This Might Sting a Bit

​WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW
Title: This Might Sting a Bit
Author: Claire Adlam
Publisher: Quickfox
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
‘Bloody Hell!’ I found myself muttering, frequently, as I read through this roller-coaster tale of heavy-duty opiate addiction. Prescription drugs on steroids, washed down with copious swigs of vodka and the familiar fragrance of a joint. But eliciting the ‘bloody hells’ (and a few Hail Mary’s not to have been there myself), was not the combo so much as the sheer quantity. 

So our addict is Kat or Kit-Kat as she’s known in the family. A farming family living in Zimbabwe at the time of Mugabe’s land reform. As a backdrop, edgy enough to drive any white farmer to drink I would imagine. But political stress is not the trigger – instead a flying rugby ball and a pair of teetery stilettos are what cause Kat to start on the long slippery slope of painkillers. A slope littered with lies, wrecked relationships, a crooked pharmacist and some institutionalized wake-up calls of note.
While Kat’s experience forms the core of this drug drama, she’s not the only one with a ‘problem’ and there are some other pretty harrowing skeletons rattling in the family cupboard as well.  But aside from the expletives, what also kept going on in my mind is How Does Claire Adlam Know All This? Originally from Zim herself, her descriptions of incidents and individuals are enormously convincing. I know only a few Zimmbos well, so its maybe just coincidence, but I’ve always found them to be disarmingly honest and open – and apart from the deceit around her dependency, Kat is gobsmackingly frank with a wicked wit and way with words – especially insults. But the slippery slope? There’s definitely been some research here.
To say things get really bad would be an understatement - the title phrase comes from injections around the eyes to numb the pain. Without giving too much away, she does end up in rehab, and again Claire appears to have an insider’s knowledge of these things (I won’t mention the ‘fishbowl’), so there’s a lot to be learned here, and much of it cautionary. It’s a clever plot with ends all tying up neatly. Apparently Claire wrote it a few years back, so for some time she says, ‘it’s been a footrest under my desk’. I imagine she’s feeling much relieved to finally have it out there. At over 460 pages it was no small book to write, and as her first novel, almost certain to have liberated her to write another.
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