NATURAL DISASTER

A comedy of errors in which a British mother attempts to make her last day of maternity leave a perfect one.

The unnamed narrator of Owens’ second novel is trying to have one last “special day” with her children before she heads back to her job at a heart-health nonprofit, where she works as a content manager. (Trigger warning for American readers: She’s had a year off.) She imagines the day as a kind of “farewell tour” to the places familiar from her daily routine with her 1-year-old, Rudy, and Felix, her headstrong 4-year-old. The mother realizes this may be her last maternity leave; she and her health-tech executive husband haven’t decided whether they’re done having kids, but she suspects they are. Their relationship, she says, has “taken on the reliable, municipal sturdiness of something like a town hall.” On this day, her husband is away at a conference and as the morning begins, the narrator finds a tampon—a kind she never buys or uses—in his travel bag. Is he having an affair? The question plagues her as the long day with her kids stretches ahead. The trio’s morning features meltdowns, cross librarians, and a stroller that has to be publicly greased to get through a shop doorway—and that’s just before lunch. As the day goes from bad to downright alarming, Owens tackles everything from working-mom guilt to breastfeeding, from postpartum bodies to the nature of time itself. The novel is at once wryly funny and analytical, dissecting 21st-century middle-class motherhood with aplomb. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but maybe that’s the point. Moms are all in this together.

The neuroses of motherhood are laid bare in this witty and poignant novel.