Stunning and horrifying in equal measure
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The blurb
Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill. A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics. The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything. Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.
The Review
I absolutely love dystopian books and this is without doubt one of the best I have read in a very long time. The timing of this book is really eerie - I have to admit it did heighten the feeling of dread reading this book about a global pandemic, whilst in the middle of.... a global pandemic! I guess for some people who are feeling very anxious at the minute, they may not want to read about something that hits quite so close to home, but for me it was utterly the right time. It was completely prescient and made the book feel all the more real to me.
This is a really complex and clever tale which had me absolutely gripped from start to finish. Set in a world where the fear of infection is ever present, this is a story that is paced perfectly. It follows the story of 'The Crisis', the moment where the world reaches a tipping point in antibiotic resistance, leading to millions of deaths. The thing that makes this book so scary is how quickly we are racing towards just such a scenario. (This is an author who has certainly done her research and you can read more about antibiotic resistance on her blog here)
The timeline of the story flows effortlessly between pre-crisis and post-crisis to slowly interweave and bring together all of the story strands. You think you know what is happening and then there are some subtle twists and turns. The characters are wonderfully developed and believable.
The scariest thing for me was the repercussions of an antibiotic resistant community that you don't immediately consider. This book describes a government strategy where the over 70's no longer receive antibiotic medication, in an effort to control the levels of resistance. They are basically left as sitting ducks, waiting for the first simple infection to take hold of them. But there were other areas that just hadn't occurred to me, like people no longer engaging in physical contact apart from their families (sound familiar?) and the huge disruption to our animal food chain - the majority of which is pumped to the gills with antibiotics, and is a huge contributor to this cliff facing we are walking blindly towards. Down to the simplicity of barely anyone having pets, least of all those with claws that might incidentally scratch them and cause a simple infection from which you might never recover. It was seriously chilling.
Above all, this book is utterly gripping. It is a haunting view of a possible future with a heart-breaking human story interwoven through it. I feel very lucky to participate in Blog tours, and none more so than when it is a debut book by an author which is as stunning and wonderfully horrifying, as The Waiting Rooms is.
The Waiting Rooms is released in paperback on 9th July 2020 by Orenda Books
Big thanks to @annecater at Random things tours, for organising and inviting me to take part in the blog tour. This is my honest and unbiased opinion.
About the Author
Eve Smith’s debut novel The Waiting Rooms was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award. Eve writes speculative fiction, mainly about the things that scare her. She attributes her love of all things dark and dystopian to a childhood watching Tales of the Unexpected and black-and-white Edgar Allen Poe double bills. Eve’s flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and highly commended for The Brighton Prize. In this world of questionable facts, stats and news, she believes storytelling is more important than ever to engage people in real life issues.
Eve recently contributed a piece of flash fiction, Belting Up, to an anthology of crime shorts called Noir From the Bar. The collection of stories has been launched to raise money for the NHS.Eve’s previous job as COO of an environmental charity took her to research projects across Asia, Africa
and the Americas, and she has an ongoing passion for wild creatures, wild science and far-flung places.
A Modern Languages graduate from Oxford, she returned to Oxfordshire fifteen years ago to set up home with her husband.
When she’s not writing, she’s racing across fields after her dog, attempting to organise herself and her family or off exploring somewhere new.