For this semester’s first BwogBooks review, staff writer Maren Frey covers law school grad Susan Rieger’s (‘76) new book Like Mother, Like Mother. 

I first came across Like Mother, Like Mother in my local bookstore this winter break, desperate for an escape from my boring hometown and in need of a good book. And though it’s always said that “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” the one for this book immediately caught my eye with its bright impressionist-style sketching of the two mothers on the cover and I immediately bought it. And this was the start of a two-day reading frenzy where I was consumed by the lives of the Perreira and Maier families in the novel. 

Like Mother, Like Mother follows writer Grace Maier on the quest to find her long-lost (and believed to be dead) grandmother, Zelda, who abandoned her mother Lila in the 1960s. And though the story takes place over the course of more than 50 years, Rieger seamlessly weaves the stories of the Perreira-Maier family and their beloved friends, leaving no detail behind. 

The author of Like Mother, Like Mother, Susan Rieger, is both a graduate and former faculty member of Columbia Law School. Rieger graduated from Columbia Law School in 1976 and then went on to teach undergraduate law courses at Yale. Following Yale, she became an associate provost at Columbia and she still lives in NYC to this day! In addition to Like Mother, Like Mother, Rieger has also written novels The Heirs, an NPR 2017 Best Book of the Year, and The Divorce Papers, an inventive novel told solely through email correspondence, legal documents, and personal handwritten notes. According to Deadline, Like Mother, Like Mother is in the works by producer Sue Naegle and Dinner Party Productions. 

Thus, through the novel’s narrative, one cannot help but fall in love with the complex characters, from Ruth, the Tallahassee-raised podcaster best friend of Grace, to Frances, Lila’s benevolent mother-in-law who is the heiress to the General Motors fortune. The novel takes the reader on a journey all over the U.S. from Detroit to Palo Alto to DC, transporting the readers not just into family life but throughout the whole country.  A combination of mystery, romance, and historical fiction, Rieger’s book is at times tear-jerking and at others, laugh out loud funny. Though I loved the whole story, I have to say that the ending was a bit rushed and it seemed like Rieger just wanted to wrap up the story with a bow and call it a day. Nonetheless, Like Mother, Like Mother is a beautiful family story on the power of motherhood.