Review: 'The Mother-in-Law' by Karen King

You meet the love of your life and everything is suddenly perfect, except, well, he lives with his parents and his mother is maybe a little bit obsessed with him. Now what? Well, if you're Dara, you'll tough this out till you get your man. If you're me, you'll sigh but stay onboard to seew here this journey ends. Thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the long delay in reviewing.

Pub. Date: 29/07/2022
Publisher: Bookouture

Today is my wedding day. And I don’t know if I’ll make it out alive…

As I put my beautiful white wedding dress on, I try not to ignore my fears. I look in the mirror and feel more beautiful than I ever have before. I know marrying Sam is the right choice. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

I reach for my bright yellow roses, and I force myself to be as cheerful and sunny as those flowers. I won’t dwell on everything that’s happened recently – ever since we agreed to stay with his parents for the weeks ahead of the wedding.

Glancing down at my sparkling engagement ring, I pretend to myself I can forget about the ‘accidents’ I keep having, that I can’t believe are coincidental. Or about his mother’s barbed comments, and the dark looks she gives me.

And, just for today, while I walk down the aisle towards the man of my dreams, while I say ‘I do’, I’ll try to put the secret I know about the family I am marrying into right out of my mind.

Even though that’s one secret that – if I was my soon-to-be mother-in-law – I might just kill to keep…

Evil mothers-in-law were a hot topic in domestic thrillers for quite a while. Much like the evil step-mother, the figure of the mother-in-law unites a lot of elements and occurs at exciting moments. She is a new woman who enters our protagonist's life at a crucial moment and is usually the mother of the soon-to-be husband who can throw up major hurdles to blissful wedded life. She is also not just a mother, a figure already imbued with all kinds of potential, but also a woman in her own right who has a whole history the protagonist is unfamiliar with. She is also a stereotype, which means that novels can play with the reader's expectations. Perhaps the mother-in-law isn't as bad as we feared, or perhaps she is much, much worse. And then there are weddings, events for which expectations are sky-high and where everything can go wrong. So it's no surprise that mothers-in-law featured in so many thrillers during the 2010s and early 2020s. However, I do find myself being slightly tired of her and this didn't help my reading of The Mother-in-Law. While Karen King does try to play with the type and maybe misdirect us, it didn't come together for me. 

Dara meets Sam and they fall in love, a tale as old as time. Theirs is a whirlwind romance, which means Dara overlooks some of the red flags, such as Sam still living with his parents in his late thirties, the presence of his glamorous childhood-friend Tamara, and his somewhat controlling mother, Evelyn. Within months she finds herself walking down the aisle, but those months are filled with accidents both small and large, which have her questioning what kind of family she is marrying into. The Mother-in-Law technically has a lot of fun elements to it, which could have worked really well, but it is let down by its writing style a bit. A lot of this book is us being told things, rather than shown them, and time flies by. This became a major issue for me when I realised I was not buying into Dara and Sam's love at all. Within 5 pages they are in love and we are told they talk a lot and have beautiful moments together, but I never really got to see any of these. If I don't get their love I also don't get why Dara would stick through all the weirdness happening. I appreciate that King maybe wanted to highlight the whirlwind-aspect of the romance by having time flying by, but it meant that I was largely left cold by things. On top of that, some of the writing was very repetitive and Dara would consistently have the same kind of thoughts about things. I appreciate we need to build up tension and cannot immediately accuse a future mother-in-law of sabotage, but do we have to go back and forth on it quite so often? The characters also never fully came alive for me, even as they were given background.

I unfortunately did not have a good time with Karen King's writing, but I can appreciate that maybe some of that is a me-thing. I usually enjoy how much of a thriller depends on characters making silly choices, but I've come to realise that that enjoyment depends on certain elements of writing. I just couldn't buy into any aspect of The Mother-in-Law. The love didn't feel real, the thrills were minimal, Dara is so uncertain it's hard to know what she thinks or wants, Sam is a non-entity, and Evelyn has so much potential but never lives up to it. As the accidents Dara experiences ramp up, I would expect the tension to go along with it, but instead I felt like I read the same thing over and over again. Perhaps this is also because it was written in first-person and I therefore expected more actual insight or turmoil. I did want to know how Karen King was going to tie this all together and so I did have a fun afternoon racing through this book, but the fun mainly lay in getting to the ending, not in the journey itself. A whole lot happens in the last quarter or so, some of which is cleverly set up by a prologue of the wedding day, but by the time it all happened I was unaffected. I'm finding it hard to nail down why I didn't care, but I truly didn't. Long story short, this really wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean it can't be for someone else.

I give this novel...

2 Universes!

My rating might feel harsh because I did have fun with The Mother-In-Law, but I feel that this fun was in large part despite the book, rather than because of it.