The book is written almost entirely in the second person as one long missive from Blythe to Fox. She’s a classic unreliable narrator who, after her marriage to Fox collapses, lurks outside his new home and pulls a “Single White Female” move on his new partner. And since Blythe herself is more than a little off-kilter, it’s hard to know whose side to take. But Fox, ever protective of their daughter, won’t hear of it. When a toddler standing near Violet on a play structure falls to his death, Blythe’s suspicions intensify. Blythe’s grandmother routinely locked Blythe’s mother out of the house after school and once held her head underwater in the bathtub, nearly drowning her.Īudrain nimbly stokes the mystery as to whether nature or nurture is at play in Violet’s increasingly hostile disposition. Blythe’s mother hit her and often disappeared for a night or two at a time.

It would be easy to chalk up these difficulties to postpartum depression if it weren’t for the periodic reminders of Blythe’s traumatic family history, woven through the book in stand-alone chapters. She admits to ignoring her baby’s cries for hours on end. “I was so disappointed she was mine,” Blythe says of Violet. Noticeably absent is any sense of joy or wonder. Breastfeeding isn’t a spontanous success, for one thing a nurse “stood over us and stared at Violet and my huge brown nipple as she tried to latch again.” Blythe struggles to adapt to motherhood and she sees seismic shifts in her relationship to her husband, Fox. Their relationship goes downhill from there.īlythe’s postpartum experience is familiar, and Audrain renders it flawlessly. “I think the baby hates me,” she says just days after giving birth to her first child, a daughter named Violet. Blythe is primed, perhaps even genetically programmed, for maternal struggle. Her grandmother, also abusive, departed in a more gruesome way: by hanging herself from a tree in the front yard. Her own mother abandoned her when she was 11, after years of cruelty. Does the preschooler with a predilection for hitting need a professional intervention, or maybe just a taekwondo class? Is the kid who drops naps but not tantrums a future rageaholic? This sort of hand-wringing, at its most extreme, is at the center of Ashley Audrain’s taut, chilling debut novel, “The Push.”īlythe Connor is reluctant to become a parent - understandably so. Is my child’s behavior normal? It’s a parenting question for the ages, particularly at a time when a certain type of parent (present company included) frets over every childhood quirk, no matter how mundane.

The push ashley