt her mother or who may be trying to silence her. The plot twists and sense of ever-present dread kept me reading long into the night!

As the daughter of a mom who suffered a mental breakdown shortly after my birth, I have always been strongly interested in stories of mothers who experience emotional difficulties following the births of their children. In this book, a young woman abandons her infant in a hospital shortly after giving birth and disappears.

Her husband attributes her behavior to postpartum psychosis, a malady that she’s been monitored for throughout her pregnancy, given her own mother’s struggles with the disorder. But is that what really led to the mom’s sudden disappearance? Told in multiple viewpoints, it’s unclear who is telling the truth about what happened to the young mother. I found the plot twist at the end of this propulsive tale especially satisfying. 

Remember Mia is dark, emotional, and twisty. What I liked most about this book is how much the main character riled me up!

She’s an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator, and it propels the story forward. As this story unravelled, I questioned everything: Is the mother’s postpartum psychosis to blame for the missing child? Why didn’t she report the baby missing? Is there even a missing baby in the first place?

I enjoy when a novel makes me question what I thought I knew.

This book has everything a book club could ask for. Characters that you love, even when maybe you shouldn’t. Relationships that seem both familiar and endlessly fascinating. An epic dilemma that resonates and flourishes until the very end. It’ll definitely have you wondering, what would I do? At the end of the day, that question is all you really need for a lively book club discussion. 

This novel is an invigorating thrill ride along the streets of “Old Brooklyn” in a modern-day setting. As a former New Yorker who once listed Brooklyn as a hangout, it is rather easy to empathize with Sydney Green while she witnesses her cherished neighborhood being overtaken by invader investors perusing the streets in the guise of tourists. Something strikes her as peculiar when For Sale signs continue popping up at the existing homes with long-time neighbors suspiciously relocating to the suburbs. 

Ironically, Sydney encounters an unlikely helpmate in the form of someone whom she considers one of the intruders; Theo, a new neighbor. There’s a mutual distrust between them but it is not enough to override their suspicions about the things that are taking place. Is it overly accentuated paranoia or a genuine fear that compels the unlikely pair of sleuths to discover what is actually happening? Will their homes… show more.

Malamud isn’t thought of as a crime writer, but this story of a robber who goes to work for the man he robbed as a kind of silent penance is very much a story of crime and punishment, of sin and redemption, and it directly inspired one of my own stories about a killer who winds up working for the mother of the man he killed.

A sad and troubling book, this book is about how even good intentions can lead to bad outcomes and how atonement might never be enough but is still necessary.

Just to get this out of the way: Adam is one of my closest friends. We both started our second novels New Year’s week of 2014 on a trip we took for the explicit purpose of starting new novels. I spent the next ten years trying to write my book, but Adam finished Sensation Machines in a more reasonable time frame. It was published in the summer of 2020, a basically impossible time to promote a book because we were all in lockdown. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that summer, but still.)

It is a marriage story, a murder mystery, a cultural satire, a tech farce, and a reckoning with all the lessons we failed to learn from the last financial crisis. And it’s a great Brooklyn novel, in the tradition of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (also a second novel!) and Jonathan Lethem’s The… show more.

It might ruffle some feathers to think of the early aughts era of hipster Williamsburg, NY as a “period piece,” but there’s no other setting for this dynamite novel. Cudmore evokes that perfect blend of cigarette smoke, eggs benedict, and the lingering scent of vinyl records in her mystery novel for those of us who grew up emulating High Fidelity but wish for it with a hidden track of murder. It takes me back to my own college days, when I was reading mystery novels… before it was cool. 😎