Here are 100 books that That Kind of Mother fans have personally recommended if you like
That Kind of Mother.
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I am a tumbleweed writer—one who moves from town to town every few years—and I have learned to adapt to new communities and break into new friend groups. In a sense, one could say I reinvented parts of myself as I moved from place to place, and I changed hats regarding what job I would get. Although challenging at times, the scope of this atypical lifestyle has provided me with a wealth of experiences to draw on when drafting a story, not only in setting and career, but also the psychological rollercoaster that comes with blowing with the wind.
This is such a beautiful novel from so many angles.
Although not specifically a suspense story, this book has many suspenseful elements. The character work in it is lovely, and the backstory of the girl, Ursa, is doled out in fragments to a final heart-wrenching reveal.
I love books where characters face their demons and push through challenges. Every character in this book is struggling with something significant, yet their individual challenges round out the story rather than overwhelm it.
An Amazon Charts, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post bestseller, and a Goodreads Choice Award finalist.
In this gorgeously stunning debut, a mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again.
After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot…
A compelling and unforgettable tale of humanity, resilience, and the lengths we will go to for love. When the end comes, what will you wish you had done?
In 2050s London, a deadly virus sweeps the globe, and the British government decides to evacuate children from the cities while a…
As a mom of three who's struggled to find a balance between parenting, career, and meeting my own needs, I'm intensely interested in the way our society views motherhood. There are so many different ways to become a mother and so many different opinions about what makes a “good mom.” On the one hand, our culture has incredibly high expectations and seems to judge women no matter what choices they make. At the same time, we don’t offer struggling moms basic supports like low-cost childcare, mental health benefits, or paid maternity leave. I love reading novels that recognize this paradox and take a generous view of the many definitions of motherhood.
I read this book during a camping trip with my family, and I got so sucked into the story that I kept sneaking off to read in the tent (which seems appropriate, given the plot). We’ve all read stories about husbands and fathers who hide secret second families, but in this case, it’s a mother who is secretly married to two different men.
The story illustrates how mothers are human and flawed like everyone else, and it made me reflect on all the ways our culture expects women to sacrifice for their families. I found myself questioning what we mothers owe to our children versus what we owe to ourselves.
Lore Rivera was married to two men at once. She led a secret double life - until one man shot the other. That's the story the world knows.
But true-crime writer Cassie Bowman wants to know more - about the mysterious woman at the heart of it all, and about what really happened the night of that tragic murder. How did Lore lead two lives? How did it feel when it all came crashing down?
After years of hiding, Lore is finally ready to tell her story. But as her tragic tale unfolds, will either woman be ready for the…
I grew up in a family that avoided expressing any emotion. A happy house was one where anger and frustration were unheard of. Even laughter was suspect. Books allowed me to experience joy and sorrow. Books allowed me to express my feelings, even though it was behind my closed bedroom door, clutching a handful of sodden tissues, exhausted from the novelty of letting my emotions out. These books are not the books of my childhood. Instead, they are the books of the grown-up me who no longer has to hide behind her bedroom door. I think you will love them just as much as I do.
This is a story about adoption. But not the story of the poor child no one wants. Instead, it is the story of the joy of growing up knowing that the child is blessed to have been chosen by their adoptive family.
Laurie Frankel’s main character, India Altwood, wants people to know that family is complicated. Love is complicated. And maybe people shouldn’t be too quick to judge.
This book is an excellent example of why I love this author. She is brave and honest, tackling stories that need to be told.
India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards (which, torn into pieces, also function as make-shift confetti) and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to tv star.
But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do - she tells a journalist the truth: it's a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India's an adoptive mum herself and knows there's so much more to…
A compelling and unforgettable tale of humanity, resilience, and the lengths we will go to for love. When the end comes, what will you wish you had done?
In 2050s London, a deadly virus sweeps the globe, and the British government decides to evacuate children from the cities while a…
As a mom of three who's struggled to find a balance between parenting, career, and meeting my own needs, I'm intensely interested in the way our society views motherhood. There are so many different ways to become a mother and so many different opinions about what makes a “good mom.” On the one hand, our culture has incredibly high expectations and seems to judge women no matter what choices they make. At the same time, we don’t offer struggling moms basic supports like low-cost childcare, mental health benefits, or paid maternity leave. I love reading novels that recognize this paradox and take a generous view of the many definitions of motherhood.
I couldn’t put this one down! I kept asking myself what I would have done if I was in the same situation as Sarah, who found herself accidentally kidnapping a child to protect her from an abusive mom. The story made me think deeply about whether biology or bonding should matter more when deciding who deserves to raise a child.
I love it when authors aren’t afraid to dive into the perspective of unlikeable characters, and I appreciated that Frey gives us chapters from the perspective of the biological mom, whose misery and overwhelm I found relatable even as her parenting choices made me cringe.
Emma Grace Townsend. Five years old. Gray eyes. Brown hair. Missing since June.
Emma Townsend is lonely. Living with her cruel mother and clueless father, Emma retreats into her own world of quiet and solitude.
Sarah Walker. Successful entrepreneur. Broken-hearted. Abandoned by her mother. Kidnapper.
Sarah has never seen a girl so precious as the gray-eyed child in a crowded airport terminal - and when a second-chance encounter with Emma presents itself, Sarah takes her, far away from home. But if it's to rescue a little girl from her damaging mother, is kidnapping wrong?
Motherhood blindsided me. I was 37 and living my childhood career dream as a foreign correspondent when I serendipitously smelled the head of a friend’s newborn. Next thing I knew, I was up all night singing old Beatles' songs to a baby who needed to eat every half hour. Amazed by the power of rudimentary biology to reshape my conscious experience, I couldn’t help but start writing about it, first in essays and then in two shameless motherhood books of my own: The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes You Smarter (heavily inspired by SarahHrdy) and Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention (about sharing an ADHD diagnosis with my son).
Beginning in 1970, with “Up the Sandbox,” Roiphe was part of the first wave of shameless motherly truth-tellers. There are few more truer sentences than her acknowledgment that “feminism, despite its vast accomplishments, has not cured me of motherhood” in this poignant and prescient book about the impossible expectations that continue to bedevil working mothers.
The author of the best-selling novel Up the Sandbox offers a critical account of the feminist stance on marriage and motherhood, arguing for renewed support for the needs of working women trying to bring up children. 40,000 first printing. Tour.
I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
Deciding to place a child for adoption is one of the most excruciating decisions in the human experience. When Amy Seek, a promising architecture student, becomes pregnant, she’s not yet ready to become a parent. But she’s also not ready, completely, to hand over her child to a perfectly lovely family. Her tale of love, heartbreak, and acceptance is a reminder to parents and non-parents of all circumstances that there are lots of ways to make a family—and in this case, it was the best, most perfectly imperfect option. I think this is a really important book for everyone in the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, adoptees) to read, because it really gets up close and uncomfortably personal with the struggle some birth mothers undergo, despite the unlimited love they have for their babies.
God and Jetfire is a mother's account of her decision to surrender her son in an open adoption and of their relationship over the twelve years that follow. Facing an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-two, Amy Seek and her ex-boyfriend begin an exhaustive search for a family to raise their child. They sift through hundreds of "Dear Birth Mother" letters, craft an extensive questionnaire, and interview numerous potential couples. Despite the immutability of the surrender, it does little to diminish Seek's newfound feelings of motherhood. Once an ambitious architecture student, she struggles to reconcile her sadness with the hope that she's…
I bought a bookstore when I was twenty-five, knowing nothing about business but knowing I loved books. It was the happiest I’ve ever been, professionally, and also the most broke. At some point, I came to my senses, sold my store, and got a job working in a library. I’m a library director now, and I don’t get to recommend books as much as I used to when I didn’t have to do things like think about the budget and remove dead mice from the cellar. Still, I get to work around books, and I overhear and occasionally insert myself into a fair number of book-related conversations.
Talk about a complicated mother-daughter relationship! Almost as soon as her daughter is born, Blythe suspects something is…off. And no kidding, is it ever? This book takes the idea of not being able to connect with your kid to a whole other, really terrifying level.
What I particularly love about this book is how much it challenges the idea of who is in charge in the mother-daughter relationship, and what it means if your kid is really, truly, bad. This book actually made me gasp. The title refers to the central incident of the book, but I like it because the book also pushes against all kinds of societal norms.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | A New York Times bestseller!
"Utterly addictive." -Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
"Hooks you from the very first page and will have you racing to get to the end."-Good Morning America
A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family-and a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for-and everything she feared
Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had.
Becoming a mother rocked my world in countless ways, drawing me to books that explore the raw, unfiltered truth about how challenging motherhood can be. The complexities—the love, guilt, and frustration—resonate deeply with me. Motherhood is also why I started writing; initially, I wanted to process the overwhelming emotions I was feeling. When I began sharing my writing with friends, their “Yeah, me too's” made me realize I wasn’t alone. I have deep respect for authors who can capture the messiness of motherhood so honestly, and I’m inspired by their ability to put into words what so many of us experience.
I loved this book'sraw, unflinching exploration of a taboo topic: the quiet regret some mothers carry. Through Sadie, a fierce Broadway star and feminist icon, and her daughter Jude, an actress on the brink of her own fame, Reimer paints a portrait that's complex and so intimate it’s almost uncomfortable at times.
I appreciated how neither woman was cast as the villain, and in their struggle, I found I could relate to both of them at different moments. Cleverly structured as a play in six acts, this novel is a beautifully written, compulsive read that asks the hard question: can a woman truly be both a devoted mother and a devoted artist?
Set against the sparkling backdrop of the theater world, this propulsive debut follows the relationship between an actress who refuses to abandon her career and the daughter she chooses to abandon instead.
Sadie Jones, a larger-than-life actress and controversial feminist, never wanted to be a mother. No one feels this more deeply than Jude, the daughter Sadie left behind. While Jude spent her childhood touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, desperate for validation from the mother she barely knew, Sadie catapulted to fame on the wings of The Mother Act—a scathing one-woman show about motherhood.
As a mama bear, I must be courageous for my three little warriors. It took a while, however, before I could activate my courage. Why? Because I had to face years of fears related to cultural shame, family guilt, inner criticism caused by oppressive patriarchal rules, and ancestral traumas. I even wrote a warm and witty memoir to capture my journey. I love sharing my stories and teaching my Courage Kit® framework to adults and kids. Fun fact: At age 8, I was a book presenter on the PBS series Reading Rainbow!
I loved the way Karen Kleinman used her expertise as a maternal mental health expert to elaborate on the embarrassing thoughts and fears that new and expecting mothers experience during their fourth trimesters. I laughed out loud when I saw her creative cartoons that debunk common stigmas and limiting mindsets related to mothering.
One of topics that I really resonated with include the idea that moms are supposed to quickly bounce back from childbirth on all levels. She reminded me how absurd it is for society to deem that it’s not OK for moms to take breaks and ask for help! Her stories helped me exercise more self-compassion. I also felt empowered to try out her exercises to confront complex fear-based thoughts about my own capacity as a mom.
Over 90 percent of new mothers will have scary, intrusive thoughts about their baby and themselves. What if I drop him? What if I snap and hurt my baby? Mothering is so hard-I don't know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I'm so terrible for thinking that! Yet for too many mothers, those thoughts remain secret, hidden away in a place of shame that can quickly grow into anxiety, postpartum depression, and even self-harm. But here's the good news: you CAN feel better!Author Karen Kleiman-coauthor of the seminal book This Isn't What I Expected and founder of…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
I found it almost impossible to find time for self-reflection in early parenthood. I was consumed at all times by the urgent needs of the infant and toddler in my care. But when I read Motherhood: A Confession, I became self-reflective by proxy.
Using Saint Augustine’s Confessions as a literary companion, Natalie Carnes asks, What if one of the greatest texts about human nature were written not by a man but by a woman and a mother? Using the self-awareness that is a hallmark of Augustine’s memoir, Carnes shows us maternal love and its shadow side, inviting us to see, from the eyes of women, both the dark and luminous shades of the human condition.
A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood.
What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's-even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She wrestles with…
