Book Review

The Loss of a Mother

Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger

Image from Goodreads

There are a lot of people in this book, so many that the author lists the Cast of Characters at the end.

• 11 members of the Pereira-Maier family
• 3 members of the McGowan family
• 5 members of the Goldsmith family
• 5 members of the Berman family
• 4 members of the Bates family
• 3 members of the Webb family
• And 5 stand-alone characters

The author does a fine job of helping the reader keep all these people straight, but still, reading the book is a challenge at times.

Among this multitude there are three main characters around whom the story revolves: Lila Pereira, her youngest daughter, Grace, and her mother, Zelda.

Interestingly, Lila dies on the first page of the book. She was sixty-five-years old and recently retired from The Washington Globe where she had been Executive Editor for twenty years. She is survived by her husband, Joe Maier, and by her daughters Stella (36), Ava (35) and Grace (29).

Lila’s back story is horrific. When she was two years old, her father, Aldo, had her mother, Zelda, committed to an asylum. This left Lila and her siblings, Clara (4) and Polo (6) alone with their father who was an angry, abusive man. The kids did not fare well, with Lila taking the brunt of the punishment from Aldo. Let it be noted that no one ever went to see Zelda at the asylum.

When the children were 10, 12, and 14, Aldo informs them their mother died in a fire at the asylum. There was no funeral. There was no grave to visit.

With this background, Lila has no idea how to be a mother and little interest in learning how. But Joe wants kids and so they make a deal that he will be the mother and father to their future children — with the help of nannies and au pairs. (Since Joe’s maternal grandfather was the comptroller of General Motors for forty years, money was no object.)

Joe had his own career as an attorney, but he scheduled his life to be present and available to the children. Lila on the other hand worked longer and longer hours and was rarely home. As the author tells us, “After Obama’s election, if she was awake, she was at work.” We also learn from a finally disgruntled Joe, that she did not go to Grace’s high school graduation, or to the graduations of Stella and Ava from Stanford. She didn’t even take the time to answer her daughters’ emails.

Effectively, she had disappeared from her children’s lives as surely as Zelda had disappeared from her own.

Whereas it is fairly common for a father to handle work in this fashion, mothers usually do not. Grace — in particular — is angry with Lila for this abandonment.

And since Lila is the Executive Editor of a major newspaper — who has even won a Pulitzer for her team’s investigative journalism — Grace is also angry with Lila for never investigating Aldo’s story about Zelda. He’s such a despicable man, why believe him?

Beyond this, Grace thinks Zelda is alive. She even writes a book in which she shares this opinion. Calling it The Lost Mother, Grace says it is “fictional nonfiction or a real-life novel.”

With such a famous mother and descending from GM royalty, Grace’s book is seen as a family (celebrity?) tell-all. People read it as fact and not fiction. It is a big hit. This is something Grace regrets in her mother’s dying days.

And so when Grace receives a letter from Lila from beyond the grave (Lila wrote it before her death and gave it to Joe to send it after her death) asking her to investigate Zelda, that’s exactly what she does.

The basic breakdown of the novel is as follows — the first section focuses on Lila, the second is Grace’s story, and the third and final section is the quest for Zelda.

Click here to learn more about Like Mother, Like Mother on Amazon.

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Originally published at https://www.loriekleinereckert.com on August 29, 2026.