Suburban worrier

The comfortable lives of a group of city mums are shaken by scandal in NZ journalist's confident debut novel.

- LINDA HERRICK

ONE OF THOSE MOTHERS, by Megan Nicol Reed (Allen & Unwin, $36.99), is out on March 21.

It's the school holidays and Bridget, the "mother" in Auckland writer Megan Nicol Reed's lively first novel, One of Those Mothers, is sick to death of her two kids.

She works from home and money is tight, so she is expected to be everything to everybody, fielding a barrage of demands from her preteen kids, husband and friends. On the list, dimly, is herself.

"Christ," she thinks, glaring at her offspring glued to their "bloody devices", before sinking into her usual stew of guilt and self-loathing.

She's too hard on herself. As the plot progresses, Bridget becomes someone you like - but she is placed within a very specific middle-class Pākehā milieu. There is not much diversity in her small community of Point Heed, a seaside peninsula in an unnamed city, with an easy walk to the beach and gardens fronted by closely trimmed hedges.

Bridget, who grew up in Point Heed, notes its transition from a diverse suburb into a place with "fewer brown faces" and "the pensioners" mainly vanished, replaced by houses with "cantilevered decks and automatic gates".