Natural Disaster Author: Lisa OwensISBN-13: 978-0349020235Publisher: ViragoGuideline Price: £16.99, 196ppNatural Disaster is a novel set across a single day. It’s our narrator’s final day with her children, Felix, a toddler, and Rudy, a baby, before going back to work after maternity leave. She has decided to take this last day together upon herself, to make it “special” rather than, as her friends have suggested, sending the kids off to their nursery a day early and going to a spa.So, we are immediately faced with the first of a buzzing hive of quite irritating questions: why on earth didn’t you just do that? Instead, in what read to me as a bizarrely retrograde idea of perfect motherhood, she persists, throughout the day and seemingly in every aspect of her children’s lives, to take it all upon herself. Any shortcut is perceived as some sort of mothering lack; any opportunity to ask for help or give herself some slack, a failing. Needless to say, the “special day” with her two young children quickly descends into chaos.I have no doubt that many readers, especially women, will adorn this book with such well-worn terms as honest, unflinching, relatable and perhaps even hilarious. And yes, there are mildly funny observations and attempts at slapstick absurdity (she ends up wearing a frog onesie from a hen party to the hospital). The character is somewhat self-aware, constantly agonising about the fact that she is this overbearing yet ever-haphazard mother. She guiltily looks forward to returning to work and bemoans the comparative freedom of her husband. All of which, I think, is meant to make the book feminist. But it has the opposite effect – women have always agonised. It’s their actions that matter, and hers are barely above trad wife-level. I found this novel genuinely shocking. Not because of all the ways parenting can go wrong, or how children can be wily or difficult or constantly demanding (this is not a case of a woman without children naively astounded by the realities of parenthood). My issue lies solely with the character of the mother, and her stunningly unfeminist approach to not only mothering but all of her personal relationships. She is like one of the women Betty Friedan interviews for The Feminine Mystique back in the early 1960s: women trapped in domestic drudgery, who cannot comprehend an alternative. Reading this novel, you’d think nothing had changed for women in the past 60 years. Lucy Sweeney Byrne is an author and critic