Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur

Cover Photo from GoodReads

I was given an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own. 

I don't generally read memoirs. They really aren't my thing, and I tend to prefer the world of fiction to real life. When I saw the title of this book though, I couldn't help myself. It sounded like an episode of Jerry Springer, and I was curious. It took me a while to get to it, and the book has already been published, but here we go. While reading this I was reminded of "The Glass Castle" in a way because both are memoirs about awful parents. 

First of all, Malabar is TOXIC as hell. She decides to cheat on her ailing husband with his best friend and uses her 14 year old daughter as an accomplice and an alibi. Adrienne, or Rennie as people call her, mentions that she grew up without a moral compass, because what was right was whatever pleased her mom at the time. That's an important thing to remember, because it's something that follows Rennie throughout her mom's twenty year affair. Even as an adult, Adrienne's life is all about her mother. She marries the son of her mom's lover (ICK) and is put in a compromising position when he finds out that not only have their parents been sleeping together for years, but she knew about it and never said anything to anyone. Her mom essentially gaslights her throughout her life in order to get her to do whatever she wants, and it isn't until years of therapy later that Rennie starts to see their relationship for what it was. 

At the end of the book, Rennie faces her fears of being like her mother when she has her first daughter. Having a toxic parent myself, I could almost put myself in her shoes, which made it bittersweet for me to read about. I remember having that same feeling while holding my daughter, wondering how anyone could do the things that were done to me and call themselves a parent, knowing that as scared as I was to make the same mistakes, somehow, it was all going to be okay. 

I would definitely recommend this for anyone who wants to read a wildly complicated mother daughter memoir.