Book Review: The Things that Keep Us Here

While the cover is beautiful, it doesn't depict what this book is really about . . . a mother trying to keep her family safe from the H5N1 influenza pandemic. I found this book sitting on the shelf at my local B&N, immediately mistook it for a mainstream fiction novel and picked it up anyway because I sometimes read that genre. The synopsis hooked me, since I love stories about pandemics and how people cope with them.

The Things That Keep Us Here had me riveted from the very first page. Not only did I want to find out if Ann and her family survive the pandemic, but I wanted to know if the government was able to come up with a vaccine or a cure before civilization got wiped out. The most powerful moment in the book (at least for me) came during the height of the pandemic. Ann and her neighborhood were living without power and in constant fear that they would come down with the virus. While Carla Buckley conveyed Ann's fear through her unrelenting obsession with cleanliness and isolation, I didn't quite feel the sense of Ann's terror until her best friend came to her door one night, very sick and wanting Ann to take care of her baby son, who may be carrying the same virus as his mother.

What would you do in a situation like that, with your spouse and children looking on and expecting you to show some compassion and kindness? Would you let that woman and her child through your front door, or leave them standing outside in the snow to fend for themselves?

Although this book didn't have nearly the raw emotional power of The Stand, it was good in its own right. I enjoyed reading from two POV's, Ann's and her estranged husband Peter's. Buckley succeeded in making this story as realistic as possible, both from a scientific point of view as well as the human point of view. Recommended.