My word, it's an oddity this one, to be sure! Young Khristen finds herself wandering a bleak Earth, where Nature has been abandoned and just a few elderly folk try to take action against those who were perhaps responsible for the terrible state of things. Khristen encounters some of these elderly survivors residing in a run-down resort (imagery here vividly bringing to my mind some of the characters and environments in wonderful paintings by the brilliant Julianne Hundertmark). Here, too, she meets the enigmatic young Jeffrey - a highly intelligent child, to whom, in one brilliant quote, his mother says, "Jeffrey, don't play with your thoughts"! I will need to read this novel at least once more to see if I can "understand" it a little more, but that's no bad thing (the same could well be said of much of Franz Kafka's work, and that great writer's name is evoked many times in "Harrow"). Many questions remain for me after the first reading: is this Earth our Earth?; is it purgatory?; are the characters living or dead?; is Jeffery far more than he appears?; and are Khristen and Jeffrey the hope for the future? I've given four stars, rather than five, because I felt the quality and coherence of the writing varied somewhat through the novel, but any book that contains sentences such as, "Well we have to live in the now. To be anywhere other than the now is to paint eyeballs on chaos." has to be worth a go!