You know that metaphor of the frog sitting in the pot of water while it slowly comes to a boil? That's what this book felt like.

A regime implementing emergency measures against it's own people in modern day Ireland and a single family's fight as the world dissolves around them. That definitely drew me in. In some ways there was no way I wouldn't eventually have found this. Within lies a promise of something vaguely in the same vein as a "1984" or "The Children of Men" or even "Parable of the Sower". They all contain elements that can be found in some new shape in this book, but where all three of the previously mentioned left me with a sense of some promise unfulfilled, "Prophet Song" left me somewhere else.

At times, I was moaning at characters making stupid choices, wrong choices. Being wreckless or naive or in denial. Yet I constantly had to ask myself, can I say I would have been able to act much differently? It can be easy to make choices on behalf of fictional characters, when you imagine being the hero.

The story of these quite normal people trying to make sane choices in an insane world are not that far from people elsewhere in the real world. People coming face to face with some power beyond them, that has already decided long ago that they have no interest in whether they live or die. Somehow, even right after reading about the Nakba in Palestine and the revolution in Iran in '79, it is often too easy to put the book down knowing the facts of the matter, but not much else. The choices that has to be made, when so few choices are left. The fight for agency when several conflicting parties have already decided your fate one way or another. The loss felt, while losing yourself. The reaching out and clinging on to hope, any hope, even if the voice in your own head tells you to turn around. These pages told that personal side of events and did it brilliantly.

I did not feel good after reading this book. I wanted more. Even just one more chapter. Not to revel in the world of the story or the unexplored possibilities, but because I could not bear the uncertainty of the next chapter that was not there.