P.46:
" 'We're going to be just fine Alice.' He kisses me on both eyelids. He used to do this sort of thing and it felt precious: he'd kiss all the vulnerable places where blood in tendons race too close to the surface, protecting them with the charm of his care; my throat, my wrist, the backs of my knees. But since I saw my mother's body, Pete's careful eyelid kisses feel morbid, like a death right. His kisses make me think of that ancient Greek tradition of placing coins on the eyes of a corpse."
Alice the protagonist and her baby daddy Pete have moved to Katoomba, NSW, Australia, from Sydney. Alice"accidentally" became pregnant from Pete, and now, nearly ready to give birth, they want a cleaner environment to start their family. But Pete is kind of an asshole, and she doesn't love him. However, she decides to let the wind blow her life around, and besides, this new skin disease, "cutis," is scaring her. She figures maybe her baby won't get sick from it, up by these Blue Mountains.
The move is not well-thought-out, though. The house they rented has no cell phone reception, there's no land line, no internet connection, and the local doctor is only accepting emergency cases. A preggo is not considered an emergency case. The nearest hospital is an hour's drive away.
P.55:
"the stories people were sharing all featured unusual skin growth or aberrant scarring. And it wasn't just affecting mouths and noses: in some of the more lurid accounts, eyelids were knitting together, ears were closing up, genitals were folded back into sealed pudenda. blurry photographs appeared, with the ambiguous lighting of ghost Hunter pictures, purporting to show the strange outgrowths of skin. One account described a man in California whose rectum had sealed over: he'd supposedly died from fecal vomiting, choking on his own s***."
Now, in NSW, People affected by "heat events" are being moved to refugee camps where there is no alcohol permitted, no medical care, and once you move in, you can't leave without being charged a "relocation compensation." And you've nowhere to go back to: your old house is boarded up and condemned.
P.97:
"I've read about the contamination of breast milk: they've found paint stripper and DDT and flame retardant in there. She could be poisoning him right now. We're all bringing our babies into harm, one way or another."
P.216:
"this time I see something drop from the tree at the end of the garden. I hold the baby tight to my chest and I walk slowly to the edge of the border. I wait a moment, but there's no sound. I peer at the soil at the foot of the tree, and then I see it: a tiny little bird, a baby bird, fallen from its nest, and another baby bird just a few feet away from it. One of them is twitching on its side, its little legs scrabbling at nothing. The other is perfectly still. And I know before I look at them closely what it is that I will see; that their eyes will be fused, the grey skin sealing them into darkness."
This book has a wild ending. There's some interesting slang going on, too, which I had to look up the meaning of. ( )

A woman gets pregnant unexpectedly, just as the world careens toward a the most horrific eco-disaster you can imagine. The writing was great, the emotional landscape was 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 book, 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. ( )