Sophie should be the happiest woman in the world. A good job. A nice home. Best of all, married to Matt, the love of her life.
But there’s one thing she doesn’t have – a baby. She knows that without a child of her own to love, she will never feel complete. This emptiness at the center of her life is driving her to the edge of madness.
Then Lucy, her best friend forever, comes back to live in their home town - and offers to have a baby for Sophie.
Which sounds wonderful. But Sophie doesn’t realize that Lucy has a sinister agenda of her own. And together they are about to take a journey to the innermost circle of hell.
Yeah, you read that right. I gave this novel ZERO stars. Why? Because this was one of the worst books I've read in a very long time. Between a plot that makes absolutely no sense, characters who are both spectacularly unlikeable and painfully one-dimensional, and an utterly ridiculous cliffhanger ending, I genuinely can't think of a single thing this novel did well.
But before I get into all of that, let me explain why I actually finished this book instead of doing the sensible thing and marking it as a DNF.
This novel was published in 2025 and, while the Kindle cover has since been changed, the original cover was nearly identical to another novel published back in 2017. To make things even stranger, both books are titled The Surrogate, and both have remarkably similar premises, yet they're supposedly written by different authors and published by completely different publishing houses.
Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me. So I decided to read them both and see just how similar they really were.
Unfortunately... this was the one I started with. Now, let's break this disaster down.
As I said before, single character somehow manages to be both completely despicable and astonishingly one-dimensional. Lucy is an obvious grifter from the moment she walks onto the page. She knows exactly what she's doing, whether it's openly flirting with her supposed best friend's husband, making snide little comments about what she would do if she were Sophie, moving into Sophie's house, wandering around in Sophie's clothes, finding every possible excuse to touch Matt. None of it is subtle, yet somehow everyone around her seems determined to pretend otherwise.
Matt is a spineless cretin (I was going to call him a worm, however that would be insulting to worms) who is so blind to the fact that Lucy is playing him, and his wife is clearly unhappy about it that it’s pathetic and painful to read (especially when he literally says things like "I thought... you know... once Lucy was better we would try again for a baby" or saying maybe Lucy could become their nanny after this supposed baby comes) Dude, just tell your wife you want an open marriage. Or better yet, be honest and admit you just want to sleep with her best friend. Again.
Then there's Sophie. Good grief. I don't think I could have disliked her more if I'd actively tried.
Ironically, one of the only reasonable reactions she has in the entire novel is becoming furious at the thought of her husband sleeping with her former best friend... despite the fact that this arrangement was originally her own suggestion.
Unfortunately, that's about where the rational thinking ends.
When Lucy later claims she's lost the baby after being attacked, after conveniently refusing to take another pregnancy test to ease Sophie's fears that she was lying about being pregnant in the first place, you'd think that would be the moment Sophie put an immediate stop to the entire arrangement. But you would be wrong.
Instead, she spends chapter after chapter dancing around the issue, never once clearly telling either Lucy or Matt that she no longer wants to continue with the plan of Lucy being their "surrogate" if it means that Matt and Lucy have to sleep together again. She even tells herself she can't ask Lucy to leave because Lucy "has done nothing wrong."
Excuse me... what?
This woman has been wearing your clothes, openly flirting with your husband, constantly invading your personal space, and making you miserable inside your own home.
Whose house is this again? Because last I checked, it belonged to Sophie and Matt, so if Sophie wanted Lucy gone, she was perfectly within her rights to show her the front door. But somehow that's apparently too difficult.
What finally pushed me over the edge was what happens later in the novel when Sophie eventually snaps and does something completely unthinkable. Then, when Matt steps in to deal with the fallout from her actions, Sophie inwardly becomes angry at him because he’s asking her to help him and she accuses him of having “no thoughts or feelings” for her in that moment.
At this point, I just wanted to shake her because I mean, to be fair, YOU created this situation, and now he's trying to deal with the consequences. Perhaps consider that the world doesn't revolve around you for five whole minutes?
Sadly, even all of that might have been easier to overlook if the plot itself had been compelling.
But it wasn't. It was every bit as ridiculous as the characters inhabiting it.
For starters, I don't care how desperately my husband and I wanted children. If we couldn't afford to pursue surrogacy legally, then we simply wouldn't be having a baby.
What we absolutely would not do is decide that my best friend should naturally conceive a child with my husband. That's not surrogacy. That's an affair dressed up in prettier packaging.
As the story unfolds from the so-called "moment that changes everything," Sophie becomes increasingly neurotic over things that make absolutely no sense. She ties herself in knots telling ridiculous lies when simply telling the truth would have been both easier and far more believable.
She's terrified the police will think Lucy wouldn't simply disappear... despite the fact that, according to virtually everyone who knew her, disappearing is exactly the sort of thing Lucy has done before. She becomes convinced that perfectly ordinary text messages between herself and Matt are somehow incriminating when, in reality, they read exactly like concerned neighbors discussing another missing person in the area.
It's little things like this that gradually pile up until the entire plot collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
Then there are the imagined conversations.
At one point, after a neighbor's son is found dead, Sophie watches from her window as the police bring his parents home following what she assumes was the identification of his body. The father glances toward Sophie's house, says something to the officers, and they all look up in her direction. Sophie immediately convinces herself that he must have been telling them she's always watching.
Again, not everything is about you Sophie. As a matter of fact, Where I live, which also happens to be a small town, it's completely normal for neighbors to look outside when police cars suddenly appear on the street. Hell, we've even been known to congregate at the end of the street if there has been an accident.
And then, as if it wasn’t bad enough that I have suffered through every single page of this train wreck up until now, the book somehow manages to get even worse. Not only does Sophie escape the consequences of her actions with surprising ease, but the novel concludes with one of the most ridiculous cliffhangers I've read in quite some time.
If the author's intention was to hook readers into picking up a sequel... No thanks.
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