Sarah MossKirja-arvosteluja

An abusive husband/father takes his family along with a college class of archaeology students on a summer reenactment trip, during which they will all live as closely to the way the ancient peoples of northern Britain lived. The professor leading the class slowly gets sucked into the father’s obsession with recreating a human sacrifice ritual, and the narrator – a teen girl and the daughter of the family man – is at the heart of the reenactment.
This one’s short but also sort of a slow burn. The tension is built up really nicely, and although I’m not sure I’d really call this a full-on horror novel, it’s definitely got a good creep factor to it.

Summerwater tells the story of a group of families spending their holidays in a cabin park by a Scottish loch.
Each chapter is written from the point of view of one individual from each cabin, except for one (there is a big reason for that).

There is almost no interaction between these people outside their cabins and the holidays are seemingly ruined by the constant rain. The gloomy mood is echoed by the characters who reflect on their lives in a stream-of-consciousness style, often with a dark sense of humour or very intimate, lyrical observations.
Each chapter gives us a piece of the puzzle before the main event takes place.
Some chapters are interludes about the natural world. These were beautiful.

“The woods expand, settle down for the night, offer a little more shelter to those that need it. Trees sleep, more or less. Maybe some nights they dream and wake, check the darkness, sleep again till dawn.”

Along the way, we catch little details, hints at Brexit, the climate crisis, the future full of uncertainty.

Summerwater reflects the spirit of times similar to the way Ali Smith does it in her Seasonal series. Obviously, their style is very different, but I love them both for their ability to gently move our focus from the big things we can't control to the compassion and love for those perceived as "the other" that we most certainly can.

This book throws you a curve, at least if you don't first read some of the nicely done reviews already on here. It begins with a scene of human sacrifice in Iron Age Britain, cuts to a group of students on an archaeology course trying (not too hard, mind) to re-enact Iron Age life whilst camping outdoors near the woods in northern England, and is titled "Ghost Wall", so, I was expecting some magical realism, some supernaturalism, in line with reading this book solely on someone's recommendation who said it was "spooky".

No angry two millennium old ghosts who were victimized by human sacrifice here, though. Instead, the twin horrors of contemporary working class nativism and domestic abuse. The students and their professor have teamed up with a local bus driver, Bill, who is a self-taught ancient history buff, and who brings along his teenage daughter. He likes old history because he's wedded his identity to a romanticized vision of an original British people (white, non-Catholic, natch) from whom he descends, walking the same ground they did. There's an awkward scene near the beginning of the book where his romantic view clashes with the professor's academic one:

The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said, they wouldn't have bothered with that, would they, if the British hadn't put the wind up them. Well, said the Prof, they weren't exactly British, as I said before, they wouldn't have seen themselves that way, as far as we can tell their identities were tribal. Celts, we tend to call them these days, though they wouldn't have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the west. Dad didn't like this interpretation... He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night. What about Boadicea, Dad said, she routed them an' all, didn't she. Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems to be a more accurate rendition. For a while, yes, but she led the Iceni in the south, there's not much evidence that the people round here caused the Romans any major alarm, the Wall was much more of a symbol than a military necessity.

Naturally, the logical reasoning of the educated middle class worldview has little effect on the racialized and idealized worldview held by our white working class character, who would upend his already formed core identity and understanding of his place in the world if he accepted that his views were, factually, wrong. People don't generally care to do such a thing, of course, working class or not; psychological studies show that we rather tend to harden our pre-existing beliefs when presented evidence that they're wrong.

This reads, then, like a criticism of the people who voted for Brexit or Donald Trump, holding onto uneducated, incorrect ideas on race, tribe, and the like. We're a long way from events in the Iron Age. But then the story moves on to focus more on the domestic abuse our bus driver inflicts on his wife and daughter, an issue that as Moss nicely demonstrates lacks a class angle. The professor and one of his male students seem all too comfortable with Bill's obvious misogyny, building up to the end of the story where they literally join him in inflicting physical abuse on his daughter, knives and stones included in a miserable reenactment of the literal human sacrifice the story begins with.

Though not about what I thought it'd be about, it does build some spookiness, as you still know it's leading up to something... not good. It's well-written, fairly interesting, and a quick read, as well, though the ending is a bit undercooked, I'd say.

This is a very well written book with many characters somewhat difficult to differentiate. They are on a vacation in Scotland where the weather is awful. They are staying in an old rental community with much history, but Moss foreshadows the bleak ending that occurs. It seems as if she is predicting the end of the world either due to climate change and/or a plague so it is now easy to believe. Some of her characters are almost cartoons, but her on the spot writing saved the book.½

The writing and content of this book were so precise and filled with meaning. This is about a lockdown due to a virus and the reactions of a variety of people. Fortunately, every one of them is very aware of many of their thoughts--past, present, and future. Many pertained to me, and I presume to most readers, and they are presented very well. I did not know the area of England described, nor many of the dialectical words used, and I still very much wanted to see what would happen. Maybe this book will help me to look at life from many perspectives.

Haunting. (No pun intended.)

17 year old Sylvie's father is obsessed with ancient British history. With little formal education (he is a bus driver) but through independent reading and research, he has made himself somewhat of an expert in early Iron Age life. When the novel opens he has brought Sylvie and her mother to an encampment with a group of grad students and their professor in experimental anthropology to live two weeks as the Iron Age people lived, as hunter-gatherers.

Sylvie's father is also, we learn, not only obsessive, but also abusive, and soon he is carrying things too far. The grad students notice bruises on Sylvie, and things take an extreme turn when her father and the professor begin planning a human sacrifice ceremony.

This is another book in which the illogicalities and implausibilities disturbed my reading pleasure. How could Sylvie's father convince an established college professor to perform a human sacrifice ceremony, even a "pretend" one, although it is not quite so clear that it wouldn't end up with someone being harmed. It is clearly noted that the professor would not allow the female grad student to be the subject because of possible repercussions, but why would he allow the subject to be a minor child, and allow the full participation of his other grad students? Maybe all men are supposed to be awful? Or was the author trying to present this as a kind of Lord of the Flies situation, a descent into savagery. If so, the theme is woefully undeveloped.

And the novel ended abruptly, with protective services taking Sylvie away. I couldn't help but wonder what was going to happen to her--was she being removed from her family permanently?

This had an interesting concept, and I enjoyed learning about the gathering of various food stuffs and survival techniques. Too bad it wasn't encapsulated in a better story.

2 stars

Skillfully written but not particularly enjoyable. Linked stories depict sad and not terribly interesting people on "holiday" at a rain-soaked Scottish bungalow community. The marriages are bad, the country's bad, America's really bad. And maybe there's murderous xenophobia afoot? 3 stars....

Expect to learn much more about the author than the country of Iceland, despite her evocative descriptions of the landscape. Difficult for me to get past her dislike of dogs.

Loose story told from multiple viewpoints of people living in holiday cottages around a loch. Moss really depicts the people very well (although a couple of times I did have to remind myself who was who, especially whose child was whose). No spoilers, but I wasn't so enamored by the ending, but can see others disagreeing, so I'm not down on it.

4 stars because of the beautiful narration of the audio version. I don't imagine I would have liked as much just reading it, but hearing the monologues in the lovely accent was captivating. I couldn't stop listening. There isn't much of a plot and I loved it.

As compelling as Summerwater, maybe a perfection of this sparse circular form. I haven't read her earlier work but I'm interested now. Actually a very good way to show the intense dread and persistent mundanity of lockdown.

What a tour de force!
Summer-water describes a summer holiday in Scotland, spent in tiny damp cottages overfilled with damp families. Depressed mothers, absent fathers, grumpy teenagers, crying babies, and a malevolent girl all cower in their cottages in the rain, the everlasting rain.
We’ve all had holidays like this, where the plan seems sound until you get somewhere and it is all quite gruesome and wet and everyone hates each other and wishes for a return to comfortable beds and modern conveniences, not least the poor mothers who somehow end up doing all the cooking and cleaning anyway. I still regret not helping my mother more on our camping “holidays”.
Sarah Moss manages to enclose the reader in holiday claustrophobia in such a poetic way that you don’t really notice that you are feeling a distinct unease, a sense of foreboding, a wish for something to break, somehow, because you know something bad is going to happen.
Fantastic. It’s a short book, which is probably good because near the end the tension is almost unbearable. Moss gets the inner monologues of her characters perfectly, from the teenagers contemplating the bleakness of their future existence to the wife trying to remain interested in a mutual orgasm project. I found myself nodding in agreement with all the characters’ life stages.
Mind you, it is a sticky novella- I imagine the images will stay in my mind like the streams of mud all of the characters have to plunge through. Not to be read on a rainy vacation.

Wow.
Still gasping at the end of this very powerful book.
Sylvie is the terrified daughter of a brutal man who lives in an Iron Age past, or at least attempts to. She, her dad and mum, and several students join a professor for a reenactment course that quickly devolves into a series of unkindnesses that escalate into actual abuse.
This has a feeling of Lord of the Flies, as the students and the professor get caught up in the tales of the bog people, seek more and more to reenact their lives. The students do escape now and again for real food and beer and other sustaining elements, which leaves Sylvie and her mother at risk for even more attacks by her father.
By the end of the book things are spiralling out of reality, and as the men construct their ghost wall, Sylvie knows the fate that waits for her and is incapable of stopping it.
Breathtaking in the way she creates mood - I can feel the sun on my face even now, the pain in my feet from walking barefoot on rocks, the cool rushing of the creek water- Sarah Moss plants us into an increasingly confined environment and never lets us go until the end.
Extremely powerful, disturbing, and yet believable. So well done. I’d like to read more of Moss’ work but I must confess I am a bit afraid to. This is a high residue book- it will leave tracers in my mind for some time.

Alfred Moberly, an aesthete artist, married Elizabeth Sanderson, a religious zealot who abhors any kind of pleasure or beauty. There was no indication of her opinion of the opulent rooms he designed for clients. Elizabeth's abuse of her daughter Ally, started at birth. Surprisingly, Ally, and a second daughter, May, survived. This was not a mere Puritanical upbringing but sheer cruelty. It was difficult to decide if Alfred was too busy with his art and meeting with wealthy clients to intervene or if he just closed his eyes to what was happening.

Ally grew up determined to train as a doctor, in part inspired by her mother's work at a home for poor women but also in an attempt to attain Elizabeth's approval. Moss gives a lot of attention to the startling state of the all-male medical establishment at the time including the barbaric Contagious Diseases Act introduced in 1864 as an attempt to protect men from sexually transmitted disease by arresting any woman out alone, no matter how innocent, and enforcing an invasive examination.

In the first half of the book there was little continuity in the story that jumped from one abusive event to another. I was tempted to abandon it and only continued because I have enjoyed other books by Moss. The second half improved but by then Ally is having panic attacks that are diagnosed as hysteria and treated with painful "blistering" with candles as well as physical work such as scrubbing floors. The latter part dealt with Ally's training as a doctor, describing the prejudice she experienced.

Although Moss's writing can be beautiful and her research is impeccable, I cannot say I enjoyed this depressing book.

Cntent warning for non-sexual child abuse/domestic violence as being the main theme of the book. There's only one scene explicitly depicting it, but it's enough. The way the tenseness and fear infects the rest of the book is very real. The feeling of being constantly on edge, constantly needing to please, knowing it's usually not enough anyway. It's intense and powerful.

The book is the exact right length, staying constantly taut. The ending is maybe a little pat and I can understand it being frustrating but somehow it didn't bother me.

Did not finish. Very unpleasant read, just sounds like the ramblings of an insensitive boomer to be honest, and theres already too much of that around. I just can’t tell if the main character is actually supposed to be unpleasant and selfish and be unlikeable, or if the author is trying to “expose” some kind of misplaced “truth”…

Set in November 2020 when most of the world was on lockdown on account of the global pandemic, Sarah Moss’s The Fell revolves around Kate, who furloughed from her job , is self-isolating at home with her son Matt, due to exposure to COVID -19 . Feeling restless and stir crazy, one evening she decides to go for a walk along the hills close to home, falls and is seriously injured . Not knowing what has happened to his mother Matt correctly assumes that his mother went for a walk and is initially annoyed that she broke the law by venturing out of the house while supposed to be in quarantine . However, as the night progresses and after it is confirmed that Alice,their next door neighbor, saw her walking towards the moors , the search for Kate develops into a mountain rescue operation amidst worsening weather conditions.

The story is told through a stream of consciousness narrative from the perspectives of four people- Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate’s thoughts flit between her financial worries compounded by fear of being fined on account of her breaking quarantine laws , her son Matt and the life choices she is made to reflect upon through a dazed and delirious conversation with a raven she meets on her expedition. Matt concerned for Kate’s physical and emotional well-being is made to mull over his own behaviors and feelings, realizing how much is at stake for him for his mother to return home safe and sound. On one hand we see him as a difficult self absorbed teenager while on the the other we see the mature way in which tries to remain hopeful busying himself with household chores while responsibly interacting with his next door neighbor Alice keeping with quarantine regulations . Alice is an elderly widow and cancer survivor struggling to adjust to the isolation brought on by the pandemic and recent widowhood , but tries to remain hopeful and keep up Matt’s spirits while making plans to lead a fuller life once the pandemic ends. Rob, the mountain rescue volunteer whose team along is tasked with finding Kate, ponders over whether Kate’s action were deliberate and whether she was driven to drastic behavior motivated by personal reasons while also questioning his own motivations for volunteering for such risky endeavors in his downtime often at the cost of his personal relationships.

The author takes us on an insightful exploration into the mind and thoughts of people in the midst of the global pandemic. This short novel delves deep into the emotional toll of forced isolation and uncertainty on the human psyche and the need for human interaction and contact in trying times. The author does not hesitate to touch upon how lives and livelihoods are affected when regulations set in place for the greater good out of consideration for the health and well being of others can test individuals' power of endurance and push them to their limits. Tense and fast paced, reflective and thought provoking, The Fell is an almost too relatable depiction of how the pandemic has changed the way we live, think and behave. Once I adjusted to the stream-of-consciousness narrative, I was completely reeled into this relatively short but immersive novel. Though this is not a lengthy novel (more a novella, to be precise), it is very deep and absorbing . I took time to pause and take a breather when it felt too heavy or just got too real. This was my first Sarah Moss novel and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the eARC in return for an honest review.

Fast becoming one of my favourite authors. I loved this interleaving story of families in a run-down Scottish holiday park during a single day of unceasing rain. It's so beautifully written, so precise, and unexpectedly full of dry humour.

This short book focuses on a day in the lives of a few residents in a small English Lake District village during COVID lockdown. Kate is a laid-off waitress, divorced, a bit New Age-y, a vegan and a holistic health fanatic, the kind of person who uses bamboo toothbrushes to save the earth and believes that crystals have healing properties. Now she can't enjoy her daily walk to the fells without facing a large fine for breaking quarantine, and the confinement plus all of her personal issues depress her. She lives with her teenaged son, Matt, who seems to be managing the situation much better. The story kicks off when Matt realizes that his mom is not sleeping or out in the garden; he suspects she has gone for a walk and hopes she makes it home before she gets caught. But as dark falls, he becomes more and more concerned.

Kate and Matt are two of the alternating narrators. A third is their neighbor, Alice, a recent widow who has also just completed treatment for cancer. She happened to see Kate walking past her house that afternoon. When Matt knocks on her door, Alice convinces him to call the police and report his mom as missing. Did something happen to her up on the fell? We're introduced to one more narrator, Rob, a search party volunteer assigned to lead the ground hunt for Kate.

Through her narrators, Moss manages to convey the claustrophobia and fear that most of us experienced at some time during the COVID outbreak. Her style might be off-putting to some: each narrator's sections are written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness with very long sentences. That, I think, is because she wants us not just to her their stories but to know how their minds are working and how they are feeling as the hours move along. If this was a 500-page book, it might be excessive and annoying, but it's quite short, just a little over 200 pages. Overall, a fast, well crafted read, if you're ready to dive back into COVID for a time.

This book was...fine. Intriguing subject matter, but it lacked punch.

Mesmerizing and tense, well-crafted. I'll say it again, I love a story that's only as long as it needs to be. Fantastic for a rainy night read.

Interesting story, but the cruelty to one character honestly took me out of the book; it seemed above and beyond what was necessary to tell the story.

This book wasn't at all what I expected, and I still believe that the blurb on back is intentionally misleading when it comes right down to it. As such, I'm probably less inclined to be generous in a review, but the fact remains that while I can admire what the author does here, this book wasn't for me. It's fine as a short piece of literary fiction with a simple story at its heart, but it's neither ghostly nor particularly haunting or striking, lovely as some of the language is. I doubt I'll try another work by the author, and the misleading nature of the blurb may well lead me to think more carefully about picking up books from this imprint in the future.