4.25/5

This felt like a fever dream. It's so crazy that most of this story only takes place within two weeks. So much, yet so little happens. I loved the narrative of this story; I never knew what exactly was real and what was in her mind.

Thank you NetGalley and W W Norton & Company for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

5 ⭐️. this book as weird. like, WEIRD weird. and I loved every minute of it. I found myself dragging the book along because I wanted to keep staying within this weird, twisted world of Elise, Tom and the beet harvesters. I will be forever have nightmares about beets and sugar now.

ty to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Beta Vulgaris encapsulates what it feels like to spiral when off of your anxiety medication. It’s the subtle things changing around you while you panic— yet it seems to never affect those around you. It’s slow creeping, pulse quickening, anxiety on the most personal of levels. This of course works for psychological horror. While the story was fighting very hard to keep my attention in places, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this book to some extent. I think it’s definitely unique! 2.5stars/5.

This is the kind of weird novel that I live for - I was 100% pulled into the world of sugar beets and worms and Elise. Margie Sarsfield is a magician with descriptions - I could feel the cold, the beets, the smells, the hunger, the tide of Elise's emotions. God, I just loved this book. We need a new category of novel, the weird literary novel, for the people like me who have to wade through 100 read-alikes to find these absolute treasures. Can't wait to see what the author does next! You go, girl!

A compelling debut novel that gets under your skin like a rash until you pick it away to the very last pages.

What beet me up real good:
-The cover. Don’t judge a book by its cover… but the cover made me pick it up in the first place!
-Beet overdose. I loved how the beets were everything. Recurring motif, setting, character, plot. ALL HAIL THE BEETS. Return to the dirt.
-Realism. This is a story firmly based in reality, despite the madness and light horror elements. Elise’s insecurity and anxiety were palpable. We’ve all met someone like her and maybe even have a little bit of her in us.
-Setting. I actually knew a crust punk that did seasonal sugar beet harvesting and have always been curious about it. So reading a story that takes place around said harvest really made it all the more intriguing for me!

What force-fed me beets:
-Light on the horror. I would actually not necessarily consider this ‘horror’, but more general literary fiction. It has the whole ‘slow decent into madness’ thing down, but I can’t say it was particularly disturbing. It wasn’t really scary, creepy, or unnerving.
-The final act. The last ¼ or so lost steam for me and I was not a huge fan of the conclusion itself.

Overall, this is definitely worth a read and I will be looking out for more from Sarsfield in the future!

3.5 rounded up.
I did read this in one day but kept thinking should I DNF it? It doesn’t really get exciting until about 50% and even then you still don’t really know what’s happening but hmm that was an interesting book. I was getting a lot of Death Valley, Rouge, and Piglet vibes.

Beta Vulgaris follows Elsie, our female protagonist that joins a sugar beet harvest for the season to recover from financial debt. Over the course of the harvest, Elsie starts to lose track of reality as coworkers disappear, her worries about financial status impair her ability to care for herself, and relationships form and fall apart.

The beginning and middle portions of the novel build the relationship with Elsie as the reader views her troubles and builds a sense of compassion/empathy. Subtle shifts in writing start to artfully show the cracks in Elsie's perceptions. The stream-of-consciousness writing that spans the majority of the novel really aid bringing the reader into Elsie's descent into madness (or psychosis). I found the latter parts of the novel hard to follow, as I'm sure was the intent of Margie Sarsfield when writing the first person accounts of Elsie's lost grip from reality, and had to pause periodically to make sure I still had my grips on my own reality. Toward the end I unfortunately found myself waiting for something to happen. I felt resolution was missing from the story and the ending left something to be desired.

I would recommend this book to readers who love unhinged female leads, dark elements, and peaks into mental illness. Overall this was an interesting storyline and was well written.

Thank you NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for the ARC.

I love a surreal book and this book fits that perfectly. This is an odd little story but I really enjoyed it. It made me uncomfortable in a lot of different places but in the absolute best way.

I read this book and though I loved it, it left me wanting more and very curious.
I felt on edge and wanting to know what would happen next.
The main character I found her relatable. Like myself when it came to her mental health and money struggles. But like I said I wanted more because, I wanted to know if she found the answers she needed in order for her to have her happy ending. I need to know if she got her ending ugh… however overall I enjoyed it.

I loved the writing in this book. I can’t get enough of the writing in this book. Sarsfield paints a woman that is anxious and makes poor choices but I still want what’s best for her. Even though you know the genre is horror, you want her to be okay.

This is psychological horror at its best, and also a bit of Midwestern Gothic. One of my new favorites. (If you’ve struggled with disordered eating before, though, I would recommend skipping this one).


I received this book as an advanced copy and I’m leaving my review for free.

Thank you NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book took a lot out of me. Fundamentally this book is about the mental decline of our main character, Elise, after she and her boyfriend decide to go work for a month helping harvest sugar beets. The book is labelled as horror and I wouldn't say that is wholly inaccurate, but the horror here is much more mundane than what I think of when I think of horror novels. The horrors of anxiety.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone currently dealing with major mental health issues because I think all this book will do is make things worse. I think it may have made my mental state worse and I only have to deal with a fraction of what Elise has to deal with. The book is bleak and everything just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and, I can't stress this enough, worse for Elise as the book goes on.

If there is any reason to read this book it is because of Elise. She is a stunningly realized character, who you just want to shake and tell her everything will be alright, even though she would never listen to you and convince herself that you hate her. I see myself in Elise and I see a lot of young people in know in Elise.

My only real problem with the book is the pacing. The book is nearly 300 pages long which isn't crazy long, yet it still manages to feel bloated. Its sort of like if a Safdie Brothers movie was 3 hrs long, which is to say a little too long to be stuck in the worst part of any person's life. A few too many chapters which don't really push things forward, just establish how bad Elise's mental state is which we kind of already knew.

Will be looking out for more Margie Sarsfield, crazy that tis is a debut novel.

Like a rash rubbed raw or a beet boiled to its limits, Margie Sarsfield's Beta Vulgaris is a livid, visceral reading experience that will burrow into the reader's mind like the roots of so many tubers. When I first started reading this book, I got strong Kathe Koja vibes, which is a legitimate comparison both stylistically and for the content of this fever dream narrative, but the magic of Koja's punk-rock-prose is in its delicate balance. In a book like Cipher, the reader is constantly bombarded with repulsive aesthetic detail and plagued by the characters' irrational inner monologues, but the pacing allows Koja's brilliantly original plot to shine through the chaos. Beta Vulgaris, by contrast, was couple of beets behind the orchestra in terms of rhythm.

By the end, it's hard not to feel bloated and overfed by the sheer madness of the narration. You feel assaulted by the miserable sensory detail you've been fed and violated by the disturbing eroticism infused into every page. That being said, the experience of accompanying Elise on her earth-choked descent into hell is perversely thrilling. Sarsfield is clearly an author to pay attention to, but it will take a particular reader to love this unique, body-horror-heavy nightmare.

A mesmeric thank you to WW Norton & Co. and NetGalley for the ARC.

This debut horror litfic novel is the story of an unquiet mind- a meek yet witty girl with abnormal thoughts. Elise works at a beet farm with her boyfriend, Tom, over the summer to make quick cash. But their adventure quickly turns out to be more than they bargained for as people disappear amidst a mass hysteria. And Elise herself begins to experience a sensitivity towards the frenzy when her boyfriend disappears.

Beta Vulgaris is a visceral portrayal of nature at its most hypnotic state. It’s funny, ambiguous, yet relatable through Elise’s voice. Her inner monologue becomes stranger and more incoherent as she slowly becomes one with the earth, which unfortunately does make the plot drag towards the end. Albeit a slower read, I enjoyed this character driven book (especially the first half) and am excited to read more of this author’s future work.

This was a delightfully weird and harrowing novel. Taking place at sugar beet farm, Elise is a seasonal worker running away from her problems and hoping her pay day will solve everything. It's impossible not to feel for Elise who is a beautifully written tragic character.

(4.5/5, rounded up)
Are we sure this is Margie Sarsfield's debut? Her incisive attention to detail - not only in her storytelling but in the prose itself - impressed me from the start. I'm not sure I've ever come across such crafty, masterful use of motifs. Thanks to how efficiently and effectively you're brought into her mind, connecting with Elise feels effortless. The way her spiraling thoughts are used to propel the story forward and hint at subtle shifts in her reality is *chef's kiss*.

Beta Vulgaris only had 2 downfalls:
- This trope is so, so common
- There was a lull in the back half that almost lost me, The pace picking back up not soon after, I'm happy I stuck around. Removing that downtime, though, would push this to a 5/5.

While the ending was predictable, the way in which it unfolds was not. Unlike other books I feel predictable, I still wanted to push through in order to see how Margie Sarsfield closes the novel out.

I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan, Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier and/or My Husband by Maud Ventura.

I liked this - a surreal reading experience. I just feel like the description and genre it’s listed as were a bit misleading, which causes some people to be let down. Like they were expecting more horror - this is more subtle. I would recommend but call it more of a psychological character study that goes off the rails.

I'm still unsure why this read was in the horror section in NetGalley. Maybe a bit psychological horror? So I did feel for Elise throughout the book. The author was very good at describing what a person goes through with anxiety and depression without their meds. Also, if they can't afford those meds, which was very sad. I spent the first half of the book wondering where we were going with the story, then the last half skimming paragraphs, wanting it to move along. It got redundant and fever dreamish and those aren't always the best qualities of a book for me.

I saw other reviews refer to the ending as not being good, and I completely agree. It was abrupt and it meant perhaps a metaphor but I am not good with metaphors in books. Just give it to me straight. And the time frame was confusing to me- I finally realized that it takes place 10 years ago, in 2014. There were Generation Y cliques on the camp where Elise stayed at while she worked at the beet farm. "Crust punks", "train riders", "free bleeders" (don't ask), any type of hipsters and Emo kids you can imagine were in this book.

In the end, I felt let down. This didn't give me any feelings and that's what I yearn for in a book. I digress.

Chronically broke Elise and her boyfriend Tom travel from Brooklyn to Minnesota to take part in the Sugar Beet harvest. It will be back breaking labor, but it will pay well enough to cover their rent for a while -- a relief for Elise who is being hounded by her debt, and guilt about that debt.

Elise will be relatable (too relatable) to MANY female readers -- self-conscious, self-loathing and in a perpetual loop of anxiety and guilt about that self-loathing. Our clearly unreliable narrator is bound to unravel at any moment.

And unravel she does. This is definitely for fans of Mona Awad or Odessa Moshfegh.

I was hoping this would be a bit more "spooky" but that's on me -- the true terror is just being a young woman without adequate mental health care.

oooo ok I honestly loved the heck outta this one. probably between 4-4.5 stars for me. I thought the premise sounded super fun and spooky and it definitely delivered. while it didn't really get quite as spooky as I would've liked, I loved the slow build of horror and Elise's descent into madness. I love stories where it's hard to tell what's real and what's imagined - big fever dream vibes, good body horror. I found this compulsively readable despite the spiraling, maddening anxiety throughout the duration of the book. explored interesting themes relating to class, mental health and body image, made me scared of beets, etc.

definitely impressed by Sarsfield and very interested in anything else she puts out into the world!!

thanks ww norton & company + netgalley for the arc <3

Solid 3 stars. Let me begin by saying that I am relatively new to the horror genre, and finding out that a lot of horror books aren't just your typical scary story. I 100% thought that this story was going to be more on the scary and typical horror side after reading the synopsis and going into the book, which was a little bit of a let down. I really liked the different themes and elements that the author added into this book, finding myself relating with Elise more than I thought I would. The author did a great job at depicting how mentally debilitating it can be to deal with and go through an eating disorder and anxiety. I also liked how the author depicted Elise's emotions when dealing with her relationship with Tom. Even after he had fucked her over, she continued to go back and fourth between loving and missing him and absolutely hating him, something that I believe to be accurate when people go through something traumatic in a relationship. Unfortunately, I wanted a little more from this story. I was hoping this would be a scary horror book, which it did not deliver. I also wish we found out what happened to all of the people who went missing. And lastly, the ending was incredibly disappointing.

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the ARC I received for review.