WILD GAME My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Narrator Julia Whelan delivers Adrienne Brodeur's heartbreaking and exquisitely written memoir with an observer's objectivity yet with enough compassion to keep listeners enthralled. The author paints her mother, Malabar, with loving strokes, revealing a child-woman who involves 14-year-old Adrienne in the intense love affair she carries on with her husband's best friend. By making her daughter complicit in her deception, Adrienne's mother makes her feel special and needed. Whelan creates the perfect picture of a child so consumed by her mother that she hardly knows where her mother ends and she begins. This audiobook offers an incisive psychological study of an unhealthy mother-daughter relationship, and Whelan makes Adrienne's struggle to find and separate herself from Malabar absolutely convincing. A conversation with the author and the narrator follows this poignant work. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2020]