Scan barcode
A review by thisotherbookaccount
The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
4.0
Follow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/thisotherbookaccount
Humans are bags of water and blood. Children are that too, but smaller and even easier to break. They could die from a peanut allergy you don’t know about, walk into a van while you aren’t looking, choke on a pancake during breakfast, get mauled by a neighbour’s dog or, if you’re in the US, shot in the classroom.
Children are not good for my anxiety, so I can imagine what the family in this book has to go through after the elder daughter collapses and stops breathing.
This is a slice-of-life look at how a family makes sense of a shocking event, even if it doesn’t always have answers. We never find out why Miriam collapses and stops breathing. The family, then, has to live with the fear of the daughter dying for real next time, if the condition is genetic in nature, if the other daughter will eventually suffer the same fate — all while maintaining (or trying to) a sense of normalcy around the house. But is ‘normalcy’ normal? What tragedies are other families carrying that we don’t know about? I am not a parent, but Moss’ writing draws out the worst nightmare of every parent and how an event like that can drive a wedge straight through a family and an otherwise happy marriage.
Moss also made an interesting choice of telling the story from the perspective of a stay-at-home father. Big chunks of this book are about the father preparing breakfast, checking in on the daughter, doing the laundry, picking the daughter up from school, bringing the other daughter for her follow up — you get the idea. It’s domestic life brought to life on the page in wonderful, nuanced details.
My only complaint is that there are chapters in this book about the rebuilding of a bombed cathedral, which runs parallel to the main narrative. I see what Moss is trying to do. She’s trying to compare the rebuilding of a cathedral with the rebuilding of a family. However, once you figure out what she’s trying to do, those chapters become really boring articles from the latest issue of Architecture Digest.
This book is a little too long, but I am happy to have discovered a new author whose works I cannot wait to dive into.
Humans are bags of water and blood. Children are that too, but smaller and even easier to break. They could die from a peanut allergy you don’t know about, walk into a van while you aren’t looking, choke on a pancake during breakfast, get mauled by a neighbour’s dog or, if you’re in the US, shot in the classroom.
Children are not good for my anxiety, so I can imagine what the family in this book has to go through after the elder daughter collapses and stops breathing.
This is a slice-of-life look at how a family makes sense of a shocking event, even if it doesn’t always have answers. We never find out why Miriam collapses and stops breathing. The family, then, has to live with the fear of the daughter dying for real next time, if the condition is genetic in nature, if the other daughter will eventually suffer the same fate — all while maintaining (or trying to) a sense of normalcy around the house. But is ‘normalcy’ normal? What tragedies are other families carrying that we don’t know about? I am not a parent, but Moss’ writing draws out the worst nightmare of every parent and how an event like that can drive a wedge straight through a family and an otherwise happy marriage.
Moss also made an interesting choice of telling the story from the perspective of a stay-at-home father. Big chunks of this book are about the father preparing breakfast, checking in on the daughter, doing the laundry, picking the daughter up from school, bringing the other daughter for her follow up — you get the idea. It’s domestic life brought to life on the page in wonderful, nuanced details.
My only complaint is that there are chapters in this book about the rebuilding of a bombed cathedral, which runs parallel to the main narrative. I see what Moss is trying to do. She’s trying to compare the rebuilding of a cathedral with the rebuilding of a family. However, once you figure out what she’s trying to do, those chapters become really boring articles from the latest issue of Architecture Digest.
This book is a little too long, but I am happy to have discovered a new author whose works I cannot wait to dive into.