It also makes it impossible for her to have any friends. It is the thing that keeps her efficient and hardworking, but it is also the thing that cuts her off from her peers and family. Susan’s self-reliance is both a virtue and a vice. As previously mentioned though, they took this instability in very different directions and became almost polar opposites of each other. His drinking coupled with his careless patenting made it difficult for Susan and Edward to have a stable childhood. Their father was an alcoholic who took out a lot of his rage out on his son, Edward. Within the Green family, there is a lot of trauma. As we all know, life rarely likes to give a break and when things are going bad they tend to go really bad. Susan is particularly invested in getting her share of the inheritance sooner rather than later because she finds herself, at 45 years of age, pregnant. Both of them argue and battle over their mother’s will and who ‘should’ get what. She is reserved, closed-off (and one could argue untrusting) to those around her, and she also believes in ‘doing the right thing’. He drinks too much, is extremely disorganised, and he is very careless when it comes to those around him. Susan’s brother, Edward, is a rather terrible and self-serving person. She returns to her mother’s home and childhood town to attend the funeral and help her brother tie up everything. The novel opens with the death of Susan Green’s mother. It is not your typical contemporary fiction novel for all the right reasons and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Haywood’s discussions on motherhood, vulnerability, and complicated families. It is about family conflict, death, grief, secrets, and forgiveness. The Cactus is the debut novel from Sarah Haywood which is about letting go of who people want you to be and who you have made yourself become because of your past experiences.

The novel The Cactus by Sarah Haywood is standing upright on a windowsill next to a succulent.

Sarah haywood the cactus