Her anxieties extend into the sleeping hours and are exacerbated by the record breaking heat waves and forest fires. Is she reacting to a feeling that doom will eventually befall her anyway? (“If working on the phones had taught me anything, it was that emergency could not be avoided.”) Or is it an extension of her chaotic childhood? Or an attempt to find some kind of temporary refuge from the chaos around her?

She spends her free time drinking way too much and going home with strangers. I was afraid of just about everything.įor all her anxieties, she is reckless with her personal safety. I was afraid of cyclists, people in tracksuits by traffic lights, afraid of staircases and lit cigarettes and power lines. … I became afraid of walking too close to the gutter and the cars that veered around corners too quickly. And, sure enough, as she answers calls for accidents and assaults and fires, she becomes fearful of every dark corner and bump in the night. She assures friends and family that she’s up for the job, but as we get more information about her past–growing up with divorced parents and a fearful mother–we get the feeling that this is not the job for her.

After graduating college, a young woman (the unnamed narrator) feels at loose ends, and–with the idea of saving up some money and getting away–she takes a job as an emergency dispatch operator. The Inland Sea is a coming-of-age story in the ‘age of anxiety’ and climate crisis.

(I see this event has been moved to October for next year!)

I’d like to say it also counts for Brona’s AusReading Month in November since it’s really hard to fit an extra book into November. I read The Inland Sea for Bill’s Australian Women Writers Gen 5-SFF event, and now that I think about it, the inclusion of Scaredy Squirrel might have helped to make the book more SFF than it turned out to be. And then I’m slightly disappointed that I’m not about to encounter Scaredy Squirrel or Chester the Cat in Australia searching for the Inland Sea. And for one second I think to myself, I didn’t know Melanie Watt wrote an adult novel! Just for s split second. Whenever I look at this author’s name, I mistakenly see Melanie Watt, who is a Canadian children’s author.

Madeleine watts the inland sea