“The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.”
Florence Grimes is an atypical St. Angeles School mother. Most of the other mothers at the prestigious London school are a good decade older than her, as well as wealthy and impeccably put together. Florence is messy, feckless, irresponsible and a bit of a party girl. The other mothers, indeed, do not seem to be fond of her, though I’d say they lean more towards disdainful judgment than actual hate.
Florence was raised in Florida until her late mother decided to drag her two daughters to England to pursue a relationship (Florence was 17 at this point). A few years later she was chosen to be part of a girl group named Girls’ Night. The group was grinding it out on tour when Florence and their manager Will had a one-night stand that resulted in the best thing in her life: her son, Dylan. Now, Dylan is 10 and goes to a posh school (turns out Will came from wealthy parents) and Florence is a single mother. After Florence left Girls’ Night due to her pregnancy, the group hit it big. Will and Rose (Florence’s bandmate, who apparently was the one he was interested in all along) married and have two daughters.
So, Florence’s life is not great. She definitely feels like she missed her chance at success, and she’s stuck running an Instagram-based balloon arch business that her sister, younger but much more competent, set up for her.
Things get exponentially worse when Dylan returns from a school trip to a wetlands preserve missing his trip partner, Alfie Risby. As it turns out, Alfie and Dylan have had conflicts in the past, and Dylan is generally unpopular and considered a troubled student.
What does Florence do? Makes things worse by letting Dylan go off with his father the very night that Alfie goes missing, just as a media circus and police descent on St. Angeles. Okay, maybe that part wasn’t the worst decision, but it’s frustrating that she won’t just talk to Dylan about Alfie’s disappearance, especially when she discovers that he brought Alfie’s backpack home with him.
Florence does explain it a bit later – that talking to Dylan will make it all real and she’s afraid of what she will hear. On the one hand, this behavior is in line with the Florence we know and, honestly, a least a little understandable to me. On the other hand, a young child is missing and it seems to me that the urgency of that should overcome one’s avoidant personality traits.
I guess it’s fair to say that I struggled with Florence acting the way Florence acts, because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing to be ditzy and irresponsible in everyday normal life (though, not totally advisable when you have the care of a small person to consider). But the reality of Alfie being missing often feels like an afterthought rather than a real and pressing consideration for Florence. In general the book treats the presumed kidnapping rather lightly.
Halfway through the book, Florence does something that felt beyond the pale to me – she justifies it both as protecting Dylan and as something that is only damning an already guilty person. But it’s really quite bad. I almost judged her less for the action than for not seeming to realize how bad it was, if that makes sense.
Anyway, rather unbelievably Florence ends up teaming up with fellow American St. Angeles mom Jenny to investigate Alfie’s abduction. Jenny is a sharp and somewhat tightly wound lawyer and single mother to twins. For Jenny it’s a bit of a lark and a break from her high-pressure job (again, it feels odd that adults would take the disappearance of young child so lightly). Florence obviously has other motives – to prove Dylan innocent – but keeps those from Jenny. I had mixed feelings about that – again, it’s in line with what you’d expect from Florence and certainly isn’t the worst thing she does in the book, but at the same time as they become tentative friends it felt like a kind of shitty thing to do to Jenny, mixing her up in the potential trouble of Dylan’s involvement without letting her know the truth.
This is the second book in a row I’ve read where there were procedural aspects of dealing with the police that were unbelievable to the point that they took me out of the story. In this case: the police come around Florence’s flat Friday night, hours after Alfie is discovered to be missing. She has already packed Dylan off to his father’s; the police are obviously eager to talk to him. Then….days pass. Like, many days. The police don’t come by again, they don’t call, they don’t seem to make any attempt to speak to the person who last saw Alfie. This is incredibly unbelievable to me, and felt unnecessary to the plot – surely this could have been handled some other way? It’s not that the story is grittily realistic in other aspects, but there are still limits to what I can accept as a reader.
As noted, the tone of All the Other Mothers Hate Me was breezy; the events of the last quarter of the book are increasingly dark. (Also, it felt like the book was supposed to be funny but I didn’t find it so?) It was hard for me to reconcile Florence’s attitude at the end given what she goes through. I understand that this was a choice and meant to be in line with Florence’s worldview, but it still felt discordant. In general, while the plot was appealing and the writing was good, I just didn’t connect with Florence the way I wanted to. I felt sorry for her but I didn’t really like her. My grade here was a B-.
Best,
Jennie
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Jennie
has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she’s read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she’s had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she’s not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.
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