I read Jenny Mustard’s debut, Okay Days, back in 2023. Unflashy, perceptive and absorbing, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable novel which made me happy to put up my hand when What a Time to be Alive popped up on NetGalley. A coming-of-age story, it follows Sickan who’s changed her name from Siv hoping to reinvent herself after moving to Stockholm.
If you didn’t behave like an ordinary person and dress in clothes that signalled sanity, you would be shunned. What I saw was, adults hate abnormality, just as much as children do.
Eighteen months into her course, Sickan’s still friendless and living in spartan student accommodation, still constantly anxious that her peers are laughing at her, when she catches the eye of Hanna, a very different sort of misfit who appears to cultivate slovenliness, seemingly impervious to what others think. An odd sort of friendship begins between these two until eventually Hanna invites Sickan to share the palatial, fin de siècle apartment she’s inherited. Sickan is from a very different background, provincial and frugal, her parents so absorbed in their work as academic researchers, she’s been left to raise herself with the help of her grandmother. Hanna is the richest person she’s met, apparently intent on annoying her mother as much as possible. Hanna draws Sickan into her circle of acquaintances rather than friends. She meets Abbe at a party and begins a relationship which pushes Hanna to the fringes of her life. Over the year or so the novel spans, Sickan learns how to be a lover and a friend, taking steps into an adult life that might be different from the one she’d thought she’d have.
I stare in the mirror and I know I am overthinking but merely knowing you are overthinking never helps, which makes that advice, stop overthinking things, really quite toothless because how?
Sickan tells us her story beginning with how she and Hanna came to know each other, punctuating her narrative with flashbacks to her childhood. She’s a child of benign neglect, loved by parents too caught up in their work to pay their daughter the attention needed to raise a child or to notice the bullying she’s subjected to by her schoolmates. Mustard uses the same understated, quietly witty style that worked so well in her debut, conveying Sickan’s painful awareness of her social ineptitude and her attempts to learn how to be with people with a tenderness that made me want to cheer her small triumphs and ache for her setbacks. The end is brilliantly done, neatly swerving cliché and illustrating how far she’s come. I ended my Okay Days review saying it wasn’t one to shout from the rooftops about which is probably true of this novel, too, but I think I’ve found one of those authors who can be relied upon to produce the goods, something to be more than pleased about. I’m looking forward to Mustard’s third outing.
Sceptre Books: London 9781399740876 304 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
