June 29, 2026
Tilt, by Emma Pattee
I don’t ask for much from a camping trip—just perfect weather, and an absolute banger of a read selected from a bookshop en-route to the campground. This time it was Beach Reads Bookshop in perfectly delightful Port Dover, where Robyn’s pick—Tilt, by Emma Pattee—totally made my weekend.
Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s the totally gripping story of Annie, nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib in Ikea—she’s left it too late, as usual—when an earthquake hits, when THE earthquake hits, the big one that’s long been expected but which no one wants to think about. And the novel is about Annie’s journey through the wreckage of the city as she tries to find her husband, the journey alternating with chapters that tell the story of how Annie got here, her dreams, disappointments and compromises, a life she’d never expected when she was young and fresh and being promised that she could accomplish anything she set her clever mind to.
There was a point around the campfire when I was reading Tilt and I was almost in pieces, and my husband said to our eldest, “If this is hitting her this hard, the book must REALLY be brutal.” Because both of them have had the experience of me foisting books upon them by exclaiming, “Read this. It’s GREAT!” and they come back having finished the book and are totally destroyed, asking, “Why did you do this to me?”
Which brings me to the line in Tilt book where Annie notes that there are two kinds of people: the kind who make lists of all the ways a baby might die, and everybody else. (Annie also notes she and her husband never got around to making an earthquake preparedness kit, which was relatable. I don’t like to ground my anxiety in the physical world, preferring to keep it squarely in my head, which makes me feel safer somehow.) I’m definitely among the former group of people, although I don’t think this is the kind of book that will necessarily destroy you—although what do I know? I’m still sorry to anyone who was upset after I told them to read A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney. I thought it was gorgeous and funny. Sad, but also true and gorgeous and funny.
What I don’t tend to gravitate toward are books that anyone might compare to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, and Tilt might be the one exception to that, mostly because Lydia Kiesling called it, “The Road meets Nightbitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and how can you not be intrigued by that kind of mash-up?
I loved this book. I loved Annie’s voice, her compassion, its limits, her humour, her honesty. I love the way the narrative gripped me and didn’t let go. How the novel’s broad scope manages to contain such a massive spectrum of the human experience—the awesomeness of being alive, the terrible and terrific risk of falling in love and wanting, the devastation of realizing just how fragile all this, the very foundations on which we construct our measly existences, and the way we’d do so again and again. What a gift and what a burden it is to be human. How hard we can fight to survive.
