Why You'll Love This
Lizzie Prain has a body to dispose of, a very good cookbook, and an unsettling amount of practicality about the whole situation.
- Great if you want: dark domestic comedy with a deeply unsettling edge
- The experience: queasy, deadpan, and oddly hypnotic — not easy to shake
- The writing: Young sustains a chillingly mundane tone that makes the grotesque feel banal
- Skip if: the premise's literal follow-through sounds like too much
About This Book
Something has gone terribly wrong at the Prain cottage — and Lizzie, a quiet, meticulous housewife with a talent for cooking and a fondness for her garden, is going to handle it the way she handles most things: methodically, practically, one careful step at a time. After decades of small erosions inside a difficult marriage, she has finally done the unthinkable, and now she must move forward. What follows is a study in the strange, dark space between freedom and consequence — a story about what it means to survive a life you didn't choose, and what you're willing to do to claim a new one.
Natalie Young writes with an unnerving calm that mirrors her protagonist perfectly. The prose is precise, almost domestic in its quietness, which makes its darker turns land with considerable force. Young structures the novel like a recipe — deliberate, sequential, oddly ritualistic — and that formal tension is exactly what gives the book its unsettling power. Readers who appreciate psychological fiction that stays close to one woman's interior, who find the mundane made strange more disturbing than outright horror, will find this novel difficult to put down and hard to shake.