Mother is Watching Book Review

by Catalina Bonati

2.75/5 stars ★★★☆☆

Mother is Watching by Karma Brown (to be published March 2026) is a literary sci-fi horror novel which focuses on Mathilde, or Tilly, and her art conservation job. In the near future, she receives the opportunity to restore the last artwork of a deceased artist named Charlotte Leclerc who used human body and insect parts as part of her paintings. However, as she becomes pregnant and becomes part of the MotherWise organization, the painting and the artist’s story comes alive to her and she begins to slowly descend into madness.

The story takes place in an unspecified year in the future where the world population has gone through a pandemic which caused infertility in men. Now, society is geared towards encouraging pregnancy and motherhood in ways that are oppressive. MotherWise is a company which mothers subscribe to (almost as an obligation) with its own system of doctors and health monitoring. The constant surveillance of mother’s bodies is patriarchal, tyrannical, and dystopian. Nevertheless, Mathilde seems to enjoy her pregnancy despite her husband Wyatt and her doctors policing her every move. The planet has endured extreme climate change and climate migration and disease prevail, although Tilly is white and middle class and does not experience these problems herself.

Mathilde works slowly to restore the painting, titled “The Mother.” Tilly’s mother was also an art conservationist who worked with a Leclerc painting, and Tilly experiences hallucinations of her mother giving her advice and merging with the figure in the painting. Tilly’s psychosis is sudden, but it is not immediately clear why the painting is the cause. There is a confusion between her mother, the artist, the figure in the painting, and herself, and it is not exactly clear who is doing the haunting. Tilly’s experience with the painting is often violent and involves blood or wounds or some sort of small sacrifice. It does not seem inherently connected to motherhood, which makes the story seem disconnected from itself at times, as if there are two different storylines which only sometimes intersect.

The writing is sometimes a bit too flowery and descriptive, and at times does not match the pace of the events which are unfolding. The ending is a bit too long and stretched out, yet the events which lead up to ending are underdeveloped.

Despite the problems in pacing and in connecting themes, this story has built an interesting tech-utopian yet thoroughly dystopian world in which men (specifically Wyatt) are villains and motherhood is now a social status. To me, these aspects were far more interesting than the mystery and suspense aspects regarding the story of the painting and the artist, which were at times confusing and seem secondary to the worldbuilding. Overall, I recommend this book to readers of Chloe Aridjis, Christina Dalcher, as well as Stephen King and Oscar Wilde.