Lucky me, Armfield signed this for me at a talk! Our Wives Under the Sea was amazing and this book seemed like it was going to hit many points for me: London in apocalypse, difficult family issues, queerness and endless rain. I get anxious every time it rains because of damp. Private Rites should have been absolutely my shit.

But honestly, this is probably my biggest disappointment of the year. This should have been a horror about the slow decay of drowning London. Someone at the talk said London was the fourth character, and I agree. This is, terrifyingly, exactly how I imagine we'd deal with a rain-based apocalypse. I.e., we're fucked.

The book instead focuses on the strained relationship of three sisters. I would have loved this book if the characters had more to give. But I found them so bland and unreal. Everyone had overly quirky and posh names. The dialogue was deliberately 'edgy' (hate this word but I don't know how else to describe it). Their thoughts were incredibly overwritten and unbelievable. Private Rites would have worked better as a novella. The writing was fine for a while, but by the end it got really annoying - the overly cool quirkiness of it all.

There's not much plot, which was fine. I wasn't expecting one, this is more of a character study. But suddenly the plot appears in the last 10 pages! You could tell something strange was going on before, but I didn't think we'd actually find out what it was. Things went overboard. It was too dramatic, and then the book ends abruptly with no aftermath or reflection. 

So I don't know what Armfield is trying to say with this book. There was real potential when the narrative pulled back to focus on the slow-moving climate disaster and drew similarities to our current reality. I could totally see this future for us. But those interesting ideas were overshadowed by the sisters, who were more archetypes than fleshed-out characters.