If I had to sum up All Her Fault in a single word, it would be: laborious.
I don't mind a twisty thriller or being led down the wrong path. But this one never really worked for me.
The novel opens with an interesting premise. Marissa arrives at a house to collect her young son, Milo, from a playdate, only to discover that the address she has been given belongs to a complete stranger. There is no playdate, and Milo has been kidnapped. It's the sort of opening that should get you excited but instead, I found myself struggling to engage.
The story is told from two perspectives: Marissa, the mother of the missing child, and Jenny, another school parent whose son was unknowingly used to lure Milo away. I suspect Andrea Mara intended these dual perspectives to build tension and perhaps explore some of the complexities of modern parenting and family life. Sadly, neither of those things really landed for me.
The characters felt disappointingly two-dimensional. We have the cliquey, unpleasant school mums and the career mother weighed down by guilt about balancing work and family. They all felt like familiar television archetypes rather than fully realised people. In fact, much of the novel felt as though it had been written with a television adaptation in mind rather than as a novel in its own right.
Despite being packed with twists and red herrings, the story somehow managed to feel both obvious and overly dramatic at the same time. By the final few reveals, I felt as though I was being asked to perform increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics just to make everything fit together. I appreciate that thrillers often require a degree of suspended disbelief. But this one asked for far too much of it from me.
All Her Fault is interested in blame: who was responsible for Milo's kidnapping, and how responsibility can be shared and imposed upon others. Had the novel leaned more into those themes and been written as more of a literary exploration of guilt and responsibility, I suspect it might have worked better for me. As a thriller, though, it all felt too surface level to have much emotional impact.
It's probably clear by now that I didn't particularly enjoy this one. The premise is undeniably compelling, but the execution simply didn't deliver for me, and unfortunately it's not a novel I would recommend.
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