The blue book of Nebo

Manon Steffan Ros

Book - 2021

"Winner of the 2018 National Eisteddfod Prose Medal and the 2019 Llyfr y Flwyddyn (Wales Book of the Year) After nuclear disaster, Rowenna and her young son, Dylan, are among the rare survivors in rural northwest Wales. Left alone in their isolated hillside cottage, after others have died or abandoned the towns and villages, they must learn new skills in order to remain alive. With no electricity or modern technology they must return to the old ways of living off the land, developing new personal resources. While they become more skilled and stronger, the relationship between mother and son changes in subtle ways, as Dylan must take on adult responsibilities, especially once his baby sister Mona arrives. Despite their close understandi...ng, mother and son have their own secrets, which emerge as in turn they jot down their thoughts and memories in a found notebook. As each reflects on their old life and the events since the disaster which has brought normal, twenty-first century life to an end, their new-found maturity and sense of purpose contrast not only with their old selves but also with new emotional challenges when Mona sickens and dies. In this touching prize-winning and best-selling new novel, Manon Steffan Ros not only explores the human capacity to find new strengths when faced with the need to survive, but also questions the structures and norms of the contemporary world"--

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Subjects
Published
Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing 2021.
Language
English
Welsh
Main Author
Manon Steffan Ros (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
151 pages : 22 cm
ISBN
9781646051007
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ros (The Seasoning) delivers a spare and intimate story of a family surviving a near-future global apocalypse. Rowenna, 36, supplies her 14-year-old son, Dylan, with a notebook she found in the nearby Welsh village of Nebo, and in it they take turns writing stories of what's happened since "The End"--which began eight years earlier with reports of bombings of major cities in the U.S. and U.K. They grow vegetables and trap rabbits for food, and Dylan and his two-year-old sister, Mona, keep a mutated hare as a pet. Dylan feels unnerved after realizing he doesn't know how Rowenna came to be pregnant with Mona, given that everyone else had either fled, joined mutually annihilating gangs, or died in their homes from the fallout of a nuclear power plant explosion shortly after The End. Rowenna writes of both children's fathers, sharing stories of human weakness and grace. Ros's restrained, slow drip of details about the outer world feels plausible and horrifying, and Dylan's interest in the Welsh language ("that weird ll sound, like air escaping from the sides of the tongue"), which Rowenna has largely forgotten, engenders both poignancy and hope. In a time rife with and ripe for stories of the end, this one stands out. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A mother and son journal their way through the end of the world. Veteran writer Ros structures this novel as diary entries written by Dylan and his mother, Rowenna, in the tiny Welsh town of Nebo, which has been emptied following a nuclear apocalypse they call The End. (A nuclear war has devastated America at the very least, and a nuclear power plant meltdown occurs closer to home.) The two have been breaking into abandoned houses for supplies (including notebooks like the "blue book" of the title) to sustain themselves and Rowenna's young daughter, Mona. It's clear early on in this trim novel that the usual sense of post-apocalyptic dread doesn't apply here: The power's out, but there are no marauding thugs, military incursions, or other imminent threats. And though there's evidence that the world's gone off-kilter (like a mutated two-headed hare and masses of slugs escaping the poisoned soil), the prevailing theme is renewal. Dylan's entries are thick with observations of nature and pride in self-subsistence. Rowenna's entries are at first brooding, both about The End and her own story, particularly the (absent) fathers of her children. But as the years tracked by the novel press on, she shifts toward more upbeat observations as well. Rowenna reaccesses her grasp of Welsh-language reading and writing, symbolizing the idea that progress distanced us from our roots and that perhaps a reboot isn't such a bad thing. (Ros translated the book herself from the original Welsh.) The who-needs-civilization-anyhow perspective can get cloying. ("Cooking is a lovely thing. You make something, and then you get to eat it.") But Rowenna's flintiness and Dylan's maturity keep this brief novel from becoming overly simplistic. And a closing twist is both ambiguous and further challenges typical ideas about the genre. A curiously sweet-tempered novel that finds the upside of global catastrophe. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.