A Mother’s Guide to the Apocalypse

• Author: Hollie Overton
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: August 19, 2025
• Publisher: Redhook

Thank you to Redhook, Oliver Wehner, and Oriel Voegele for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If you knew the world was ending, how far would you go to protect the people you love? How would you ensure their survival? And what secrets would you want to keep buried?

For Olivia Clark, the summer of 2024 was the beginning of the end. Political upheaval and natural disasters are bad enough, but when danger arrives on her doorstep, threatening her triplet daughters, Olivia finds herself scrolling doomsday-prepping forums for hours, determined to protect her family from the coming apocalypse. Olivia’s husband and friends insist she is being irrational—until she is swept away in a flash flood that devastated LA.

At least that’s the story her daughters were told.

Eighteen years later, the Clark triplets discover a guidebook that calls into question everything their father told them about her mother and her death. Reeling from this betrayal, the family returns to California, determined to uncover Olivia’s true fate.

Confronted by an unfamiliar world where nothing and no one are what they seem, the sisters must unravel the truth about the father who raised them and the mother who may have abandoned them, while struggling to hold on to the one constant in their lives—each other.

While I’m not a huge fan of horror, I do love a good post-apocalyptic read (or at least I did before Covid-19). Hollie Overton is a new-to-me author, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Even so, I still had high expectations for this book, because the premise sounded so good.

To start with, the story is mostly set in California, although there are some scenes that take place in the UK. The circumstances of the ‘beginning of the end’ was a bit too close to what is going on in the US today: political upheaval and natural disasters are a pretty good way to talk about my country, although to be honest, it seems like it’s not only my country but affecting countries around the world. While normally this would be the ‘horror’ aspect of the story, when it’s your reality, it hits different. The horror aspect for me was more the idea that if things keep going the way they have been, this could be our reality in the not so distant future. And that is a terrifying idea.

The story is told in multiple formats and through the eyes of various characters. We see things from the perspective of Olivia, her husband Sam, each of her triplets (Cassie, Betty, and Rosie). We also get to experience not only the characters POV, but detailed excerpts from Olivia’s chapters of the titular guide, and reddit threads.

Let me backtrack. After a harrowing home invasion while her triplet daughters are sleeping upstairs, Olivia begins to feel unsafe. Totally understandable, if you ask me. She soon finds herself poring through doomsday-prepper threads on reddit for hours, and starts to find herself prepping, convinced that it might be the only way to survive whatever is coming. At first, her husband and friends humor her new tendencies, but then they become concerned about her taking it too far and it winds up driving a wedge between her and all those that care for her. Ultimately it winds up pushing her closer to her new prepper friend, Joe, as the only person who doesn’t judge her for this almost obsessive need to prepare for an apocalypse. 

While we might joke around about doomsday-prepping, seeing Olivia’s slide into this lifestyle makes a strange kind of sense. She experiences a traumatic event that kicks off her about-face, and it’s all focused on ensuring that her daughters would be as safe as possible in the future. As part of that, she creates a guidebook for her daughters to be as safe as possible. It’s really thorough, and I’m going to be sure to keep this book handy just in case I ever need this info.

Eighteen years later, her triplets are now adults, taking care of their father, who has developed dementia. After Olivia’s disappearance in a flash flood and the inability to find any trace of her, Sam brought the triplets to his family’s home in the UK, which was more stable than the US. They grow up off the grid, operating their own farm, and taken care of by their father and their paternal grandparents. But eighteen years later the triplets discover this guidebook and a letter, which causes them to question the veracity of the story they’ve been told and it leads them back to California.

However, once they get there, they realize how idyllic their own home is—even with extreme temps and weather events, England isn’t anything like the Mad Max inspired version of modern-day LA. Nothing and no one are what they seem, and the triplets don’t have anyone they trust besides each other. But coming to New Pacific has created a new separation between them, and the secrets they’re keeping only further that divide.

The way that each of the characters interact with others is meaningful, and often has long-lasting echoes in the story. Readers see the strong protective drive that fuels Olivia’s prepping, and again through her creation of the guidebook. Sam has been a devoted and loving father to the girls, and each of them are very different despite their shared appearance. So the betrayal of their beloved father has rocked their world, which is further shaken by the idea that their mother might not be dead. 

However, once the story lands back in California, the characters that are introduced tend to be more one dimensional. Everyone seems to have an ulterior motive that drives them, and then their entire personality is boiled down to that. I was further disappointed that I was able to predict some of the twists with ease—I’m the kind of reader who likes to be surprised by the twists rather than piecing the clues together before the twist. 

Overall, this was a pretty great read, considering. Although I didn’t really like a lot of the California characters, I really empathized with Olivia, Sam, and their daughters. The book is almost 500 pages, yet it’s easy to fly through whether in print or audio. The audiobook is narrated by Eleanor Caudill, and is done masterfully whether portraying the Geordie accent of British English, or the flatter American accent of California. I struggled to put this book down, and spent basically most of my time reading to find out what happened. Despite the aspects that I didn’t vibe with as much, I still thoroughly enjoyed the story. Just don’t expect much of an escape in this book—it’s way too close to reality right now. But it does have a great mystery at its heart, and a fantastic character-driven story.

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