THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS

At the end of it, I certainly wouldn’t describe the book as fluffy. It wasn’t as harrowing as The Goldfinch so at least it still provided some emotional recovery, but Enid (our protagonist) has a lot of complex mental health difficulties to address. Written in first-person, the book takes us along on an anxious, emotionally detached, and emotionally avoidant ride through grief, self-hatred, and relentless paranoia. The title itself is a reference to how Enid hides her emotional vulnerability through spouting off random facts about space instead of telling somebody that she cares about them or is feeling anxious. Emily Austin has the writing skills to somehow make this a fun ride. Especially when Enid’s paranoia centres around true crime (relatable) and bald men (hilarious).

Enid’s dry delivery carries the book. It’s funny when appropriate, and keeps her anxiety contained so that even when she’s having a panic attack due to a bald neighbour, the tone never slips into the melodramatic. On most pages we have gems like the following:

“My hobbies include listening to murder stories, having casual lesbian sex, and telling my mom interesting facts about space. I am not well-equipped to discuss skiing, sailing, and whatever other depraved hobbies occupy the time of opulent middle-aged white men.“

She’s detached without becoming sardonic. I’ve struggled with narrators whose cynicism of others can become almost cruel, and they lack the self-awareness to confront their own contempt and how it contributes to feeling alienated. Enid’s difficulty with others didn’t feel hateful; she’s anxious and she struggles to understand why other people think in the way that they do. She doesn’t hate them for it, she just doesn’t know how to feel okay enough with herself to bridge the gaps. She’s also self-aware enough to know that her problems are her own and she doesn’t try to pass them off to others, though of course this is intertwined with her own self-hatred. When the self-hatred is addressed, she finds herself connecting more easily.

Anybody who has a rudimentary knowledge/awareness of autism will have picked up on the autistic traits she exhibits (a diagnosis confirmed by her therapist towards the end of the book) but what I appreciate is that she’s written with complete empathy. It never feels like we’re laughing at her, rather just coming to love her as a character and the perspective that she offers on the world. Well, that was my experience anyway.

It’s also worth mentioning that this book could possibly stick in my mind as the thing that finally prompted me to go get an autism assessment. I already have a diagnosis of ADHD (which is how I’d explained a way a lot of my suspicions about autism), but I had way too many “oh… oh” moments when reading the process of Enid’s masking behaviours and how she’d feel before/during social interactions. Books that give me some sort of personal insight in a way that other books haven’t managed always get a bump in the star ratings.

There are two particularly defining moments in Enid’s life. The first being that her father (now deceased) left her mother and built another family, leaving Enid’s mother in a severe depressive cycle (I believe it was hinted that this was Bipolar Disorder). The other being that when Enid was a teenager, there was a fire at her school in which a boy was killed, and rumours were spread that Enid was the one who started it.

Enid’s father planted the idea that she was unlovable, and left her questioning what her half-siblings had that she didn’t. Crucially, he was quick to believe the rumours about the fire too, and the combination of his response, the bullying Enid experienced at the time, and her conviction that she’s a terrible person were internalised to the extent that she really did believe she started the fire. It becomes a traumatic memory that Enid avoids throughout her life, until pushed to confront it by her therapist. This finally unlocks the mystery of the bald man phobia: the boy killed in the fire was left with no eyebrows and had to wear a wig during the open casket funeral. Bald men became a symbol of the shame that Enid felt about the fire.

Despite how many mental health topics are addressed in the book, the exploration of them feels well-rounded. Enid and her best friend Vin bonded through their similar experiences of emotionally unstable and at times, suicidal mothers. Enid can’t allow herself to have anything other than casual sex because she’s convinced that if she allows people to get close to her, they’ll see that she’s actually a terrible person. She is trying to navigate the reconnection with her half-siblings after the death of her father whilst also being hyperconscious about the impact this could have on her mother. Like, these aren’t small issues to grapple with. They’re meaty, and I admire how Austin handles them with so much precision and warmth.

Despite romance being something I’d been looking for, the romance of this book ended up being the least interesting part of the plot. There was nothing wrong with it, but there was so much for Enid to work through that the development of her relationship with Polly fell into the background at times. Their meeting was memorable at least: after finding out about Enid’s affair with her wife, Polly comes to confront Enid but ends up crying in the shower whilst Enid washes her down instead. I will say that I appreciate how Polly wasn’t written to be a saviour, more so a straight-talking encourager for Enid to work through her issues. At no point did Austin try and frame it as though Enid & Polly’s relationship was the underlying motivator for Enid’s recovery. It also wouldn’t have made sense – the highly avoidant Enid at the start of the book was in no psychological place to be rescued. Not unlike a cat, Enid needed a person who showed up consistently and took emotional intimacy at a slow pace. Polly was perfectly written for the role.

The only issue I really took with the book was its pacing. It was slow at times, and considering how all-encompassing Enid’s anxiety could be, this felt a little painstaking. Then it felt like we got a ton of forward movement and revelations in the final 30 or so pages of the book and I was left feeling like I’d been swept up in an emotional tornado.

I understand why: as a 30-year-old white woman on TikTok, I’ve been thrown into the baffling, somewhat addictive, and terrifyingly tempting world of the tradwife algorithm more than I’d care for. The TikTok overlords have no doubt detected my childfree, cat-loving, feminist lifestyle and have deemed it worthwhile to try and steer me down a different path; videos of soft-voiced women placidly steering toddlers through organic, gluten-free cookie recipes are all over my FYP. Many of us have now watched these women – all seemingly on a sliding scale of devout Mormonism – present an alluring alternative to the fast-paced world of doom-scrolling and microplastics at a time when it’s easy to feel disillusioned with it all. The world is on fire and we just want to wear loose-fitting clothing and harvest the occasional carrot – is that too much to ask? Apparently so if you also want women to have rights and children to have vaccinations. Well anyway, all that to say that it was a matter of time before a major book release addressed the topic, and Caro Claire Burke struck gold with the kind of timing that most authors dream of.

Before I get stuck in, it’s probably worth mentioning that my thoughts and feelings about the book are much more negative than the 3.75 stars may suggest. My star ratings tend to be a balancing act between enjoyability and quality. For this one, enjoyability won out – it kept me engaged and was fun to read. This is in spite of a lot of issues I had with the depth of the subject matter and the skill with which it was handled.

Let’s set the scene. A satirical psychological thriller following Natalie Mills, obsessive perfectionist and devout… something. I’m assuming Mormon (see above) but it’s never clarified beyond references to the Bible and church. We meet her at the height of a successful social media empire promoting a highly curated tradwife lifestyle. She’s poured obscene money into making her ranch house appear as authentically 1850s as possible, and this she posts alongside saccharine posts about her marriage to Caleb, her current pregnancy, and their brood of children.

All this is turned on her head when she one day wakes up to find that she appears to be in the literal 1850s. She’s no longer pregnant, but her husband and children are like uncanny versions of the ones she has in the modern day. Through a mixture of abusive behaviours from 1850s-Caleb and weirdly parental/controlling commands from her eldest daughter Mary, Natalie is confined to the ranch. From there, the chapters cycle between exploring Natalie’s life in the modern day, and her entrapment in the 1850s.

This is fun. I like the concept. It’s a little heavy-handed (what if we took someone romanticising the olden days and actually put them back in the olden days??? Bet they wouldn’t romanticise it then!!!!) but that’s okay. With increasing rejection of modern wonders like milk pasteurisation and antibiotics, heavy-handedness may just be something we need as a society right now.

The heavy-handedness isn’t contained to the concept though, and that’s probably my main issue with the book overall. I appreciate subtlety, but all through this book I feel as though I’m being beaten over the head with The Point. The Point takes many forms: the olden days aren’t fun or aspirational, devout Christians can be hypocritical, social media is fake, Natalie is a shitty person, Republican politicians are grifters, the manosphere is bad. Take your pick. I don’t disagree with any of these things but Burke’s attempts at exploring them feel half-baked and surface-level.

Natalie’s characterisation serves as both an example of Burke’s lack of subtlety, and (perhaps due to an unfortunate consequence of first-person narration) also amplifies the clumsiness in which the rest of The Points are handled.

Natalie is clearly highly intelligent. She made it into Harvard off the back of her own hard work, and managed to become a social media star despite competing against untold numbers of wannabe tradwife influencers (as shown in a memorable chapter in which she attends a social media marketing course and comes face to face with a Zoom call full of clones with the same aspirations as her).

Except for when it’s convenient for Natalie to lack the critical thinking skills that would develop her complexity as a character. Natalie is so blatantly hypocritical that I spent the majority of the book thinking that Burke was making another Point: many so-called religious devotees don’t even believe in the religion but only pretend to do so to gain an audience and monetise it. This was not the case.

Natalie seemed to genuinely believe in God and religion, but at no point during the book did she spend any time critically evaluating her own hypocrisy, or even making a coherent case to the reader as to why she held such strong values whilst clearly failing to uphold them. If Harvard hadn’t come into the story I’d question it less, but I refuse to believe that somebody who made it to Harvard either lacked such critical evaluation or even a coherent argument for their beliefs backed by evidence from the Bible and/or theologians. That’s not to say that intelligent people can’t hold contradictory beliefs. Of course they can, but they also have the brainpower to twist themselves into psychological pretzels to rationalise their contradictions. Burke asks us to just be sold on the fact that Natalie is both that devout and that intelligent. The whole book I found myself asking ‘but… why?’ whenever Natalie reaffirmed her beliefs. Sure, she was raised in them but why did she go so far off the deep end? By the time her mother and sister were deprogrammed, I can understand how Natalie’s bitterness about life choices she’d felt forced into by her religious values made her hypocrisy too painful an upheaval to confront. I just never felt convinced by her unquestioning devotion when everything about her life was otherwise so calculated.

Natalie’s unsophisticated characterisation now leads me on to why I hated the ending.

During the 1850s chapters, we get plenty of clues that all is not as it seems. Natalie finds a piece of plastic that she recognises as part of a lapel microphone. The family speak with anachronisms. Mary is unsettling anyway, but it soon becomes clear that she’s lying to Natalie about where she’s going and what she gets up to away from the ranch. As I progressed, I kept my fingers crossed that it wasn’t heading towards either:

a. it was all a dream

b. it was all in her head

Unfortunately, it turned out to be all in her head.

Turns out that following Caleb’s affair with Natalie’s producer Shannon, Shannon’s departure from the farm, and Shannon’s exposé about the abuse, lies, and terrible working conditions on the farm, Natalie has some sort of mental break. A breakdown so severe that she apparently loses all grip on reality: she renounces social media after the Internet turns on her, and decides to completely immerse herself in 1850s life by giving up all technology and contact with the outside world. We have no idea exactly how this came to be as Natalie herself has forgotten, hence waking up and being confused that she’s no longer in her former life. We do get a chapter of info-dumping from Clementine, her eldest daughter in the modern chapters. Clementine arrives to the farm, reminds Natalie that she is still in the modern world but is just pretending not to be, and rescues the children that Natalie and Caleb had post-mental break.

We’re led to believe that Caleb’s powerful politician father had so much influence over local law enforcement that none of them checked in on the children, despite Natalie’s abuse and declining mental health being common public knowledge. His father was apparently also powerful enough to shut down any discussion of the situation online so that Natalie was able to fade into obscurity. I feel sceptical about much of this, but okay.

Despite Caleb having an affair with Shannon, being ready to run away to the big city, and being deeply entrenched in the manosphere just prior to the mental break, he was willing to go along with Natalie’s delusions. Sure, the 1850s lifestyle allowed him unprecedented power in the family home which was undoubtedly enjoyable for him. Their sons from their modern life (now grown up) also lived nearby and this afforded Caleb creature comforts such as food and TV. I still struggle to understand why he went along with it all. Even the argument of it being better for his father’s political career falls flat – surely the political base his family appeals to would be forgiving of divorce for a man whose wife would largely be considered ‘low-value’ (ick – that’s a manosphere term and not one that I claim for anything other than to argue my point).

More than anything, I wish the book had leaned into the unsettling and downright scary elements of the book more. Less satire, more thriller. Natalie’s escape attempts from the 1850s ranch were downright terrifying, and Caleb’s father showed that Burke is capable of writing genuinely unsettling and threatening characters. The 1850s children were genuinely unnerving. If it weren’t for this atmosphere created throughout the book, we’d probably be looking at 2/5 stars instead. A novel expanding on the horror and even incorporating some magical realism into the mix to account for the different timelines sounds like a promising idea of what could have been. The fear is what kept me genuinely engaged and what made it an enjoyable read overall. I find unlikeable characters to be a lot of fun so I’d never want Natalie to be cleaned up and made ‘nicer’, just for her to make more sense.