“A Reluctant Mother is mesmeric, wildly inventive, and hallucinatory. Sometimes hilarious. Frida, Dore’s heroine, is fierce, hardcore, full of fire, with a moral compass just steady enough to navigate nightmares and heartbreak. Here’s what it’s like to be a mother – for those who can’t, those who won’t, and those who are – whether they’re reluctant or not – giving it everything they’ve got.” – Lisa Moore, author of This is How We Love and February

Frida, and her husband Blake have chosen not to have children. Concentrating on her artistic career instead, Frida has mostly managed to accept this difficult decision while putting her own traumatic childhood behind her. That is, until a stranger knocks on their door with a child she insists is Blake’s daughter. From that moment on their fragile marriage, their lives are devastatingly changed forever.

Honest, sometimes humorous and often tragic, Deirdre Simon Dore’s evocative writing has created a difficult, blunt and vitally genuine “reluctant mother.”