Genre: Literary/Contemporary Fiction
Published: Little A Publishing, August 2024 My Rating: 2/5 stars
We Were Pretending is the sophomore novel by author Hannah Gersen, which tries to juggle many interesting concepts. Grief, family, friendship, nature, technology, mushrooms and more… Sounds like a lot? Unfortunately, it was, and despite many interesting ideas, the story as a whole became less than the sum of its parts for me.
The story:
Leigh Bowers is at a breakingpoint in her life. After being caught illegally administering Hecate’s Key—a medicinal mushroom that brings peace to terminally ill patients—Leigh has lost everything in her life; from her job to her family and reputation. She sees a chance at redemption in a chance meeting with an old childhood-friend, turned natural-health-guru. Jennifer and Leigh reconnect and strike up a bold plan together; flee to the Canadian forest, live off the grid, commune with nature, and harvest the rare palliative mushrooms to administer in the care of trauma-patients. But like the forest floor; beneath the outward beauty, something dark is growing beneath, waiting to emerge.
What I liked:
We Were Pretending drew me in from the start with a strong sense of atmosphere and the introduction of a wide range of interesting topics. I flew through the first 40% in basically a single sitting, enchanted by the nature writing of the Canadian forests and intrigued by the promises being made. During that single sitting, the quality of the writing on a sentence level and the complex field of seeds being sown led me to believe I might have a 5-star read on my hands. When it came to the harvesting though; the book let me down.
What I didn’t like:
This book had the potential of about 3 separate wonderful novels inside it. It could’ve been a wonderful character-journey about a woman’s fascination with nature and mushrooms, stemming from her experiences with losing her mother to cancer. It could’ve been a tight, almost cult-like story about Leigh’s toxic friendship with her childhood best friend turned health-guru at an isolated commune. It could’ve been centered around their practice of using a combination of nature and modern technologies to treat trauma-patients, and focused on the different people Leigh meets along the way. It could’ve been so many things, just not all of them at once.
From about the half way point; the book branched out too widely and spread itself to thin. The pacing tanked and I found myself struggling to pick the book back up once I took a break.
Rather than trying to incorporate all these elements into one story, I would’ve personally preferred if the author had focused on one, to give it the page time and development it deserved.
Many thanks to Little A Publishing for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
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