I was sold on that book from the very first scene in the woods.
These are the lives of Myma and Mud-daughter, deep in the forest, isolated from the world of “Rot”:
“In the dark beyond the fence, creeps the rotted thing. Sleep you sound now, little Daughter, safe from everything."
Here is their own little world with their own rules and their own language, with their keepsakes and keepsafes, their rituals, their joys and fears. But what if the “rotted world” came a-creeping in?
Will it scupper their weirdly claustrophobic relationship?
You can feel, smell and touch the haunting forest, the dark atmosphere closing in on you.
Irvin has delivered a stellar debut with “Life-Cycle of a Moth”. Already crouching down to be poised for her next creation.

This book was so beautiful. Going in I thought it was going to be very dark and there are certainly darker elements but this very much reads as a fable about love, family and fear. I really liked the writing style and the use of language was perfect.

To be completely honest, I was scared that when I started to read this book it was going to be so similar to Lucy Rose’s The Lamb in terms of maternal relationships that I worried it would put me into a slump. However, as I continued to read Irvin’s storytelling I was hooked, tense in not knowing what would become of Daughter and Myma whilst having glimpses of the past interweaved with the present plot line.

Living on the outskirts of the community, without language, without peers, and without modernity, daughter has never seen another person other than her mother. They play games, catch food, forage, cook, and clean in their own world located in the forest. Daughter’s language is stunted, limited to the words she has heard from Myma and are written on tins. Daughter sits on the fence of maturity at almost sixteen yet linguistically, and socially she is much younger through Myma’s insistence on keeping her safe from the rotted people who exist on the opposite side of the fence.

The plot of the novel picks up pace with the introduction of a new person who transgresses and comes over the fence, forcing his existence upon Daughter and Myma - unsettling everything daughter knows of life and the world. A breathtaking and tense metaphor for the harsh world we live in, generational trauma that rots from within, and how maternal love despite its pure intentions, has the potential to stunt, and hold back the children they sought to protect.

An emotionally wrought novel about what happens when you leave society behind and raise a child in the forest. I really liked the vibe of the this book, the folk lore elements, the atmospheric descriptions. This book is beautifully written, the prose is lyrical and the language style of daughter is really interesting. The only thing I didn’t like is the trauma Maya encountered that lead to her leaving society, it’s always the same thing for female characters and this book was so well written, I feel like a different route could have been taken with her. I love the whole thing with the grey woman as well

Rowe Irvin's debut novel Life Cycle of a Moth was featured in the Guardian/Observer's influential annual Best New Novelists list for 2025.

She explains in the interview included in the article who she has drawn on childhood memories from her upbringing in rural Norfolk and Suffolk :

“The cyclicality of the natural world was very present ... We’d find dead things and bring them back.” She was about six when she “came home with a squirrel tail around my neck. I was like: ‘what an amazing scarf I’ve found!’” On another occasion she kept a pheasant’s egg in her room for a week – until it burst under her bed. “We were very curious. We wanted to poke things and turn them over.”

She also acknowledges the influence of two authors who gave her permission for the artistic approach in the text: "Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing gave me permission to completely commit to the idiosyncrasies of a voice without regard for any rules. And Lucas Rijneveld gave me permission to play with taboos around the body."

All of this is present is what is a fascinating, if for me not entirely satisfactory novel.

It opens strikingly with a fox witnessing a scene which the reader soon realises was a gang rape, with the victim left for dead. This was Maya, who survives, and hidden deep in the forest comes across a remote hut, where two people appeared to have lived, the mummified corpse of one of them still there, a grey woman who appears real to her as a kind of spiritual mentor. She stays in the hut where she brings up the daughter born as a result of the assault, although she deliberately disconnects the two events, isolated from society:

"She never thought of the child as having anything to do with what had happened to her. The girl was of Maya's body. She was of the place where Maya had birthed her. No other place, no other body.

Maya pointed to the child, then to herself.

'You are my daughter,' she said, 'and I am Maya.' She made a closed fence of her arms.
'And this,' she said, 'this is where we live.'

The story Maya told was simple, like a nursery rhyme. In it, good and bad were clear and separate in a way they had not been before she'd drawn her line of branches between them.
'In the dark beyond the fence, creeps the rotted thing. Sleep you sound now, little daughter, safe from everything'

She saw how her daughter's head tilted, the small ear filling like a cup with her voice. She felt that she was making something

She did not think of it as lying, and to her it wasn't. There had to be something wrong and rotten in the world, some foulness that could get inside a person and empty them of good. Men, Maya knew, could spoil like vegetables sickened with blight. And that particular sickness, that rottenness, it could be passed on, father to son. It was easier to think of those who had hurt her as hollowed, their humanity gone. If she tried to understand them in any other way, things became muddy and unclear. So she separated dark from light, and in this way she made her own sense of things."

The narration then alternates between two timescales:

One tells the past story of Maya's own upbringing, told in the third person, one dominated by banal male violence, from a once loving father who turns into an alcoholic, to the pressure for casual sex from the local boys (Maya herself more attracted to a childhood female friend, and later a brief affair with an itinerant female worker from overseas), culminating in the opening scene.

The second. set 16 years after the opening event, is narrated by her daughter, brought up in complete isolation from the rest of the world, led to believe that outside the simple fence that surrounds their hut and a part of the forest are Rotters, a different breed, not humans like them, the daughter and Maya, who she calls Myma, developing their own special dialect and rituals, including Maya harming herself when she feels her daughter has transgressed into danger.

"I pick up a flattish stone, turn it over in my fingers as I go. With the other hand I feel for the place in the hem of my shorts where Myma has sewn a Keep-Safe. A scrap of skin from the roof of her mouth, folded up and tucked away in the scratchy cloth.

Protect you against Rot, Daughter.

Shudder with the thought of it, that worst thing. Rot like the gone-bad-on-the-inside of fruit, like biting into an apple without checking for holes and my mouth filling with a rancid brown mush. Worse than a foul mouthful the Rot that comes from outside the fence. If that kind of Rot got into me or Myma then we would be the gone-bad apples. Us Rotters.

Everything inside us eaten away. I wouldn't be Mud any more. I wouldn't be any name at all. I wouldn't even be Daughter.

Those Rotters out there, they look like you and me, Daughter, but they're all empty on the inside. You can see it when they turn their backs, see right the way in. They're hollow, like dead trees."

Maya never named her daughter who instead takes her own temporary names from the treasures she finds in their area of the forest:

"Everything sounds, even the air when there is no wind in it. I am always hearing. All murmur, all patter.

The objects in the Museum sound different to other things in the forest. The Museum is an apple pip, dried-grass plait, acorn cup, alder catkin, big grey stone, bottled puddle, squirrel tail, birch leaf, thistlehead, finger-shaped root, finch nest, smooth black pebble, owl feather, moss, pine cone, dried worm, black beetle, shiny conker, large dead spider, coughed-up owl pellet, crow foot, millipede, dried sap blob, blue egg, dandelion stem, shrew nose, mouse tail, bracken frond, badger claw, rusty metal ring, seed pod, rat spine, crispy dead wasp, rabbit paw, hazel twig, rook beak, white garlic flower, bramble thorn, bent nail from the doorway, scab of lichen, vole skull, oak leaf, hawthorn bark, snail shell, walnut shell, splinter from Myma's heel, apple bark, muntjac hoof, dried redcurrant, hedgehog spike, rabbit rib, dead woodlouse, pigeon wing, weasel foot, sycamore seed, holed fox tooth.

These things have names hidden inside them.

When I finger-thumb-plucked the pip from the apple pit the sound it made was full and round, like a humming in the throat or a whomph of wings. I felt the thrum of it behind the bone of my breast and knew that it was my name, my first. I said to Myma, Now I am Pip, and she looked at me a moment then said, Pip-Daughter, okay, yes, and she wrote it in the dirt with a stick and showed me it was an unusual word because it reads the same both ways. But when I held the apple pip to her ear so she could listen to its hum, she shook her head and frowned."

As the daughter approaches her 16th year, and for the first time, a 'Rotter' approaches their compound, a man from the outside world, who Maya captures and initially plans to kill, but the grey woman stays her hand, and then allows to stay with them on pain of not interfering with their unusual arrangement. This isn't a story of the daughter discovering the world outside, as the man, Wyn, is himself an outsider and turns out to have his own connection to the hut (which he himself was not aware of), although as he and Maya become friendly he does try to persuade her to tell her daughter the truth behind the myth she has constructed for her.

The novel is atmospheric, and the natural scenes vividly and viscerally drawn, and the world which Maya has constructed plausibly done (although one has to imagine this set in an earlier time), particularly the language and the rituals. Against that, the set up feels something done before (e.g. in Room), the somewhat fey language can be a little grating over more than 250 pages, particularly as there is relatively little action, and overall I'd have preferred this at a shorter length.

3.5 stars.

This is the most complete book I’ve read since North Woods by Daniel Mason, which was my favourite of 2024. By ‘complete’, I mean that it satisfied so much of what I want from a novel: heart wrenching emotional attachment; saying something unexpected and unique; a use of words that makes me want to read both more slowly and more quickly- and a sense that I won’t forget this book soon or easily.
I find it completely astonishing that this is Rowe Irvin’s debut.

I believe that no matter what with a book you've been fortunate to receive you should give feedback, good or bad.

With Life cycle of a moth I simply could not continue reading this book. I gave up 10% of the way in. I found the manner in which it was written really strange to read and the story seemed to be all over the place. I simply could not see where the story or the characters were gone and did not have that feeling I normally get with a book. Sorry if this is not what you want to hear.

The writing didn’t work for me unfortunately! I thought the story seemed interesting initially, but I was thrown off by the Daugher/Myma language. The whimsical and waxing prose of the writing was hard to sink my teeth into. As well, the story was something I’ve read time and time again, there wasn’t anything new within this story for me.

Life Cycle of a Moth by Rowe Irvin is a stunning and haunting debut that grips you from the very first page. This book is a masterclass in atmosphere, tension, and emotion, exploring the complexities of maternal love, isolation, and the fragility of the life one builds to protect what one loves.

Set in a remote woodland, the story revolves around Myma and her daughter, Daughter, who have lived in complete isolation for nearly sixteen years. Their life is intricately woven with the changing seasons, their routines, and rituals, which have kept them sheltered from the outside world. The daughter has never questioned the life her mother has chosen for them, until one day, a red-haired stranger, Wyn, steps into their isolated world, disrupting the balance that Myma has so carefully constructed.

The arrival of this outsider threatens to unravel the very fabric of their existence, forcing Myma to confront the depths of her fears, sacrifices, and the lengths she will go to to protect her daughter. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Myma's desire to shelter Daughter from the world is driven by a traumatic event in her past that she is desperately trying to shield her child from, but how long can one remain in isolation before the cracks begin to show?

Rowe Irvin's writing is truly remarkable—hauntingly beautiful and deeply immersive. Her descriptions of the forest, the routines of Myma and Daughter, and the shifting emotions that run through the story are vivid and poignant. The world-building is rich with folklore and nature influences, making you feel as though you are part of this secluded, fragile world. The way Rowe describes the smells, the dust, and the tactile sensations in the environment is so immersive that it almost feels as though you're physically present with the characters.

The narrative unfolds in a way that feels both immediate and reflective. Flashbacks enrich the present-day plot, gradually revealing the hidden history that shapes the characters' choices and the strained relationship between Myma and Daughter. The flashbacks and the present story come together in a beautifully executed way, where past and present meet at a pivotal moment, adding layers of complexity to the characters' motivations and decisions.

One of the most striking elements of the story is Daughter's naming process. Using a "Museum of Objects," she names herself according to the objects she collects, taking on their characteristics when needed. This unique way of identifying with the world around her is symbolic of her deep connection with nature and her desire to forge her own identity while remaining under the protection of her mother’s world.

At its core, Life Cycle of a Moth is a profound meditation on the lengths a mother will go to protect her child, even at the cost of her happiness or safety. It is a story about sacrifice, love, and the inevitable consequences of living in isolation. The tension between Myma’s need to protect her daughter and the world that is slowly encroaching upon them is palpable, and the emotional weight of the book stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

This book is an absolute triumph. Rowe Irvin’s debut is a haunting, beautiful tale of love, loss, and the complexities of motherhood, one that will linger with you long after the story ends. If you’re looking for a novel that combines deep emotional resonance with striking prose and a unique narrative, Life Cycle of a Moth is a must-read.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

This is definitely one I liked better when I could give some time to it. Immerse myself in the writing and the world of these two isolated characters.
I enjoyed reading about the current life they were leading, the rituals and order they put things in to survive.
When Wyn showed up, I wasn't as interested. I felt then, that I'd read this book before.

I'm sorry, this is a personal thing, but I really dislike this kind of fey language that makes up this book: 'Myma calls me Daughter but that is not always my name. What are you now, Daughter? she asks, and I tell her I am Stone or Vole or Twig or Finger or Worm. She laughs at my names and calls me Little Stone, Little Sniffler-Daughter, Crawly-Kin, Wriggle -on-the-Belly Daughter, Branching, Finger-Daughter'.

This is a book full of 'raggedness', of 'red howls', of cutesy 'This-and-Thats' and 'Keep-Safes'.

Underneath it all is a story I've read times before of a mother who traps her daughter in the name of safety, until the daughter grows up, meets a man/outsider and realizes her whole world is a make-believe created by a matriarchal figure. It's all quite straightforward and it's only the fey language that makes it seem strange and potentially interesting.

If the writing works for you then this could be a powerful folksy fable - for my personal taste, I found the prose indigestible.