Submission 4087

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Author: Jennifer van der Kleut

Published: 2026

Genre: Other Genre

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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What begins as an awkward but manageable situation, an unplanned pregnancy, a casual fling, a conversation that needs to happen, becomes something considerably more sinister in Jennifer van der Kleut's debut psychological thriller. Savannah Mitchell is thirty-four, recently rebuilt from a devastating breakup, and suddenly pregnant by a man named Max who has, impeccably timed, just reconciled with his ex-girlfriend Madison. Madison, it turns out, is not upset. Madison is thrilled. Madison wants to help. And that helpfulness, the uninvited visits, the lifestyle demands, the cheerful takeover of a pregnancy that is emphatically not hers, is the first sign of something that escalates from uncomfortable to dangerous with alarming speed. The Better Mother is a propulsive, anxiety-inducing debut that asks, with genuine menace: how far will someone go for a baby they have decided belongs to them?

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Savannah Mitchell's life has been rebuilt carefully, brick by brick, after the kind of breakup that leaves a person needing to start from scratch. At thirty-four, she has managed to achieve something resembling stability when a brief, uncomplicated fling with Max produces the most complicated of possible outcomes: a pregnancy she did not plan and must now navigate alone. The call to Max is awkward but necessary. His response, supportive in principle, complicated by the fact that he has just reunited with his ex-girlfriend Madison and will need time to tell her, is not ideal but workable. What is not workable, it gradually becomes clear, is Madison herself. Madison's reaction to the news defies expectation. She is not jealous or threatened. She is enthusiastic, warm, and eager to be involved. She wants to meet Savannah. She wants to help with the pregnancy. She has ideas about prenatal nutrition, about how the nursery should be arranged, about the decisions Savannah should be making about her own body and her own child. Max insists his girlfriend has the best of intentions. Savannah's instincts tell her something considerably different. The escalation from casually intrusive to actively dangerous forms the novel's tightly constructed arc. What Madison wants, and the lengths she is willing to go to get it, emerge across the novel in a series of reveals that are carefully paced for maximum anxiety. Van der Kleut builds the threat with the incremental precision of someone who understands that the most terrifying antagonists are not the ones who announce themselves but the ones who maintain the performance of helpfulness right up until the moment they can't. Savannah, fighting for her child before it has even arrived, must work out who she can trust, how seriously to take her own instincts against the pressure of Max's reassurances, and what it will take to protect herself from a threat that the people around her cannot quite see.

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“The Maternal Instinct as Both Shield and Target”: The Better Mother is, at its most fundamental level, a novel about the specific vulnerability of pregnancy, the way the body and the future it contains become targets for forces the pregnant person cannot fully anticipate or control. Savannah's instinct to protect her unborn child is the novel's moral engine, and van der Kleut uses it with a genuine understanding of what that instinct produces: the heightened awareness, the willingness to act on feelings that cannot yet be fully articulated, the specific terror of being responsible for a life that cannot yet protect itself. Madison's obsession and Savannah's protective instinct are the novel's two poles, and the tension between them is what generates its most visceral anxiety. “The Gaslit Woman and the Challenge of Being Believed”: One of the novel's most psychologically precise elements is Max's consistent positioning of Madison's behaviour as well-intentioned, even as the evidence of Savannah's experience suggests something considerably more concerning. Savannah's position, watching her own legitimate fear be reframed as oversensitivity or paranoia by the person who should be her ally, is a recognisable and infuriating dynamic, and van der Kleut renders it with enough accuracy to make it genuinely uncomfortable. The novel is, in part, about what happens when a woman's accurate perception of danger is consistently minimised by someone who has decided that the alternative explanation is more convenient. “Obsession and the Entitlement to Someone Else's Life”: Madison's obsession is not simply possessiveness over Max; it extends to Savannah's pregnancy, her choices, her body, and her future child. Van der Kleut is interested in the specific psychology of someone who has decided that something belongs to them before they have any legitimate claim to it, the entitlement that transforms helpfulness into takeover and interest into invasion. The novel charts the escalation of this dynamic with careful attention to how each stage normalises the next, making it possible for behaviour that would be immediately recognisable as threatening in isolation to accumulate gradually into something that those close to the situation struggle to see clearly. “Pregnancy as Vulnerability and as Power”: The novel uses its pregnant protagonist with deliberate awareness of what pregnancy represents in the thriller genre: a heightened state of physical and emotional vulnerability that also contains its own form of fierce, primordial power. Savannah is more vulnerable than she has ever been, dependent on others, physically changed, emotionally exposed and simultaneously more motivated than she has ever been, driven by a protective instinct that has no upper limit. Van der Kleut uses this duality to give her protagonist a specific form of strength that the thriller's conventions typically deny to women in her position. “The Complexity of Co-Parenting Arrangements”: Beneath the thriller mechanics is a more quotidian anxiety that will resonate with readers who have navigated complicated family configurations: the question of how to establish boundaries with the new partner of a co-parent, how to protect one's own autonomy while maintaining a necessary relationship with someone who will be permanently adjacent to your child's life. The novel takes this ordinary anxiety and escalates it to its most extreme expression, but the underlying question of what happens when the person your co-parent chose poses a genuine threat is not entirely fantastical.

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Madison's First Meeting. The initial encounter between Savannah and Madison is the novel's most carefully calibrated scene, the moment where everything that follows is established in miniature. Madison's warmth is excessive in a way that is difficult to name as threatening without sounding irrational. Her enthusiasm is the kind that forecloses pushback. The scene is constructed with the specific unease of a situation that is wrong in ways the protagonist cannot yet articulate, and van der Kleut uses it to establish both Madison's character and the central challenge Savannah will face throughout: the problem of a danger that presents as helpfulness. The Escalation Sequence. The novel's most sustained achievement is the management of Madison's escalation, the careful progression from intrusive to dangerous that moves through stages, each normalising the next, each slightly harder to dismiss than the one before. Van der Kleut paces this with considerable skill, building anxiety without releasing it prematurely, maintaining the reader's dread in a sustained state that makes the eventual confrontations land with the force of something that has been accumulating for the entire novel. Savannah as Protagonist. She is specifically well-chosen for this story: a woman who has already demonstrated resilience by rebuilding after significant loss, whose instincts are both reliable and consistently challenged by the people around her, and whose investment in her own child gives her motivations that are both understandable and, in the context of what she is facing, entirely justified. Readers who find thriller protagonists frustrating when they make poor decisions will find Savannah considerably more satisfying: her choices, given what she knows and when she knows it, are consistently reasonable, which makes the situations she finds herself in genuinely frightening rather than self-inflicted. The Stomach-Churning Tension. The novel's most notable quality, noted consistently by readers who encountered it, is the physical quality of the anxiety it produces: the kind of reading experience that registers in the body, that makes a reader feel the protagonist's dread rather than simply observe it. Van der Kleut achieves this through consistent point-of-view control and through the specific escalation structure: the anxiety is never fully resolved into relief, which means it compounds across the novel into something that is genuinely difficult to put down.

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The Better Mother has a clear and enthusiastic readership, and it will satisfy them with considerable conviction. If you love psychological thrillers built around obsession and domestic menace, van der Kleut's debut operates in the tradition of the genre's most beloved examples, the deeply unsettling scenario rooted in the recognisable, the antagonist whose danger is initially deniable, the protagonist who is right about the threat long before she can prove it. Readers who enjoyed The Last Mrs Parrish or who return to Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as touchstones will find this novel in direct conversation with those works. If you appreciate thrillers that make you physically anxious, the kind of reading experience that produces a visceral, embodied response rather than simply intellectual engagement, the novel delivers this quality consistently. The anxiety is not manufactured through cheap shocks but built through sustained, careful escalation, and the result is a thriller that earns its most uncomfortable moments. If you are interested in stories centred on pregnancy and motherhood with genuine stakes and ga enuine understanding of what those experiences feel like from the inside, Savannah's position trying to protect herself and her unborn child against a threat nobody else will validate is written with enough specificity to feel authentic rather than melodramatic. A note on tonal expectations: some readers may find certain plot elements require a degree of suspended disbelief, and a few threads remain less fully resolved than the overall narrative might warrant. These are minor caveats in a debut that is fundamentally about sustained, well-executed anxiety and on that measure, The Better Mother delivers thoroughly. For readers who want a compulsively readable, genuinely unsettling thriller that will make them question the performance of helpfulness from the first page to the last, this novel announces a writer to watch.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.