Harare Review of Books

376 pages.

First published on May 7, 2022.

Genre: Fiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Parthian Books for this eARC.

Helen is a prepper, and the mother of Jack, a five-year-old. She lives on a farm in the shadow of a nuclear power plant in Wales. Nearby live her family—her sister, Jennifer, with her husband, and her parents. Her mother is dying of cancer.

Helen’s fixation is the power plant, and the possibility of an accident there. She has tried to raise Jack to be independent and self-sufficient, to be able to cope if the worst happens. As part of a test of his readiness, she decides to go away on a trip to Chernobyl, leaving him in Jennifer’s charge.

The first half of the book was very slow going for me, as I tried to make sense of the story. The author does not make this easy, with everything fragmentary, and with the pacing slow. It makes a little sense if you see it as the influence of Helen, the main protagonist, who was to me a very unlikeable and unreliable character.

The second half of the book picked up, with some interesting (if somewhat bewildering, at times) action. The best part of the book was really when Helen finally came into her own, somewhat redeeming herself. I was, however, left without a real sense of whether to sympathise with her, to believe she was right, or whether to see her mental state as the unfortunate by-product of her circumstances. She was not at all relatable to me, and I never found it in me to care about what happened to her.

Her son, the other focal character, was a very strange boy, believably so. The story should have revolved around him, but he was too abstract a figure in the end. And there was no resolution to Jennifer’s arc, even though served as Helen’s oppositional figure.

All in all, a rather unsatisfying read. I found myself mostly just rushing to finish the book, only really engaging briefly near the end.

Rated: 5/10.