Lisa Owen’s Natural Disaster is a breezily paced book, its prose and set pieces often very funny. Yet this hilarious novel carries throughout it a whisper of cool-edged sharpness, the threat of a rain cloud about to shake its contents loose upon the park swings. It is one to be read quickly, gulped down over a few hard-fought lunch breaks. If you are this book’s target audience, you’re already a professional at eating with one hand anyway.
Our unnamed narrator has pledged to give her two sons a ‘perfect day’ for her final day of maternity leave. Her determination is forged in the deluded optimism of parenthood: the liminal space of dreams where plans proceed uninterrupted by nap maths, tantrums and shop doorways too narrow to fit a double-sized pram. A return to virtual meetings, staff crises, and follow-up emails is a full 24 hours away for our heroine. Until then, she has these final moments to both cherish her boys and resent solo parenting, with her husband away for a tech conference abroad. Similar to Virginia’s Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway setting out for her morning errands, our narrator will have to buy the treats herself.
The narrator in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is unnamed, living in the haunted ruins of her mansion’s former occupant. Readers can be well into the classic before noticing the main character has no label other than that of the new wife, such is the length of the shadow cast by her predecessor. In Natural Disaster, it too is easy not to realise the heroine is absent her own moniker until deep into its pages – she is simply ‘mama’. A title shrieked in delight, dragged out in whine, cooed in cheekiness, or whimpered in anguish. A word our narrator wants to hear forever, and one she simply cannot listen to again right now.
Owens masters the tugging of conflicting emotions and deluded reasoning that is a hallmark of early motherhood. Shealso captures how one incident can descend into a series of events so chaotic, the only natural response is laughter. A childfree reader may struggle to suspend disbelief at how a mother could end up in emergency at the children’s hospital dressed in a frog onesie with nothing but croissant crumbs to feed herself and her one-year-old. A parent will read it as a chilling cautionary tale. If Sophie the Giraffe, wake windows, and the meaning of the acronym BLW mean something to you, chances are this book will do too.