The Lamb - Lucy Rose
A review of Lucy Rose’s novel centred on maternal closeness, control and a child’s unmet longing for care.
336 pages · Kindle edition · Harper, February 2025
Closeness Without Care
The Lamb does not aim for realism and it does not pretend it does. The story is heightened on purpose. The question is whether the emotional logic holds. It does. Lucy Rose writes with control and confidence, keeping the prose grounded even as the book pushes into excess.
For me, the novel turns on the mother–daughter relationship. Plenty of people will read it through identity, queerness or genre, yet the emotional centre felt more direct: a child’s longing for love from a mother who is physically there, powerful in the house, and emotionally shut. This is not neglect through absence. The harm comes from closeness without care. Love shows up as rule and possession, not warmth. The daughter grows up watching, adjusting, hoping the right version of herself will finally be met with tenderness.
That longing shapes everything. She does not crave freedom so much as recognition. She wants to be seen as her own person. The closed, inward world of the novel mirrors that, as if the maternal bond sets the limits of reality.
The ending makes the relationship’s terms explicit. The mother’s final choice confirms what the daughter has sensed for a long time: she was never first. What stops the book becoming nothing but cruelty is the daughter’s small act of resistance near the end. It changes nothing about what happens, yet it matters. It shows a flicker of agency at the last moment. She is not passive. She is alert, even then.
Bleak and far-fetched by design, the book commits fully to what it set out to do. The writing and that central relationship carry it. The extremity narrows the emotional range at times, which is why this lands for me at 3.5 stars.