A woman gets pregnant unexpectedly, just as the world careens toward a the most horrific eco-disaster you can imagine. The writing is great, the emotional landscape is truthful, and I’m going to read everything Naomi Booth writes from now on.
My fondest delight, when it came to my reading experience with this novel, was the birth scene. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say there is a birth scene, since the whole book before then is the story of a ponderously pregnant woman searching for a safe place to give birth, while simultaneously coping with some seriously creepy eco-disaster action.
This birth scene, when it comes, is magnificently done. Ok, it ignores the way that every contraction, in actual birth, is a peak experience of sorts…but even without that explicit kind of veracity, the scene captures the deep-heart horrific truth about birth. It captures what it’s like to have your body taken over by a primal force over which you have no control. No matter how great a woman’s individual birth experience might be (or how great she happens to remember it being, later, when it’s over), every laboring woman comes to understand at some point (unless she is utterly etherized), that her body is no longer hers…and that realization can be momentarily disorienting, or completely terrifying, depending on how you feel in general about experiencing a total loss of control of your body. Naomi Booth nails it.
So at the heart of this eco-horror-fiction Naomi Booth has slyly written the best metaphor for birth-terror that I’ve ever read.
Yeah!
Go, Naomi Booth!
I’m a fan.
on goodreads you can read all my reviews including those I don’t post here.