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A review by serendipitysbooks
The Things That Keep Us Here by Carla Buckley
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
The Things that Keep Us Here looks at how one American family (Ann, Peter and their two daughters) is affected by a worldwide pandemic. Sounds timely. Except this book. was published in 2010. I imagine reading it in 2021 is a very different experience compared to reading it when it was a new release.
What interested me was comparing my experiences and knowledge of 2020 with the pandemic imagined in this book. Some things were eerily familiar - the slow realisation that this virus was actually going to have a serious impact, the boredom of kids confined to home and cutoff from friends, the battles in supermarkets for the last of the bottled water and toilet paper, and the frustrations when your neighbours don’t follow sensible precautions. Thankfully the similarities ended at this level and we didn’t see wholesale failure of infrastructure like power, water and communications, face the inability to access food or witness the breakdown of law and order. So we never had to face the really hard question of exactly what we would do to protect our family? Would we take in our friend’s baby when his parents were dying and he could well have the highly infectious disease? Could we flee into the wilderness and survive there?
I liked the news reports and science papers that interspersed the narrative. They added to the sense of immediacy and realism. On the negative side, not all the plot elements were successfully integrated or resolved. In particular a tragedy that happened to the family in the past is alluded to several times and then casually revealed in the epilogue, almost as an afterthought.
For me this one fell into the frustrating middle category of “didn’t love it; didn’t hate it”.
What interested me was comparing my experiences and knowledge of 2020 with the pandemic imagined in this book. Some things were eerily familiar - the slow realisation that this virus was actually going to have a serious impact, the boredom of kids confined to home and cutoff from friends, the battles in supermarkets for the last of the bottled water and toilet paper, and the frustrations when your neighbours don’t follow sensible precautions. Thankfully the similarities ended at this level and we didn’t see wholesale failure of infrastructure like power, water and communications, face the inability to access food or witness the breakdown of law and order. So we never had to face the really hard question of exactly what we would do to protect our family? Would we take in our friend’s baby when his parents were dying and he could well have the highly infectious disease? Could we flee into the wilderness and survive there?
I liked the news reports and science papers that interspersed the narrative. They added to the sense of immediacy and realism. On the negative side, not all the plot elements were successfully integrated or resolved. In particular a tragedy that happened to the family in the past is alluded to several times and then casually revealed in the epilogue, almost as an afterthought.
For me this one fell into the frustrating middle category of “didn’t love it; didn’t hate it”.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content
Moderate: Child death, Gun violence, and Grief