Sealed

Starred review from May 6, 2019
Delivering bone-chilling suspense, debut author Booth reimagines dystopian SF as a terrifying modern tale of motherhood. Alice is 36 weeks pregnant, brimming with worry and obsession. As her city is inundated with cases of cutis, a grotesque illness that causes skin to seal over bodily orifices, she and her husband, Pete, move to a remote mountain home. Pete thinks Alice is just obsessed with finding something to fret about, but Alice begins to recognize that their secluded new environment may not be secluded enough. Reeling from the anxiety of impending motherhood, unstoppable biological dangers, and a relationship under unendurable pressure, Alice is left to decide whether her fear is, in fact, unfounded—or whether her paranoia is the only thing that can save her family. Booth paints a picture of good, everyday people under attack from their own bodies; the consistently tense imagery and tone create a vulnerability within the characters that is about individual biology as much as widespread disaster. Readers looking for an all-too-real dystopian scare will find this subtle, intense, deeply unnerving novel makes their skin crawl in the best way.

June 1, 2019
In this compelling, anxiety-inducing debut, pregnant Alice is living in rural Australia with her boyfriend, Pete, after they fled the city's debilitating pollution, severe climate change, and an outbreak of a contagious, fatal disease, cutis, which causes human skin to grow unabated. Alice's narration enhances the unrelentingly tension of the plot by making it clear that she is not to be trusted: she has an alarmist view about the severity of the cutis outbreak, she is in deep grief over her mother's death, and she is anxious about becoming a mother. Is she overreacting, or is Alice the only realist in a quickly escalating world crisis? Sealed refuses to be categorized: it is a pre-apocalyptic cautionary tale, an intense psychological thriller, a fable on motherhood, and pure body horror all wrapped in an unsettling package that will stay with readers long after they turn the final page. Fans of Margaret Atwood will enjoy this but librarians should also target readers who enjoyed The Grip of It by Jac Jemc (2017), Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014), and The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)