You wake up alone after an emergency caesarean, dying to see your child.
But when you are shown the infant, you just know . . .
This baby is not yours.
No one believes you.
They say you're delusional, confused, dangerous.
But you're a doctor . . .
Do you trust yourself?
Because you know only one thing - You must find your baby.
I'd like to thank Penguin Books for my copy of Mine which I received to review via NetGalley.
I think Susi Fox's debut novel Mine is going to be a book that will divide readers as it explores the dark days that Sasha experiences after she goes into early labour following a car accident. She had her perfect birth all planned out but what follows is her worse nightmare... an emergency C section alone and no sign of her baby or husband when she awakes from the anaesthetic.
What follows is a tense tale exploring the dark side of motherhood, the anxiety and fears that arise when your perfect world falls apart. Sasha is convinced that the baby she is taken to see in the neo-natal ward is not her baby but when her own husband, family and friends won't believe her, and the medical team around her are convinced she's suffering a psychotic episode, how can she find out the truth. Anyone who has been in a similar situation to Sasha, the struggle to get pregnant in the first place or who has been through a traumatic birth experience themselves, might find this uncomfortable reading at times as the emotions and desperation she was feeling poured from the pages.
Although the story follows the days following birth, we do get to see flashbacks to events in her past that give us more of a background to who she is as a person. What demons she has had to face to become the person she is today although it also gives others fodder to support their own theories of what she is currently experiencing.
I was drawn to the premise of this book from the start, the idea of a baby being swapped which is not as common an occurrence these days, thank god, as it was in years gone by. Having never had the experience of pregnancy or giving birth, I can only imagine that this would be any mother's worst nightmare... the idea of not being able to bond with your own baby from their first moments, even when they are very poorly, seems unimaginable.
But it was the medical side of things that really got to me whilst reading, I couldn't believe how quick everyone seemed to put Sasha into the category of being a psychotic new mum suffering from post-natal depression and admitting her to a mother & baby psych ward. I'm sure that this topic alone, let alone everything else that unfolds, would make this the perfect book club choice read especially amongst mothers who may have their own horror tales of pregnancy, birth and afterwards.
Mine really is an extremely accomplished debut novel that is an intense, gritty and deeply unsettling read that really got under my skin as the injustices played out. I can't wait to see what the author has in store for us next.
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