Michele Farnsworth

The Things That Keep Us Here
Carla Buckley
Random House
Publish date: 2010-02-15
$25.00
0440245095
Hardcover
Review date: 03/01/10

In her frighteningly relevant debut novel The Things That Keep Us Here, Carla Buckley asks us all, “how far would you go to protect your family”? 

Ann and Peter Brooks are just another unhappily married couple, struggling to keep their marriage together, but completely invested in the raising of their daughters. Peter is a university researcher who has discovered that the avian flu – H1N5 – has reached pandemic status and it is killing 50 out of every 100 people it touches.  Ann, his wife (until she signs the divorce papers) is faced with holding together the home she and Peter once shared and keeping her girls safe. Suburbia is not what it once was, as food becomes scarce and neighbor turns against neighbor in grocery stores and at gas pumps. A winter storm strikes and the entire community of Columbus, Ohio is left barricaded in their homes in the cold and dark. Complicating the struggle even further,   Peter has moved back to the house with one of his female graduate students when the University is evacuated.

The inevitable comparisons to H1N1, today’s swine flu, are not accidental. The change that comes to this family, to their home, to their community and the Nation is the subject of this novel. Carla Buckley raises important questions for us all, and there are no easy answers.

What scares me more than anything in a book is when the topic of fright is something that actually has potential to happen, and the possibility of a swine flu pandemic is something we’ve all been forced to consider in the last year. For this reason alone, I couldn’t put The Things That Keep Us Here down once I began. Carla Buckley may be a “first-timer”, but the depth of her characters and her realistic descriptions of a how a 13-year old girl might act in this situation engaged me with this family. It didn’t take long for me to care about what would ultimately happen to Peter, Anna, their daughters and yes, even Peter’s “beautiful graduate assistant”. When Anna’s neighbor and best friend Libby, contracts H1N1 and walks to Anna’s front door, her infant son in tow, begging for help in saving the little boy, Anna refuses to open the door. I had to ask myself if I would have done the same thing. Buckley’s novel is filled with these types of “look yourself in the mirror hard” types of scenarios.