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abbiejay's Reviews (318)
3.5 stars. Really enjoyed this neo-Victorian book overall, but found that it started a bit too slowly. However, if you enjoy Sarah Waters you should definitely try this!
"Was it something in the ground, seeping in from the derelict factories at our end of town, soaking up into our water and into our food? Or was it something we were breathing right now, some chemical drifting on the night air from the soft-drink plant at the edge of our neighbourhood, sugar and poison on the breeze?"
An intense feeling of dread permeates Sealed by Naomi Booth, where pollution and climate change have caused a strange new skin disease epidemic to spread across the world. Alice and Pete move to the country to try and start again - Alice could lose her job as she's been obsessively tracking the disease, but Pete thinks she's overly paranoid and just needs to get some cleaner air. The description of the landscape and the affects of the disease is really unnerving, and the tension builds throughout to an amazing final few pages. Read this book.
An intense feeling of dread permeates Sealed by Naomi Booth, where pollution and climate change have caused a strange new skin disease epidemic to spread across the world. Alice and Pete move to the country to try and start again - Alice could lose her job as she's been obsessively tracking the disease, but Pete thinks she's overly paranoid and just needs to get some cleaner air. The description of the landscape and the affects of the disease is really unnerving, and the tension builds throughout to an amazing final few pages. Read this book.
Fen is a collection of short stories connected by desire, hunger and love. Each is suffused with beautiful language and an element of haunting magic realism that appears to want to express feelings so deep they can’t be put into language satisfactorily. For me, the strongest story was Starver, where a girl starves herself and becomes an eel after the town drains the land. Some of the stories later in the collection aren’t as strong as that one, but overall this is an excellent and atmospheric collection.
