Household: A Post Pandemic Story

by Elizabeth Kelly, Julia Bai (Illustrations)

In a challenging post-pandemic world a young girl begins her service at a great house. She hopes this will give her security and opportunity - but what price will she have to pay?

80 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd duck of a book - a very brief novella that reads like the author's outline for a much longer novel. I've been searching out Canadian writers, and the subtitle of this one intrigued me. The author page calls this a novel of the future, and a character asks the doctor if the baby will be a boy or a girl, "but there are no machines to determine this now" as if there had been in the past. Speculative fiction usually contains at least some references to an identifiable past but this "future" is set firmly in an Elizabethan, male-dominated world which seems to have obliterated any aspect of women's legal rights. Some characters were as complete as they could be in 70+ pages, and others were just names and stereotypes who spoke a line and vanished. I'm not a fan of traditional historical fiction so it wasn't really my cup of tea, but it was a quick, fun read and I did enjoy the truly Canadian tone of the resolution. Let's all just get along, eh?