Jenny Mustard’s What A Time To Be Alive is a tender, unflinching coming-of-age novel set against the cool, expensive backdrop of Stockholm. At its centre is Sickan, a young woman navigating the disorientation of her early twenties in a city that feels both exhilarating and alien. Coming from a small village and an impoverished family of academics, Sickan finds herself adrift among the bars, student flats, and shimmering promise of a vibrant urban life.
With this new life come her firsts: first friend, first party, first love. The novel is populated with sharply drawn, often wittily rendered characters, each in their own way reflecting, provoking, or getting swept up in Sickan’s search for identity. Hannah, a wealthy, unapologetically eccentric fellow student, becomes the friend she did not know she needed; Abbe, a charmingly popular but quietly troubled figure, her first visceral, intoxicating love. Through these relationships—and others fleeting and formative—Sickan charts her own becoming: laughing, crying, drinking, smoking, collapsing, and rebuilding.
But What a Time To Be Alive is not merely a self-discovery narrative. Beneath its surface hums a potent commentary on class and privilege. Sickan’s story is one of scraping together rent, working low-paid jobs, and feeling like an imposter in a world where others inherit ease. Mustard captures with precision both the frustration and reluctant admiration directed towards the privileged class—that peculiar cocktail of disdain, envy, and fascination.
Interwoven with this is a subtle, poignant meditation on trauma. Childhood wounds cast long shadows here, manifesting in various forms: the characters’ insecurities, their self-destructive tendencies, their aching attempts to both escape and make peace with the past. Mustard approaches these themes with a lightness of touch that never lessens their weight but renders them deeply human.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths lies in its sensory detail. A cup of coffee cooling on a cluttered kitchen countertop. A cigarette butt flicked onto rain-slicked streets. Mustard’s writing lingers in these quiet moments, capturing the texture of a life in flux. It is also remarkably creative and inventive at times, weaving stream-of-consciousness-like sentences with carefully crafted reflective paragraphs, drawing on Mustard’s knowledge of the written word.
It is a familiar story, yes—a young woman finding her footing in an unfamiliar world—but it is handled with such honesty and sharp-eyed observation that it feels anything but clichéd. It is raw, sometimes bruising, often beautiful.
I was happily surprised by how powerful this seemingly small, unassuming novel proved to be. I would recommend What a Time To Be Alive to anyone who finds themselves a little lost in the storm of becoming. It is an ode to youth in all its uncertainty, a reminder that while we may not know who we will be, there is something quietly glorious about leaning into the unknown and loving what we find along the way.
Words by Angelina Castrucci
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