The Fell is a short novel that did very well at encapsulating the atmosphere and tensions during the depths of lockdown in the pandemic. The writing, each character written with a distinctive voice and almost in a stream of consciousness, worked well for the book - the feeling of isolation, being alone with your own thoughts. It's beautifully written and I felt with a lot of empathy. I felt sympathetic towards all the characters, in different ways, though some make bad decisions and certainly all are flawed. The one point of critique I have is that the ending was a bit abrupt, though I understand why Sarah Moss ended it there because it was a lovely last sentence.

The prose is beautiful but the meandering writing style was monotonous at times and I found myself wishing it would speed up. The concept of the early days of the pandemic is current yet unsettling. Could I really have forgotten how scary it was at first now that things are starting to 'normalize'? If someone had read this 10 years ago, it would seem like science fiction. Instead, it's our recent history and our reality.

This is my favorite by this author so far, featuring four people during the pandemic, trying to deal with the isolation. The style feels like if Lucy Ellmann (Ducks, Newburyport) wrote Reservoir 13 (Jon McGregor.)

British author Sarah Moss has written another quiet yet deeply moving short novel that takes place during the pandemic over the course of about twenty-four hours. In “The Fell,” Kate is waiting out a two-week COVID-19 quarantine along with the rest of her village in the Peak District of England. A bit of geographical knowledge is useful—the Peak District includes the National Park, an elevated area of moors and craggy valleys and gorges. “Fell” is not a common term in the United States (certainly not in Chicago), referring to that rocky, barren landscape, save sheep and day hikers. Kate grew up in the area and knows the old stone paths well, “The main trail swings north: Swine’s Back, Edale Rocks, Kinder Low, the edge route to the Downfall and then the great northern march over Alport, Black Ashop Moor and Bleaklow, on, if you like, over Bare Holme Moss, Black Hill, Saddleworth, along England’s backbone into Yorkshire, Cumbria, the Borders.” Those whose wanderlust has been curbed by the pandemic may find themselves in a paroxysm of longing just reading that sentence.

For Kate, the physical need to climb those hills is overwhelming, she needs the sense of peace they provide. No wonder, they provide a feeling like this: “Pym’s Chair, the Woolpacks. They’re easy to climb, mostly, from behind, and then you can sit on the edge with your feet dangling over open air, sip tea from your flask and watch the weather pass until you feel almost airborne, part of the sky.” So she leaves her home one evening, even though there’s a fine for leaving the house, even though she knows the dangers of hiking at night, because she’s going crazy in the house. This is in the early days of the pandemic, when we knew very little.

These early Pandemic Novels provide the joy of familiarity, the dark humor of remembering when we worried if the mail carried the virus, or left packages to rest outside for several days before bringing them in. Back when we were spraying our groceries with disinfectant and zealously wiping down countertops. Back when some of us were going stir-crazy from being in the house all day, so it’s easy to relate to Kate’s desire to walk outside, despite the fact that night is falling. Poor Kate takes a trip and spends a horrendous and painful night imagining she’ll die alone. Meanwhile, parts of the narrative are provided by Kate’s teenage son, an elderly neighbor, and the search-and-rescue guy who goes out to help find Kate. Mainly, we read their thoughts, and here Moss shines in creating the stream of consciousness of fully-realized, distinct characters. She easily conveys the isolation of the pandemic, that sad-and-lonely feeling we all had, but also a hopeful, very British, can-do attitude many adapted to get through it.

Moss has previously dug deep into ancient British history, both obliquely and overtly, in recent books like “Summerwater” and “Ghost Wall.” In those novels, landscape and history converge to influence the contemporary British person. While “The Fell” doesn’t specifically draw a dotted line from the early historical person to the contemporary Briton, Moss always places her characters within the continuation of their ancestors. The area that Kate is navigating is, in fact, the path of an old Roman road. Kate feels a closer affinity to the miners around whom her village grew. “She does think about them sometimes, the original inhabitants, the stirring of porridge and pottage where she now fries tofu and grills peppers but also stirs bean soup of the sort they’d surely have eaten with probably the same vegetables from the same garden as those Victorian miners, grown in earth that probably still holds the nutrients of their nightsoil, the afterlives of their bodies present in her and Matt, and aren’t we all just rearrangements of the same atoms, which could maybe somehow be a comforting thought but isn’t, not particularly.”

What does comfort Kate, as she lies in the dark on the fell, wondering if she’ll survive the night? Snippets of hymns, an imagined conversation with a raven, and, like many of us, plunging through the challenges she’s faced and overcome, until the pandemic feels like just another obstacle in an event-filled life. (Kelly Roark)

“The Fell”
By Sarah Moss
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 193 pages

Sarah Moss is a recent discovery for me, though I will never know why i hadnt read anything by her. I have gone back and bought seom from her earlier writings. Her writing is atmospheric to the point of claustrophobia, its amazing how she is inside peoples heads. This one is about the pandemic and at the height of lockdown the need to escape and take a breath of fresh air. whilst you are left feeling a sad, it succinctly pinpoints feelings of claustrophobia and fear at the start of lockdown.

The Fell is a thought-provoking and evocative read, exploring as it does themes around isolation, anxiety and compliance during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The book is set during a single 24-hour period in November 2020, in Derbyshire's Peak District. Britain is experiencing a surge in cases of the SARS-CoV-2 / Covid-19 virus (although the virus itself is never named in the book) and in the midst of social restrictions. Through four separate narrative voices, we follow the protagonists as they experience the frustrations, self-reflections and temptations that will be familiar to anyone who has been locked down for any period over the past two years (and that's most of us!). By its nature, it's an introspective piece, which rolls fairly languidly to its defining moment, then becomes more plot-based for the second half, rolling towards a reflective conclusion.

Struggling middle-aged cafe worker Kate has been furloughed from work and is presently sitting out a two week period of home isolation, after a close contact has tested positive. She's a personality who thrives in nature and is experiencing increasing levels of psychological distress at her confinement as the days roll on. Her 16-year-old son, Matt, is also cooped up in their small moorside cottage, amusing himself with online gaming and eating copious amounts of food. Neighbour Alice is also enduring isolation, self-imposed in her case, as she has recently undergone treatment for cancer and is thus at higher risk of poor outcomes, should she catch the virus.

In a moment of weakness one evening, Kate makes the decision to leave her home and take a brief walk up the nearby fell, hoping that it will restore her to a more balanced frame of mind. She rationalises her breach of isolation on the basis that there are few, if any, other people to meet or be seen by and that she'll most likely be back in the house before Matt has realised she's gone. Alice sees Kate walking towards the Fell, considers cautioning her against it, but ultimately decides to turn a blind eye.

Unfortunately, Kate's "harmless" stroll on the fell takes an unexpected turn when she ventures further than intended, falls and injures herself as night and bad weather descend. Without her mobile phone, Kate is in real danger, particularly as she has told nobody where she was going. At home, Matt becomes increasingly more concerned about his mother's whereabouts, conferring at a distance with Alice and wrestling with the competing pressures of ensuring his mother's safety, while not exposing her to the risk of a large fine she can ill afford to pay.

The fourth narrator joins the story at around the mid-point. Rob is a mountain rescue volunteer and must sacrifice a rare evening with his teenaged daughter when he receives the call-out to search for Kate in the National Park. Nevertheless, Rob knows where his priorities must lie, especially now with the ranks of on-call rescuers depleted by lock-downs and illness.

I found The Fell a nuanced and thoughtful read, capturing many of the human emotions and preoccupations that the experience of living through a pandemic has raised. I certainly never had the impression, as some other reviewers have voiced, that the book is advocating an "anti-vax" or non-compliant position. Instead, I feel that Sarah Moss is espousing values of understanding, kindness and pulling together in adversity. Some personalities will inevitably find periods of isolation and containment more psychologically challenging than others, and many readers will have experienced the temptation to "bend the rules" a little as a managed risk over the course of the pandemic. Most of those occasions have presumably been relatively harmless, but it's in the nature of human experience for things to sometimes go awry - how would we ourselves deal with such a situation?

The Fell is a timely reflection on the human condition when subjected to unfamiliar stressors. I'd recommend it to any reader who enjoys quality literary and/or contemporary fiction, and those with a particular interest in the way individuals have experienced and responded to the worldwide pandemic.

My thanks to the author, Sarah Moss, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley, for the opportunity to read and review this enthralling title.

Sarah Moss can set a mood like no one else, and The Fell is no exception. This pandemic novel is unique from the ones I've read before and had me guessing the entire time. Moss is a smart writer and that comes through in every word.

In Sarah Moss’s latest novel we return to the Peak District and face the impact of a ten day lockdown.
Kate, a single mom, waitresses in a cafe where she has come in contact with a person infected with COVID and is sent home to quarantine. Living with her teenaged son Matt, the confinement of her home, once a refuge has become claustrophobic. On a November evening, she decides to break her quarantine and head to the hills for a walk. This slice of freedom is at once exciting and invigorating. She feels alive, she sings and dares herself to walk to the top of the hill to view the world below but a misstep perhaps, causes her to fall.
At home alone with his mother out, Matt feels his own taste of freedom taking shape. As dusk turns to night and the night lingers on his senses change. His mother has not returned home and he is fearing for her safety. The drone of search helicopters fills the air overhead in search of his mother and like her, the physical and psychological need to break the rules, to escape has turned a much desired freedom into fright.
This is a gripping and intriguing novel. The prose are exact, painting a picture of the countryside, the moor, the characters and the unknown.
Well done and highly recommended.
Thanks to NetGalley, Sarah Moss and Farrar Straus and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for gifting me a digital ARC of this book by Sarah Moss - a different look into the pandemic's affect on individuals. 4.5 stars!

In England, Kate has been exposed to Covid, though she is not sick, and is under strict quarantine and not allowed to leave her home or she risks jail time and heavy fines. She is a single mom to teenager Matt, who is spending most of his quarantine time on the computer. Kate has reached her limit and needs to take a break outside, so she heads out for a walk. She is spotted by her neighbor, Alice, who had cancer so is very vulnerable to the virus. All is fine until Kate takes a fall.

Told in stream of consciousness narratives from these individuals plus Rob, a mountain rescuer. Once you get used to the narrative style, I really liked delving into each of these people's thoughts on everything from the pandemic to the mundane. It's an interesting look at the toll that social isolation takes on people, even when necessary. I'm glad I read this as we are (fingers crossed!) hopefully coming out of the pandemic as opposed to being in the midst of it, but the pandemic still has a varying degree hold on all of our thoughts and is still extremely relevant.

This novella is set near the start of the COVID pandemic. Reading it brought me right back to lockdown. Kate is supposed to be in quarantine after coming into contact with COVID-19, but she decides to go for a walk on the moors and ends up injured. The narrative switches between Kate and her son Matt along with neighbors Alice and Rob. It evokes so well that period of time when Covid was terrifying. I think I would’ve like to read more about the characters. I haven’t read anything by Sarah Moss until this and I’m definitely going to look into her back catalog.

Basically just skimmed through this book . Covid has certainly changed our way of living /thinking and this book showed that. While many experienced hardships many positives have emerged as well. This book exposed many of the negatives and how our minds often dwell on these and overlook some of the benefits. Some deep mind searching happening in this book.

The anxiety, the isolation, the self-doubt and depression brought about by the government’s enforced lockdown during the Covid pandemic was eloquently and empathetically captured here. The emotional toll of enforced isolation was perfectly described. So perfectly described that the thoughts of the characters mirrored my own thoughts at times, making the narrative eerily accurate.

The ‘stream of consciousness‘ writing style might not be to everyone’s taste, but it works well in this case. You get inside the various character’s minds, not observing, but seeing their ‘secret thoughts’ – making the events authentic and chillingly personal.

I was of two minds as to whether I wanted to read a ‘pandemic novel’ because I lived through it, hence why make myself re-experience the trauma. My mind was made up when I re-read my review of this author’s “Summerwater” and I remembered just how much I enjoyed her writing.

The ending was rather too abrupt for my taste. I wish there had been a chapter of ‘follow-up’ as I wanted to know what happened to the characters next. Alice, Kate, and Matt were so real to me that not knowing what comes after is difficult.

Sarah Moss has granted us a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of people as they experience the recent ‘lockdown’. The loneliness, fear, and boredom are all very genuinely and uncompromisingly portrayed. Their stories portray the author’s keen understanding of human nature. A short novel that is rather dark and very serious in tone might not be to everyone’s taste. However, in my humble opinion, literary fiction that engenders empathy in the reader is to be recommended. Well done!

4.5 stars rounded up

I’ve read three other novels by Sarah Moss (Ghost Wall, The Tidal Zone, and Summerwater) and have loved them all. The Fell is another excellent book.

The Fell is set in November 2020 in the Peak District during a strict Covid lockdown in the U.K. Kate and her 16-year-old son Matt are in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period because of an exposure to Covid-19. Kate is an outdoors person, someone “who needs to be out the hills every day no matter the weather,” so one late afternoon, after a week of quarantine, she sneaks out for a walk on the moors, certain that she will meet no one. She leaves without telling Matt, believing that she will return before he even knows she’s gone. Unfortunately, Kate falls and is injured.

I loved the book’s structure. Chapters alternate among four characters whose perspectives are given in interior monologues. Besides the viewpoints of Kate and Matt, the reader gets to know Alice, a wealthy widow who is immune-compromised and lives next door to Kate, and Rob, a volunteer with the local search-and-rescue team.

Each of the four characters is faced with a conflict around a question: What is the right thing to do? The quarantine has crushed Kate’s spirit and left her struggling with her mental health; she knows she isn’t supposed to leave her property but she believes she will expose no one and that no one will know that she has broken the rules. Matt, when he realizes his mother is missing, struggles with reporting her missing when doing that could result in a major fine. Alice must maintain social distancing because of her health but wants to help Kate and offer comfort to Matt. Rob is divorced and has limited time with his daughter; when she is staying with him, he is called for a search mission and so is torn between his family responsibilities and helping his team find a stranger who has gone missing.

Because of the interior monologue format, the reader comes to know each of the characters intimately: the important relationships in their lives, and their hopes, fears, and regrets. Kate’s chapters also include imagined conversations with a raven that she encounters and accompanies her on her walk. We see the impact of the pandemic and restrictions on individual lives, its emotional toll. Alice, for example, knows she has no right to feel imprisoned in her “comfy house, mortgage paid off” but she misses human connection and human touch: “No one’s touched her in months . . . Maybe she’ll die without ever touching another human, maybe she’s had her last hug, handshake, air-kiss.” She decides that when restrictions lift, she will go to a spa and “have a massage, feel another person’s hands on her skin for as long as she wants to – two massages, or three – to be touched!”

The book also examines the consequences of actions. Kate’s actions, for instance, affect others. Matt worries about Kate, as does Alice, and Rob loses time with his daughter because of Kate’s decision to go for a walk. Kate’s choice will leave the reader both disagreeing and empathizing. Though financially stressed, Kate knows she is not as badly off as others; she is safe in her home and not facing domestic abuse like other women. Nonetheless, her mental health is suffering: “the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying.” Are the rules more important than her sanity?

I appreciated the novel’s balanced view; it recognizes both the need for Covid measures and the negative effects of Covid protocols. Kate “doesn’t disapprove of lockdown or masks or any of it.” While working at a café, she expects people to wear masks properly to protect others: “it’s not as if it’s hard to wear a mask over your nose as well as your mouth for five minutes while you buy your bread and milk, is it?” She’s “always been the one who says something [about wearing a mask properly], someone has to, what you walk past is what you tolerate.” At the same time, she believes “indoor transmission is the problem, if the people in charge had any sense they’d be setting limits on how many hours you can spend inside, shooing people out into the wind and the fresh air instead of locking us in.” She worries about life after the pandemic: “And of course life won’t go back to the way it was, it never does and rarely should. There will be holes in the children’s education, a generation that’s forgotten or never learnt how to go to a party, people of all ages who won’t forget to be afraid to leave the house, to be afraid of other people, afraid to touch or dance or sing, to travel, to try on clothes.” And she worries about the long-term effects of isolation: “no one knows how to unlock the cage and we’re all forgetting how to go back to the group.”

Though serious, there are some touches of humour. Kate asks the raven, “Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God what if it’s both?” And I couldn’t help but admire the author’s wordsmithing: Kate has seen ravens around lambs and comments, “I’ve seen you at dying lambs, Raven, your kind. Your unkind.”

I hesitated to read a pandemic novel, but I’m glad I read this one. It captures the emotions we’ve all experienced: the anxiety, depression, fear, and helplessness. It reflects our waiting for the pandemic to end and “the appalling uncertainty of hope, the risk of letting yourself believe there might be good times again.” In a strange way, the book was a comforting read because it shows that we are not alone in our frustrations. Perhaps all we can do is to try our best because life has “to be lived, somehow.” We might, like Kate, make mistakes, but “we all need saving from the consequences of our own idiocy once in a while.”

This is a short book covering a short time period, but it is not short on quality.

Note: I received a galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

4.5 stars rounded to 5

My second lockdown fiction which I was skeptical about, but this short novella certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Synopsis -

In the middle of her quarantine in November 2020, Kate simply can’t take it anymore. The isolation and confinement are getting to her. Quietly slipping out, she just wants a walk in the moors.

Matt, her teenage son, notices that his mom is gone for too long and has no clue what to do, given the isolation. As he alerts his elderly neighbour Alice, they soon have the mountain rescue team looking for Kate.

Review -

The narrative alternates between Kate, Matt and Alice, instantly creating the tense and unsettling atmosphere of the raging pandemic of 2020. The prose is evocative, lyrical and spell binding, seamlessly flowing between the three of them, giving us a glimpse of their states of mind and deepest thoughts.

Moss pictures three very different perspectives of responses to the contagion, exploring how it affected them all, given their age and circumstances of life –

Kate, as a single mother is struggling make ends meet with her café job. As she gets into trouble during her walk, I loved how Moss presented her monologues with her conscience, as it begins to haunt her, reminding her of all her mistakes and regrets.

With loneliness being his only company, Matt is already edgy and when he finds that his mom is missing, his helplessness and nerves, throw him off-center.

Alice, as much as she wants to be the helpful neighbor, is anxious of contracting the illness and is caught with her own mental battles, having just survived a fatal disease.

Moss’s blend of her literary writing with the element of suspense works wonderfully and left me wanting more of the novella.

The Fell is a thought provoking read about the changing world and how even a small amount of hope, benevolence and kind-heartedness will go a long way for humanity.

Thanks NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC!

I didn't know the book was written in a stream of consciousness style; this choice really made me struggle with the narrative. The book spends a lot of.pages on the musings of its characters about how the pandemic would impact their lives. Unfortunately I didn't see the tension and the suspense promised in the blurb, just bland characters.

Thank you Netgalley, author, and publisher for the ARC.

I am on the fence about this book.

Sarah Moss does a great job capturing all the wandering thoughts, as well as the questions running through various characters’ heads as they’re all restricted to home because it’s November 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. For some, it’s frustrating, and for others, like Kate who’s partway through a two-week quarantine after exposure to someone with the virus. Confined at home with her is her adolescent son Matt.
Kate is having an increasingly tough time sticking to home (she’s used to regularly spending time outdoors rambling about). Kate’s mental health is suffering, and one evening, without telling Matt, she grabs her knapsack, some water and snacks, and heads out for for the moor when it starts to drizzle.

She gets hurt, and can’t make it back. Meanwhile, Matt discovers she’s broken quarantine and is hours past returning from wherever she went, and he worries: does he do nothing and wait, or contact the police and then let his mother deal with the ensuing anger from neighbours (one of whom works in a care facility and the other is a cancer survivor) and large fines for breaking the law?

Sarah Moss gives us different POVs, like in “Summerwater”, and has them all consider what living during the pandemic is doing to them and their mental health, their relationships with their families and others around them, and to society as a whole. And what does it mean to the people around them when someone breaks with a lockdown or a quarantine?

I did not like the stream of consciousness-like writing in “Summerwater”, which Moss repeats here. I can't say I enjoyed this book either, but I appreciated the questions she was asking, as people are under strain from prolonged lack of contact with one another, and the acknowledgement that some people don't do distancing or quarantine well at all.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for this ARC in exchange for my review.

The Fell//Sarah Moss

"She doesn't disapprove of lockdown or masks or any of it, not on principle, only the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying and the harder it is to understand why other people don't feel the same way."
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While on a two week quarantine after exposure to COVID-19, Kate slips out of her home for a hike in a nearby park. When she slips and seriously injures herself - her son and neighbor are left to wonder where she's gone. Taking place over 24 hours, The Fell is an examination of the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and what we all went through during that first year.
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GAH! I really wanted to enjoy this book. It was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022 and I can't tell you how disappointed I was after putting it down. Look, I understand that the author was not openly anti-lockdown or quarantine but I could not get some of her quips out of my head, especially when she waxes poetic about exhausted healthcare workers getting frustrated with people who willingly put themselves into harms way by refusing to take basic COVID safety precautions.
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I think this novel could be perceived as poignant by anyone who is tired of being cooped up. The mental health impacts of COVID are wide-ranging and we likely don't even know the full extent. Maybe I am being too sensitive but I just don't think this was handled in the best way possible.
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The Fell is a slim book, just 192 pages. There were moments where the writing captivated me and I think I could be a fan of Moss' other work, so I do plan to try her again. I hope I'm not disappointed twice.

3 falling stars

From the publisher: “At dusk on a November evening, a woman slips through her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, a true lockdown, but she can’t take it anymore—the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know she’s stepped out. Kate planned only a quick walk—a stretch of the legs, a breath of fresh air—on paths she knows too well. But somehow she falls. Injured, unable to move, she sees that her short, furtive stroll will become a mountain rescue operation, maybe even a missing person case.”

The publisher’s blurb had me expecting a mystery. The Fell was a stream of consciousness telling of a few people in the English countryside during the beginnings of the covid pandemic. (I did find it interesting to compare British protocols to those in Minnesota, remembering the debate over wiping down groceries.)

While the stream of consciousness writing really dug into the minds of Kate, her son and her neighbor, I found it annoying and difficult to read. “That would do, it’s not that he can’t cope on his own, it’s not that he’s never gone to bed alone in the house or that he can’t feel himself and the cat and hang the laundry and put the bins out – if they’re allowed to put the bins out, he can’t remember, would here be a worry about the bin men touching something he’s touched - it’s not that, if she want to be somewhere else, if she’s star-gazing or something that’s fine, but she didn’t say she was going out, he doesn’t even know when she went,….“ Phew, exhausting. I dislike these non-sentences that go on forever or at least a dozen lines and you don’t have any more information than when you started, or if you do, you’ve forgotten it by the time a period mercifully lets your mind rest, if it can ever do that when reading about covid or a dark and stormy night when a woman goes out for a walk.

The ending was abrupt, but the book was over for this tired-of-reading-about dreariness reader.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Fell by Sarah Moss is a novella that takes place during our current pandemic and takes a peek into the stream-of-conscious thoughts of a few different characters who all live in the same UK village, near the fells/moors (my knowledge of these things is very minimal, so forgive me if I'm getting the fells/moors, etc. wrong). The main plot is that Kate and her son Matt are isolating, as they have been exposed to someone who is sick, so under the pandemic restrictions, are not allowed to venture out of there house, other than their garden (or yard). However, Kate has had enough and ends up slipping away to take a walk on the moors, where she has an accident, and triggers a whole search and rescue attempt. I liked getting to see all of the various perspectives, and I've definitely had a lot of the same thoughts as the characters. We've all had a love/hate relationship with our current pandemic, and even if we don't act on our thoughts, most of us have been annoyed with our restrictions, etc. I don't see this as an "anti-lockdown" novel against the restrictions, as some people have suggested. I see it as more of a commentary on the collective trauma and mental health of the people in this village who are going through it together and separate. I liked the little mentions of how the pandemic is affecting homeless people and climate change, etc. There are lots of beautiful love notes to nature sprinkled in. Overall, I thought it was fine. I didn't like it quite as much as I LOVED Ghost Wall, but it did make me think, and get angry, but also nod along with some of the characters. Four stars.

Thanks to FSG and NetGalley for providing me with an ebook ARC of this novella in exchange for an honest review.

The book was written about the Pandemic, and the description did lure me in because I was searching for content about COVID that didn’t make me cringe or roll my eyes. Overall the story was intriguing, and focused more on the effects of lockdowns and distancing. It is written from different perspectives, but I found each to be a bit too rambling for me to follow.