Maybe having a few enemies on the school run means you’re doing something right…
Florence knows all about failure. After a dismal end to her 2000s girlband career, she’s moping around West London, single, broke and unfulfilled. The only things she’s proud of are her increasingly elaborate nail art choices – and her ten-year-old son, Dylan.
But when Alfie Risby, Dylan’s bitter class rival and the child heir to a frozen foods empire, mysteriously vanishes on a school trip, Dylan becomes a prime suspect. Florence has to get her act together, find the missing boy and clear her son’s name or risk losing him forever. The only problem? She doesn’t have any detective skills, she’s not exactly popular at the school gates and she’s just found Alfie’s backpack hidden under Dylan’s bed…

It took me just over an hour of listening to realise that ‘All The Other Mothers Hate Me‘ wasn’t for me. Normally, I don’t abandon a book when I’ve barely scratched the surface of it, especially when I haven’t reached the mystery part of a mystery novel but that first hour was enough for me to know that I wasn’t the target audience for this book.

It wasn’t the writing or the storytelling that put me off. The prose worked and the plot moved forward smoothly, gradually filling in the details of Florence’s world, past and present and giving me a picture of her personality along the way. The humour was sharp-edged, closely observed and delivered at pace.

Georgina Saddler’s narration was on point. I was impressed by how well she did the wide range of accents the book called for.

The problem was that I didn’t care about Florence, the world she lives in or the world she dropped out of. While I enjoyed her humour at the expense of the affluent, shallow but unshakably smug mothers whose little darlings attend the same posh-but-not-really-establishment-any-more-because-of-all-the-foreigners school as Florence’s son, their lives hold as much interest for me as an edition of HELLO! Magazine. I also couldn’t get excited about Florence’s perhaps-about-to-be-revived career as a pop star. That’s a world that’s even more shallow than the mommies at the school gate. 

So I set the book aside and chalked it up to me not paying enough attention to what I was buying.

You may have more fun with this book than I did. If you’re interested, click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of the book.