A teen mother raises her daughter on a looping road trip, living hand-to-mouth in motel rest stops and backwater towns, stepping occasionally into the heat and chaos of the surrounding cities. A life without permanence, filled with terrors and joys, their stability is dependent on the strangers-and strange men-they meet along the way. But what is the difference between the love of a mother, and the love of a friend? And in a world with such blurred lines, where money is tight and there's little outside influence, when does the need to survive slide into something more sinister?
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[My mother, she's standing at the counter with her hair shining loose over her shoulder, her eyes just as bright, her smile so wide she can only be oblivious to the lipstick marks on her teeth]***
(Crystal Lake Publishing, 8 November 2019, 252 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I'd never heard of the author before and bought this on impulse as I liked the title, cover and the blurb intrigued me. Good choice. Doll Crimes was amazing and I need to seek out more of the author's work. Everything is filtered through the daughter's eyes of a highly dysfunctional mother/daughter. The daughter seems to think her brutal and horrific like is normal when her mother passes her round various Uncles who float in and out of their lives. This normalising something so horrific is brutal to read. There are moment when her mother seems almost normal and the daughter has a happy life but this is interwoven with some horrific events, a switch between Heaven and Hell. I cannot get so much of this book out of my head. It will haunt me for a long time. The events that occur at the end are shocking but I also felt a sense of relief.