Roadside Picnic, but for the girlies.

I picked up this on a whim. I was buying myself a small stack for my 22nd birthday and found the blurb to be quite promising. So I thought - why the hell not? COVID-19 is a distant memory and so that familiar haunting anxiety of the pandemic had long been washed away. Four years down the line, I now felt safe reading dystopian again and that is exactly what Pink Slime is. Safe.

Nothing really happens because the apocalyptic eco-horror world ending event has already happened and is continuing to happen. We follow an unnamed narrator navigating trauma, grief, motherhood to a child she didn't want. She reflects on her relationships and everything that has led her to this point. I was strangely invested and needed to know if the narrator managed to get out, despite staying when others fled inland to escape the ecological crisis.

Pink Slime is a reflective glance into motherhood and home when those ties are deteriorating just as fast as the surrounding city.