Hannah’s Pick of the Week: Is This A Cry For Help? by Emily Austin

“I like being older. I’d rather be me now, than me any age prior. But there is this heaviness to aging. Who I am was built on the shoulders of the person I was last year, and the year before, and before, and before. I’m not just thirty-three; I’m twenty-seven. I’m eighteen. I’m nine. I was just born. And I have to carry all of those versions of myself, the feelings they have, and the mistakes they’ve made, everywhere I go.”

Emily Austin, Is This A Cry For Help?, Chapter 13

Darcy has just returned from a two-month hiatus to her job at the Pert Public Library. This is after accidentally seeing her ex-boyfriend’s obituary, and then ending a three-day panic attack naked, out on a pier…in winter.

Darcy is good at her job: methodical, logical, follows the rules to a fault. And yet, the universe appears to test her patience immediately with a library patron watching something unsavory on the computer, said patron getting spotted by another patron, and the story blowing up on a local news site. Her wife, Joy, is busy helping her sister with her new baby, and so Darcy is flying solo for now; flying solo, in this case, means deciding to reorganize all the bookcases and attempt to rehome a male cat named Kyle, who very much dislikes the two cats Joy and Darcy already take care of.

As Darcy re-acclimates herself to the dramas of working with the public, her blunt inner voice is both a breath of fresh air and incredibly funny. A slice-of-life piece of psychological fiction, Austin’s fourth novel still feels almost…cozy? In a sense? Even as Darcy deals with the trials and tribulations of being in the spotlight, we can see ourselves in her shoes. The course of her exploration of her traumas is realistic, not stylistic. We see her backtrack, reflect, categorize, and we witness all the messy interior parts of growing and contemplating how the people we love(d) — and the people we don’t understand — make us who we are.

If you like reading character-driven books full of heart and also with people making mistakes, another great read after Is This A Cry For Help? would be Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly, or Getting Clean with Stevie Green by Swan Huntley. Make sure to check our Austin’s other titles in our catalog as well!