Maeve is a book editor in NYC. She’s got a pretty good life, including a friends with benefits arrangement with Ryan. What Maeve doesn’t have is family. She grew up in a matriarchal cult, Mother Collective, a situation from which she escaped/was rescued when she was just a child. The only thing she really misses from that time in her life is her cousin, Andrea. They lost touch and Maeve hasn’t looked for her in years. Then, on a whim, she takes a DNA test and suddenly Andrea is back in her life…and things get, well, complicated.

This is the premise of Anne Heltzel’s first novel for adults Just Like Mother. And it started out really well. I love cult stories, and although this once doesn’t spend too much time in the cult, there is certainly enough information for readers to know that it’s whackadoodle (although, really, are there any cults out there that aren’t?) This is a cult of women, the one male child mentioned is referred to as ‘Boy’. There’s a locked room and strange sounds come from behind the door, a puppy Maeve thinks.

When Maeve and Andrea are reunited, Maeve is both elated and wary. After all, their shared childhoods weren’t idyllic. Andrea seems to have landed on her feet though. She’s made millions as the “CEO of a start-up that had been making the news for its groundbreaking contributions to the lifestyle market.” But almost as soon as Andrea re-enters her life, Maeve’s life starts to implode. She loses her job and then, a personal tragedy catapults Maeve to upstate New York, where Andrea lives in a fabulous mansion with her husband, Rob.

That’s when things get weird. Just Like Mother is one of those books that you keep reading because it is so ridiculous that you can’t stop. Some readers called it “terrifying” and “deeply disturbing” but it was neither of those things for me.

Sally Diamond’s father always told her that when he died that she should put him out with the trash, so

When the time came, on Wednesday, 29th November 2017, I followed his instructions. He was small and frail and eighty-two years old by then, so it was easy to get him into one large garden garbage bag.

The first fifty pages of Liz Nugent’s novel Strange Sally Diamond flew by. I was wholly invested in Sally’s story and her peculiar personality. Her awkward interactions with the people who live in her small Irish town, the fact that she seemed so out of step with the world, her appearance — all of these things would have been interesting enough on their own. But there is so much more to her story and when a teddy bear arrives in the mail from New Zealand, Sally’s insular life explodes. Although she has always known that she was adopted, she didn’t know any of the details of the origins of her birth. Her father’s death and the arrival of this teddy bear exposes her dark past.

I don’t want to spoil the story – hers, or that of the novel’s secondary narrator, Peter – so it’s hard to really talk about without giving things away. In any case, my problems aren’t with the story itself, which certainly had lots of potential. And my problem wasn’t with Sally, either. Despite her idiosyncrasies, I quite liked her. And my problem wasn’t even with the writing itself, which was straightforward and easy to read.

Strange Sally Diamond is another case of a book that tells you things, sometimes at convenient times. The truth of Sally’s pre-adoption life is revealed to her in a series of letters. Despite Sally’s warm feelings about her father, his less-than-altruistic motives are revealed to us by her aunt, her mother’s sister. As Sally becomes less a fish out of water and more of an active member in her community, all too quickly (given the 40 years of isolation and trauma) she has a circle of friends, a social life, people looking out for her. I mean, I guess we can believe that the reason she never had any of those things is because her father was over-protective…

All the pieces fit neatly into place and perhaps that is the sign of a well-crafted novel, but for me, it was just okay.