Little Disasters

Well written, interesting characters, great plot. I really enjoyed this new novel by Sarah Vaughan. It centres around friends who have known each other for years, having met at ante natal classes for the birth of their first children. Liz is a paediatrician, her friend Jess is a stay at home mother. The story revolves around what happens when Jess brings her baby to the ER when Liz is on duty and the events that happen from there. This is a compelling read, I couldn’t put it down. Highly Recommend!
Thanks to Simon and Schuster (Australia) and Netgalley for the arc of this novel.

EXCERPT: She risks glancing down. Two eyes stare back. Please don't cry, please don't cry, the plea is automatic. The baby's bottom lip quivers and the uneasy quiet is broken with a bleat. Great gulps of rage soon drown out the heavy lullaby. Please be quiet. Just be quiet. Be quiet, won't you? Just be quiet, for God's sake!'

It's no good. The walls push in; the heat bears down and the noise - the terrible crying that has been going on for three hours - engulfs her. Her eyes burn and she feels like joining in. She cannot cope with this: she cannot cope. She does not know how much more she can bear.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: You think you know her…but look a little closer.

She is a stay-at-home mother-of-three with boundless reserves of patience, energy, and love. After being friends for a decade, this is how Liz sees Jess.

Then one moment changes everything.

Dark thoughts and carefully guarded secrets surface—and Liz is left questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend, and about herself. The truth can’t come soon enough.

MY THOUGHTS: Sarah Vaughan has written a heartwrenching and honest novel about a mother suffering from postnatal depression and anxiety.

Motherhood is the most complex and difficult job in the world. There are no absolutes. What works for one child doesn't work for another. Every child has different needs. Husbands have needs. Thank God for friends, right? Those other women who are going through what you are going through. The women you can sit and laugh about the disasters with. The women who can put everything back into the proper perspective. But what happens when these women have gone back to work, have lives outside the home, and you are at home with a colicky, unsettled, unhappy baby and all your coping mechanisms are failing?

Meet Jess. Jess, who always has everything under control, who runs everything with almost military precision, whom all the other mums envy. She has always been careful to hide her anxieties, but one ill advised decision has opened her Pandora's Box, and now there's no shutting the lid again. The calm, capable Jess has been replaced by a Jess incapable of making a rational decision, a Jess who knows that she is a bad mother. A very bad mother.

I felt for Jess. I cried for and with her. I had a baby like Betsey. I would be up all night, walking around the lounge, baby on my shoulder, trying to quiet him so that my husband could get some sleep and be able to function at work. I would try to get an hour or two of sleep if, and if is the operative word, he went down during the day. But often the only way he would sleep was if he was in motion. I would put him in his pram and walk for miles. Then when I got home there was still washing to do - no disposable nappies then - and meals to prepare. I was a new mum in a new town, where I knew no one and had no support network other than an absolutely wonderful plunket nurse who was a mother of five children. She kept me sane. She was my lifeline.

I read a great deal of this book with my heart in my mouth, my body tensed. Sarah Vaughan has captured the desperation of the sleep deprived mother perfectly. 'There is little that's more lonely than being at home with a distraught baby and an unraveling mind.' And behind this main thread lie historical tales of parental neglect, and sometimes abuse, and the determination of those who suffered not to repeat those mistakes.

This was, strangely enough, an enjoyable read. I let out a huge sigh of satisfaction at the end. It's a story of friendship, and its limits, of the love of parents for their children, of trying to provide them with a better life, a more stable life, with more love than their parents had.

And as icing on top of the cake, there was a trip down memory lane when Liz is transported, via a dog-eared postcard of Hastings Pier, to the cafe her mother had run when she was a child. The sort that aren't around any more, that served white bread and butter standard with every meal, tea in little metal teapots, glass bottles of vinegar and brown sauce on the tables. Ours, where us girls would meet on a Friday lunchtime for the roast of the day and apple pie with cream and ice cream for $1.50, was the Regent. The five of us were thick as thieves back then, and this has made me realise that I know where only one of them is currently, and she is dead, felled by an aneurysm many years ago.

A wonderful read. A realistic read. A thought provoking read. I will be reading more from this author.

❤❤❤❤.5

#LittleDisasters #NetGalley

'The truth is hidden in things (left) unsaid.'

THE AUTHOR: Sarah Vaughan read English at Oxford and went on to be a journalist. After training with the Press Association, she worked for The Guardian for 11 years as a news reporter, health correspondent and political correspondent before leaving to freelance and write fiction. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and two young children. (Goodreads.com- abridged)

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of Little Disasters by Sarah Vaughan for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

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