Prom Mom: A Thriller

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This is a character driven, slow burner with the central protagonists not being especially likeable as they play a game of cat and mouse with each other. Who will emerge the winner? All of them are certainly calculating maybe even cold, perhaps a bit bad ass, definitely selfish, some are full of excuses, occasionally honest, but often not. As for the mothers, frankly, they’re in a league of their own. Out of all of them, Amber is probably the most likeable and I do root for her, especially after what she’s been through.

Afterwards, she left town for good – and hasn’t seen Joe since. But she knows he hasn’t left, that he’s working for his father’s real estate company, married to a cosmetic surgeon. Child free. If I were the kind of writer who was extremely calculating, I wouldn’t have written this book. No one wants to read about Covid; dead-baby stories are not good,” she says. Dubbed ‘The Prom Mom’ for giving birth in a bathroom during a high school dance, the scandalous title dominated media headlines some twenty years prior. completely addictive, I finished the audio in one day. A well-written character-driven mystery, my favorite kind! What I really wanted to write about is the possibilities of late life,” Lippman continues, saying she has “a responsibility to savor life” for her older sister, who has Parkinson’s and lives in a nursing home. She’s one of the reasons, along with Lippman’s 92-year-old mother, who is a resident of a continuing care community, Lippman has to stay in the U.S. despite “multiple moments — usually after mass shootings” but also in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which one can’t help but be reminded of when reading Prom Mom — when she has considered leaving. Though Lippman, who is “not a prescient person,” she says, wasn’t conscious of the looming Supreme Court decision when she wrote Prom Mom, “maybe it was down there all along.”

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It’s always fun for me to read Lippman’s books, representing a return to my hometown. And she always makes a point of really laying out the territory, giving a true feel for the area. PROM MOM is a slow build up with mostly unlikable characters, especially Joe, and a plot that makes you wonder where this story line is going.

She would not try to meet Joe or cross his path. But this was Smalltimore, after all, and it was probably only a matter of time before they encountered each other. She couldn't help being curious about that moment, fantasizing about it, even. She loved that she had no idea how he would respond to her, or how he felt about her. For the first time in a long time, maybe twenty years, her life held the promise of an exciting story. As a domestic suspense novel, this was dense with information. A slow burn with no empty words and a sinister gloss. As Amber was getting her art gallery ready for its opening, Joe came into the shop, and it all started over again for her. What about for Joe? Just as we begin to learn the history of our characters in Prom Mom, we are swept between the past and the present as they move beyond what drew them together to a new life. Or do we move beyond? What makes this slow burn story different than other mystery/thrillers is the author’s razor-sharp writing, characterizations, and plotting. The tension is palpable and I could not stop listening, finishing it in one day.I’m fascinated by people who, in the middle of a pandemic, would be like, ‘Yeah, I can have an affair,’” Lippman continues, adding how the human condition will rationalize just about anything when it comes to obtaining what we think we deserve, which is what we come to find out about Nice Guy™ Joe, one of three protagonists in Prom Mom, who “can justify pretty much anything he does.”