Harare Review of Books

208 pages.

First published in 2020.

Finished reading on 19 Sept 2021.

Genre: Fiction/Cli-fi.

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She’s become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.

As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she’s learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks… And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

I loved this book! Another quick weekend read between things, it charmed me to bits. It’s quirky, has the most interesting style, and is very clever without being demanding. So glad I got round to it.

There are some heavy subjects in here: addiction and mental health struggles, politics (Trump but not Trump), racism, a near-affair, and eco-anxiety, although it isn’t dealt with head-on. All done deftly, with a light touch. It feels a bit like stream-of-consciousness, or diary entries, which makes the book very readable.

Will note that not everyone loved this book; maybe it’s a bit too abstract for some people. See Goodreads for some unhappy customers.

Rated: 8/10.