Reading new thrillers by Middlesex-area authors Sarah Strohmeyer and Katy Farber, I was struck by their similar openings. Chapter 1 of Strohmeyer’s A Mother Always Knows takes place in the Cambridge (Mass.) Public Library, where librarians meet with an activist parent. Farber’s The Board also opens with its protagonist in a library, attending a school board meeting to weigh in on her daughter’s education.
The common setting is more than coincidence, given that both books are about motherhood. Libraries are increasingly the battleground for questions of how children should be raised, hence the primary target of the real-world book-banning group Moms for Liberty. While neither of the moms in these books would have any truck with that organization, they champion their own versions of liberty for themselves and their daughters.
Farber is a former Vermont public school teacher and current assistant professor of education at Saint Michael’s College who clearly knows her way around such debates. The novel’s narrator, Liv Wilcox, has recently left her husband and taken her 8-year-old daughter, Piper, to live in her late aunt’s house in a small New Hampshire town. The setting seems idyllic. But at that first school board meeting, Liv learns that the principal/superintendent, Bob Stewart, is a believer in old-school pedagogy who rules with an iron hand. He disciplines Piper for expressing her big emotions, dismisses her mother’s concerns and belittles her at every turn. The townspeople back him up, enforcing an almost Stepford level of conformity. “It was like a big town secret,” Farber writes, “this militant school, and everyone knew it.”
Insecure Liv wishes she could be a fiery feminist like her aunt, who stood up to Stewart as the town librarian. But Liv’s own law school training has given her a love for “researching, following leads, putting together a giant puzzle, seeing how it all connected.” Hoping “to make things better,” she applies those skills to investigating the principal and his posse, who may be profiting from shady side deals.
Vermonters are no strangers to small-town power politics, and it’s easy to root for the single mom in this scenario. While Stewart and his smug, intolerant minions verge on evil cartoons, Farber fleshes out Liv’s background to give more dimensions to her crusade. By standing up to the board, she confronts the sexism that she hopes won’t shape her daughter’s life as it did her own.
As a thriller, The Board suffers from a slow start and a lot of action crammed into the last act. While I cheered on Liv’s transformation from fearful mouse into kick-ass whistleblower, her risky actions don’t always feel sufficiently motivated, and her legal acumen ends up not playing much of a part in the story’s resolution. Still, her fierce love for her daughter makes her likable. Thriller readers who are less interested in fiendish twists than in meaty book-club discussions should check this one out.
While The Board has a single present-tense narrator and story thread, Strohmeyer’s A Mother Always Knows is a more densely plotted novel that unfolds in multiple time frames and perspectives. Our primary narrator is 30-year-old Stella O’Neill. When she was 10, her mom, Rose — the mother in the title — was brutally murdered on the grounds of a Vermont new-age commune devoted to spiritual dowsing. Rose had left her husband to join charismatic leader Radcliffe MacBeath, bringing Stella along. The crime remains unsolved, though Stella has fragmentary memories of a possible killer.
Adult Stella is living under the radar in Boston when a true-crime show puts her lurid past online. The exposure makes her and her dad targets of the cult, the Diviners, who are about to hold their annual solstice celebration in (where else?) the Bennington Triangle, known to Joe Citro fans as a site of unexplained disappearances. Determined to set the past to rest, Stella returns to Vermont. MacBeath may be a charlatan, but Stella’s dowsing powers are real, as were her mother’s. And she hopes to use them to find the killer.
Stella’s narrative alternates with chapters set during the last few days of Rose’s life and with present-day chapters from the perspective of Priti, the socialite wife of a tech bro who may have had something to do with Rose’s death.
For this reader, Rose’s story was by far the most compelling. It gives us a window into the customs of the cult, which Strohmeyer has worked out in engrossing detail. And Rose’s plight has a primal pull: Originally a free-spirited believer in MacBeath, she now recognizes him as a creepy hypocrite and plots to escape his clutches with her precious daughter.
Strohmeyer has authored a slew of novels ranging from mysteries to rom-coms, and the other two narratives of A Mother Always Knows veer toward the lighter tone of the latter. Priti’s tale delves into the well-heeled milieu of Dutton, Vt. (reminiscent of Dorset), with satirical gusto, introducing us to country club denizens with names like “Bogey Grovey.”
In Stella’s narrative, however, the novel’s humor becomes a disadvantage, as her cutesy voice makes it tough to take the dangers she encounters seriously. Captured by the cult, she muses on the Yelp review she’d give her prison: “There’s absolutely no view, the bed is rock hard, the food sucks, and the customer service is terrible.” A snappy one-liner sums up a cult member who was once her playmate: “Not only does he drink the Kool-Aid, he mixes it up by the pitcher.”
Sure, humor can be a coping mechanism. But after the grim depiction of the cult’s murderous discipline in Rose’s story, Stella’s constant quipping feels misplaced. Because of this tonal fluctuation, only about half of A Mother Always Knows feels like a thriller. Trying to jack up tension, Strohmeyer yields a few too many times to the temptation to fake out the reader with misleading chapter-ending cliffhangers.
Those shortcomings aside, the novel is layered enough to keep us guessing whodunit. Vermonters will appreciate its wealth of references to local history and lore, from the 1984 raid on the Island Pond community to the ghost town of Glastenbury. Strohmeyer also shows a healthy respect for the tradition of dowsing, citing her sources in the acknowledgments while noting that “I also made up a bunch of stuff.” That cheeky, freewheeling spirit permeates the book, for all its serious concerns.
Farber’s Liv and Strohmeyer’s Rose would probably agree that society places an overwhelming burden on mothers. Both characters pay a price for putting their own needs first. Rose acknowledges that her peers would see her choice to join the cult as “incredibly selfish or just plain nuts.” As a single mom in a hostile new town, Liv is terrified of being “branded ‘that’ parent. The one that brought her kid in late, picked her up late … used their grocery money for booze…”
By the end of the book, however, Liv has realized those fears are the lever the town patriarchs and matriarchs use to enforce social control. “Weren’t women always in trouble?” she wonders. “Trouble for being too much, too little.” Like Rose, she decides the best way to set an example for her daughter is not to give in.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Moms for Liberty | Book reviews: A Mother Always Knows, Sarah Strohmeyer; The Board, Katy Farber”
This article appears in Nov 19-25 2025.
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