Having recently moved to Stockhold to begin her university education, the narrator of Jenny Mustard’s latest novel What a Time to be Alive is confronted with the many challenges of expanding one’s worldview. Sickan is from the countryside, with an accent that she is in the process of shedding—along with many of the more provincial details of her upbringing—such as her detached and hapless academic parents, and her relative lack of wealth. When she arrives at university she’s paralyzed by social anxiety, in constant fear of ridicule or judgement by her peers. This keeps her mostly within the confines of her apartment, focusing on her computer science courses and eschewing most extracurricular social activity. Her life has been mostly quite lonely, when she meets Hanna, an offbeat classmate who seems to revel in being a misfit, separating herself from the crowd with off-putting stylistic choices and a disheveled appearance. The two connect over their otherness, and eventually Hanna invites Sickan to move into her beautiful apartment and borrow from her mother’s designer wardrobe.
Sickan is in awe of her newfound social freedom and the joy of building new relationships, she is for the first time surrounded by friends and laughter, has people to spend her birthday and other nights out with. But Sickan and Hanna begin their friendship on relatively uneven terms, and their closeness soon becomes sometimes suffocating for Sickan, who feels controlled and used by Hanna. The situation is exacerbated when Sickan meets Abbe, and begins a romantic affair with this complicated man—provoking jealousy in her new friend. Sickan’s life has become a tangle of social responsibilities, as she navigates friendship and relationships in a city that is new to her.
The novel incudes a series of flashbacks and peeks into Sickan’s childhood that inform the way she is relating to her surrounding. Mustard weaves in these vignettes to illustrate how Sickan’s lonely upbringing and social challenges in her youth have affected her in adulthood. The novel paints a complex portrait of a young woman who’s still learning what acceptance and nurturing relationships can look like: she feels distant from her boyfriend at times but not distant enough from Hanna. As she navigates romance as well as friendship, she struggles to navigate the complex social and class structures that infect all of her relationships, and how wealth and status can permeate the boundaries of intimacy to make things less even and balanced.
Mustard builds this character into a fully realized young woman through these insights into the small and large challenges she’s faced, building a warmth with her readers that is difficult to achieve. We are brought along on Sickan’s journey, which Mustard relates with a wit and tenderness that draws the reader close. She struggles with the issues of social acceptance and self-doubt that virtually every reader can relate too (“I stare in the mirror and I know I am overthinking but merely knowing you are overthinking never helps, which makes that advice, stop overthinking things, really quite toothless because how? “). The novel concludes with a moving and thoughtful denouement, concluding the arc of Sickan’s journey with a nod to the progress she’s made. A solid entry to the canon of novels featuring young women coming of age, that feels especially tuned to our digital age.