I love a debut novel that focuses on one intense day like this.
Interspersed with some interesting flashbacks, we are basically in the head of Annie, who is heavily pregnant, panic buying a crib in Ikea. Her husband’s acting career and her playwright potential fizzled out, they are trying to live their best Portland lives when disaster, literally, hits.
A stunningly relatable novel for millennials, this is a story about how the ambiguous ties of motherhood form, how loyalty is built and disrupted, how relationships and careers sag under the pressure of the everyday, and how communities react to ecological disaster and collapse.
As Annie crawls out from under the rubble in Ikea, she has to face a world that had rapidly changed. The novel plots her progress over one day as she tries to get home.
Throughout that journey she sees good and evil, confronts herself, and we start to see a growing sense of what home and community are really made of. Moments and experiences are tightly sketched.
A very cinematic book due to its subject matter, it is not at all twee or reductive. A novel that looks at ecological issues and the collapse of society in a very realistic, even lighthearted way.
Relatable and captivating.
One word: stirring.
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