Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite

In Tom Strelich’s Mustard Seed, after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, selected American families are secretly transported into Mustard Seed, a vast underground city beneath the hills outside Bakersfield that is built to preserve civilization during an expected nuclear war. Gill Hill grows up inside the enclosed settlement, believing the surface world has been destroyed by radiation and mutants. Following a deadly plague that leaves him orphaned, Gill is raised by musicians Miles and Tawney until an act of mercy forces him into exile through a sealed emergency tunnel. Alone on the surface for the first time, Gill discovers highways, cities, music clubs, churches, television, and ordinary life continuing decades after Mustard Seed vanished underground. As an adult known as North and later Mister Frostie, he searches for proof that the hidden world still exists beneath Li’l Pal Heaven.

Tom Strelich’s Mustard Seed has the mournful curiosity of a writer looking closely at people shaped by isolation long after the original fear has faded from public memory. The underground city beneath Bakersfield gives the novel its premise, yet Strelich keeps returning to the quieter question of how human beings preserve tenderness after spending years hidden from the world. North Hill is unforgettable through the care he extends toward forgotten places and discarded lives. His restoration of Tawney Tomlin’s trailer feels almost sacred because every repaired object has the weight of memory refusing to disappear. That same instinct follows him into the roadside burials he shares with young Hertell Daggett, where even dead animals receive ceremony and recognition. Strelich writes Bakersfield with dusty intimacy, especially around Whisper Hill, where faint accordion music drifting upward from buried vents gives the landscape the feeling of history breathing beneath the earth itself. Intelligently written and frequently very witty, readers drawn toward speculative literary fiction rooted in Cold War America will appreciate the novel’s patient humanity.