Barri Brown is fed up. A hard-working teacher on Guernsey, she’s fed up of people telling her that her biological clock is ticking. She’s fed up of being told that she’ll ‘change her mind’ when she tells her family, friends and colleagues that she doesn’t ever want children and she’s fed up of being overwhelmed, overloaded, unappreciated and overlooked for promotion in favour of people she’s spent years covering for when they have been off on repeated maternity leave. Not only that but she doesn’t really have any friends; her family is exasperated by her, despite what she sees as her best efforts to be a good Sister and Aunt (I fully empathise with her sister here), and worse still, her husband Sean has disappeared and is ghosting her, and she doesn’t know why or where he is. She has had enough.
So when she stumbles, Barri-style, into a conversation that leads her colleagues to think she’s expecting a baby, she starts to think…why not? As everyone seems so desperate for her to have a baby, and is insistent that she will one day she decides to lean into it. She can pull this off, right? With the help of progressive fake ‘bumps’ bought online and a solid game face, she can pretend to be expecting, enjoy all of the positive attention that comes with it, pop the house on the market, pocket her share of the money, take the maternity leave and disappear. Travel the world for a while as the fuss dies down, then settle somewhere new – she thinks she quite fancies Nashville although longer term, Edinburgh has quite a pull.
Enter Trish, a new neighbour who ends up becoming unwittingly embroiled in Barri’s plans and becomes her first real friend. With her support, things are going to plan until Barri discovers that Sean, the errant husband, has remortgaged the house without her knowledge and all her plans go up in smoke…but she’s still there…trapped…fake pregnancy and all, but no money on the horizon. How the hell is she going to get out of this one? When one of her students gets involved with criminal activity and resorts to blackmailing her, she knows she’s really messed up and the prospect of what will happen if she’s outed (or indeed, if she isn’t!) over the next few months is terrifying.
Motherfaker is quite unlike any book I’ve read before. The main character is so beautifully written that she’s believable in her absurdity, but there is a serious message that underpins this book which covers societal attitudes to women and how they are so often defined by their parental status – mothers are judged on their choices in the same way that childfree women are, just in a different context. When a woman is pregnant she effectively becomes public property and her body is discussed and touched, often with seemingly little choice from her. When a woman chooses to be childfree, she is often viewed with suspicion and distrust and the perception is frequently thrown around that a woman who doesn’t have children is devoid of empathy and has no idea what ‘real love’ is. Just look what is said about female MPs or CEOs without children – it’s rarely, if ever raised by way of similar criticism for males in the same situation. This book reiterates that women are often made to feel as if they do not have a choice, and also that motherhood is not always achieved by giving birth. Women may be mothers through blended families, fostering, adoption, and some will play the role of mother many times without ever having the official ‘label’. On the other side of the coin, they may decide that motherhood is not for them at all – and that’s ok too. I think the really sad thing that this book exposes is that she felt left out by the women in her life until she ‘got pregnant’ and in reality – she was. Once she was ‘in the club’, literally and figuratively, she was a different person to them. This is something that many women have felt over the years – constantly expected to have children, and then left out of so much if they don’t, or can’t. It’s a message that really makes you think.
On a more positive note, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s one of my best reads of the year so far (and we are in November now so that’s some going!). It’s got so much going for it – the nervous feeling that Barri’s lies are going to be exposed and the internal struggle of whether you want her to be found out or not? I mean she’s doing something pretty awful here, but based on her experiences, can you really blame her? She’s actually making friends for the first time in her life, she’s maturing emotionally and she’s opening up and making herself vulnerable. Her life is changing in a way she never expected and just when she’s starting to experience real friendship, she’s going to have to blow it all open with a massive expose. Somewhere down the line, while taking on the bad guys, she has become the bad guy. The unjustness of this just emphasises her frustration with the societal expectations on women to have babies and the way attitudes change towards them if and when they do – as I mentioned earlier this will ring true and strike a chord with many women. The themes of feeling ‘othered’, of trying so hard to fit in, and eventually feeling that inclusion, but knowing it’s all based on a lie and worse still, she’d never have experienced that warmth and friendship if she’d not deceived them into thinking she was expecting. To have Barri shoulder that burden, and the events that unfold as it all starts to unravel, with such humour and poignancy is a real triumph and I think Anna Brook-Mitchell has a big hit on her very talented hands.
Motherfaker is expected to be published on February 24, 2026 by MacMillan.
Thanks to Netgalley and MacMillan for the ARC – this is my honest review.
Urban Bookworm 