“Dark, perverse, convincing and compassionate – Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone’s Home is an extremely strong first novel”

NO MAJOR SPOILERS

Steve has lost his wife but before she died she made sure he wouldn’t lose his way. She arranged for him to take a small job at a local care home as a caretaker and it suits him just fine. No set hours, no one looking over his shoulder, as long as he never enters the clients’ rooms or goes into the morgue (an incongruous addition for such a small place) he’s pretty much left to his own devices and that’s just what he needs.. Something to fill those hours that were once full of Fran.

The home is quiet, very quiet, too quiet and that quietude is unsettling but Steve doesn’t want to rock the boat. He gets along well enough with the other members of staff, Polish male nurse Milos and dour Sarah and the owner Alexa, although brusque, seems competent enough, anyway it’s none of his business unless he makes it so and of course he does.

An unsettling novel that plays on the difficulties of placing elderly relatives into care, will they be looked after? Will the staff be kind? Am I doing the right thing? Do I even care? As long as I don’t have to do it, that’s fine by me, out of sight, out of mind!

The writing is quite masculine and I was surprised to find the author is female, it’s harsh and brutal, all strip lighting and grating crashes, no softness or gentleness and that’s what makes this book work so well.

Rebekah has a real talent for writing in the vernacular without leaving you groping with purposefully misspelled words and random replacement apostrophes, all brought about by clever sentence construction and the occasional descriptive notation. You cannot help but hear Milos speaking in your mind when you read his words, it’s uncanny..

Written in the (several of them actually) first person… You’re at least guaranteed a happy ever after..

Aren’t you..?

I look forward to further works by Rebekah, from behind a cushion..

 

Reviewed by:

Shan Williams

Added 4th June 2015

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Shan Williams