Trigger warning: Very gory and some people may get a bit sick at parts. I did not read this while eating, but even after finishing, my stomach is a bit ugh.
I am not spoiling anything going into this cause the synopsis lets you know right away you are reading about a mother and daughter who are cannibals. So that’s what is going on from the bat. I actually really enjoyed this, gore and all, but it is not something that I would read again, and it was a solid novel, but had some flaws.
The main reason why I could only give this three stars for three reasons. One, it gets way repetitive after the 50 plus percent mark for me. You keep waiting for the next thing to happen and it’s just more of the same. I agree with a reviewer who said if Rose had cut like 100 pages out of this, it would not have harmed her novel at all and it would have made it stronger. Second, there’s a hint about Eden here and there and it just never gets resolved enough for me and it just hangs there. Also, the whole Eden thing…it just takes a leap there that I went really?? Why I said there’s no resolution/explanation enough for me with regards to that whole character. Third, and last…..how in the world did Mama make any money to even buy anything? There were so many questions I had. It’s obvious at one point that there’s rumors about “that place” where are the police even at? I also don’t even know where this takes place, the U.S., England? I guessed England after a while because of Rose’s background and there’s a whole gamekeeper character which isn’t a thing in America. I had zero idea about the time this novel takes place either. Could be the 50s, could be present day.
The Lamb follows Margot and her mother (she calls her Mama). Margot loves her Mama and just wants her to be happy all the time. Her Mama is never happy though unless they catch a “stray” and from them, all good things happen. They have enough food. Mama is happy. And Margot feels as if they can go on this way forever. Until a woman named Eden shows up, a woman who should be a stray, but is not. Margot is forced to reckon with what she and her Mama are, what Eden is, and whether she can give up catching strays.
I thought that Rose did a good job of evoking Grimm’s Fairy Tales (come on, a woman living in the forest with her daughter?), a mysterious stranger that shows up, etc. But she also evoked a lot of folktales that I can recall as a kid growing up in Pennsyltucky as we called it.
Margot felt very real to me throughout this book (it’s told via her POV), but as I said above, Eden was not developed well at all, and Mama, eh slightly. There was a lot of unanswered things going on about her. I felt the other characters who are strays started to get mixed up in my mind. But we had the gamekeeper, the bus driver, Abbie, kids at school, the teacher. The entirety of Margot’s world felt very small and I know why she was isolated, but wish we had gotten something out of the other characters we get introduced to. There’s also a whole plotpoint involving Mama and Eden that I saw some readers were like WTF, but honestly my WTF was mostly about how do you go from point A to point B, again, there’s nothing provided us about Eden to even get there.
The flow wasn’t great after a while. It just got as I said earlier, very repetitive. I didn’t want to read anymore about Mama and how hungry she was (FYI, she’s a psychopath) and I kept wishing for the death of the character because she was 100 percent awful.
The setting, again, I can’t tell you the time this takes place, I guessed at England. And they apparently live in a hovel in the forest with black mold all over the place.
The ending was actually very well done, getting there though, again, took forever. It definitely reminded me of some of the darker fairy tales I read as a kid and it definitely evokes pity (at least in me it did.). Will definitely read Rose again in the future. This was her debut novel and there’s enough there to keep me interested in her second book.
