This is the third book I read for the BookTube Prize‘s Quarterfinals. It’s a fairly simple story, that of a brother and sister who have been sheltered and kept largely separate from the world around them by their mother. They grow most of what they need, and scrounge enough money to pay bills by picking up odd jobs and selling leftover produce. But when their mother dies, the siblings are left to figure out not only how to navigate a world they never really had to be part of (the sister can’t even read because she never finished school), but also how to come to terms with some startling discoveries they make about their mother’s life and the secrets she kept from both of them.
Life is, unsurprisingly, turned upside down. The small cottage they have been living in is suddenly rendered unaffordable, along with their bills and sustenance. On top of this, cracks start to show in their relationship. Julius is in a relationship with a woman that he has kept secret from his family, and the sudden strains of caring for a sickly sister who isn’t able to support herself are not what he wants to be dealing with. He seems to be looking for a way to stretch the chord between him and his sister, and to be able to start building a life for himself that’s a bit more conventional. His sister, meanwhile, is actually more resilient than he gives her credit for. Despite having grown up with a heart condition that kept her home from school and stopped her being able to work, she does find a perfect part-time job. It’s not enough to pay off what they owe, but it’s hers and it’s the first time she’s had a job outside of working the land.
This is a hard book to review. For one thing I don’t want to give away any of the secrets that stitch this story together, but it’s hard to talk about without doing so. And on top of that, it’s a really dark and dirty book. Both literally and figuratively. Things go from not that great to bad to much, much worse for the siblings as they struggle to find a place to land. What propels the book along is the slow revelation of one secret after another. Each illuminates another part of their lives, and some actually begin to create chinks of light in a dark tunnel.
It’s not an easy read. At all. It’s also not very enjoyable. It’s well written, and there are some interesting themes that are explored: What information does a parent owe her grown children about her life? Is it possible to start over in middle age? What defines poverty? When can accepting help be anything other than charity? What do siblings owe one another?
While I do think it’s an okay book, I also found it a bit too extreme in its portrayals. I think this was intentional to create the tone and set up the scene for later events. But I don’t know if it had to be quite as grim as it was. I also found some of the relationships a bit awkward and at times unbelievable. Even the relationship between the siblings seemed strangely distant, despite the close bond that you would expect from a family that was so cut off. They were removed from society, and yet they weren’t. It was an oddly precarious balance between this feeling Fuller seemed to want to evoke of a family that was off the grid… except they weren’t. They had electricity (when they could afford it), they had friends in the village, one child went to school and had part-time work and they even had a doctor they visited. So that extreme of a cut off, insular family doesn’t exist here. And yet, they don’t actually participate in the community either. They know people, but they also don’t. They are not actually part of anything happening around them, and don’t seem to know how to navigate interpersonal relationships. It’s a really odd not-quite-this and not-quite-that plot. I had trouble orienting myself because some chapters felt like a really out of time setting, and then the next was one of them getting a ride from someone in the village to a modern town. It was jarring the juxtaposition of the two tones and settings, and I felt like I couldn’t really get my bearings.
On top of that it was just not a pleasant read. I don’t need my books to be pleasant. I think there’s a lot of value in reading about the unpleasant parts of life, because that’s how we learn to be empathetic. It’s how we learn the realities of the world around us and how we explore our own privilege. But this book was just unnecessarily grim, and not really believably so. It didn’t feel like it needed to be so ugly, and didn’t have anything redeeming in it. The characters were frustrating and remote, the plot was slow and not very satisfying, the relationships were thin and even the ending didn’t really pull it together. I had a hard time with this one. I wanted to see why it got so much buzz, and I wanted the unpleasantness to be rendered necessary and poignant, but they just weren’t for me. I won’t be reading it again, and it ended up in 6th place in my rankings, unfortunately. That said, it did make it through to the next round, so clearly I’m in the minority in my opinion. So if you’ve read Fuller’s other books and enjoyed them, or if the premise of this book appeals to you, definitely give it a try. I suspect this was just a case of it not being the right book for this particular reader right now!
From bestselling author Claire Fuller comes a portrait of life on the fringes of society, a heart-stopping novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival.
What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant?
What would you do to get it back?
Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At fifty-one years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty.
But when Dot dies suddenly, threats start raining down. Jeanie and Julius would do anything to preserve their small sanctuary against the perils of the outside world, even as their mother’s secrets begin to unravel, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake. – Goodreads
Book Title: Unsettled Ground
Author: Claire Fuller
Series: No
Edition: Paperback/Audiobook
Published By: Anansi International
Released: January 28, 2021
Genre: Fiction, Family, Poverty
Pages: 304
Date Read: April 21-24, 2022
Rating: 4.5/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.83/5 (8,979 ratings)