I don’t generally consider myself a romance reader but the current state of the world demanded something light.
The Pretty Delicious Cafe by Danielle Hawkins is set in a small New Zealand seaside town with abundant food, twin telepathy, a hippie mung bean mother, an unhinged stalker ex-boyfriend, and a hero love interest.
Lia and her best friend Anna, who has food issues and is about to marry Lia’s twin brother, run a cafe in a seasonal seaside town. The busy season is about to arrive when a new good looking man rolls into town. Lia is attracted to him but is also trying to deal with an ex-boyfriend who isn’t taking ‘it’s over’ well.
I listened to the audio book whilst making sourdough and then gardening. The story sets a good pace and has quirky, likeable characters (except for the crazy ex). It’s a feel good eccentric romantic comedy that’s got plenty of laughs and will make your mouth water for boysenberry cheesecake. Luckily the end of the book has a catalogue of recipes from the cafe you can try out.
If you have a completed manuscript ready to edit and you’re not quite sure where or how to start, I have a solution for you. The Australian Writers Centre online Cut, Shape, Polish course is one of the most useful writing courses I have completed to date, and there have been quite a few.
Cut, Shape, Polish is a practical step by step course that will provide you with a framework, tools and templates to complete a comprehensive edit of your manuscript. The course has five modules with audio tutorials and downloadable handouts.
It starts from the macro. Get your plot and structure right to ensure a satisfying outcome, identify themes and the questions your story is asking. Learn how to map your story structure with easy to use templates so that you can dissect it for plot holes, inconsistencies and gaps and make sure tensions rise and fall in the right places.
Module two dives into character to ensure your characters develop and drive the story. Learn how to check if your characters will be engaging and believable for readers, and if their dialogue is convincing and moves the story along. Identify and resolve issues with tone, voice and motivation so that your characters are convincing and keep readers engaged throughout the story arc.
Module three covers theme, setting and descriptions. Check if you are getting your point across through layering a cohesive thread through your work. Identify and resolve issues with world building and setting, build in motifs and symbols where they can improve your story. Bring to life the story your unconscious wanted you to tell.
You will move your focus from the macro to the micro in module four and study the sentence level. Make sure your point of view is working for the story. Interrogate the balance of show versus tell, info dumps and exposition, make sure your tense is consistent and consider sentence structure and style.
The last module hones in on openings and endings of sentences, chapters, the story and the overall story arc. Catch your cliches, find the words you repeat over and over, and over. Consider the value of Beta readers, taking feedback like an adult and whether you would benefit from the services of a professional editor.
The best time to start this course is after you have completed a first draft and left it to rest for a few months. This will give you twelve months of course access to work through your edits alongside the lessons. There is a lot in the course, so you’ll probably want to complete it more than once.
Sorrow and Bliss is one of those books that straddles commercial and literary fiction. The story made me laugh out loud one moment and cry the next.
First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.
Food writer, Martha, is reflecting on her life soon after separating from her husband and about six months after finally getting an accurate diagnosis and treatment for a mental illness that has plagued her for all of her adult life. She reflects on the the two decades that have passed since ‘a little bomb went off’ in her brain at seventeen.
Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.
Martha’s telling of her life is deadpan and comically tragic. She is not a particularly likeable character, yet she becomes an endearing narrator as the reader comes to understand her struggle with her own behaviour and identity.
Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. usually on their own.
Sorrow and Bliss is a love story set in London and Oxford. It is a novel about mental illness and it’s effects on sufferers and those who love them, including their uniquely dysfunctional middle class families.
After that, Nicholas got up, stretched, and told me I could have his spot because he just remembered a girl he need to make amends with because his final act before rehab was putting a nine iron through her windscreen after taking more than his recommended daily intake of methamphetamine. ‘Which I discover is non. Back shortly.’
Various doctors, psychologists and prescriptions have failed to help Martha. She and those around her fall back on the belief that she is simply too sensitive, and a bit difficult. Martha searches for answers, knowing that something isn’t right. Her experience exposes the fallibility of the medical profession that often gets things quite wrong, and through doing so can change the course of a persons life in ways that can be quite damaging.
Suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop
Interestingly Martha’s illness is never named. I found this both liberating and frustrating. It forces the reader to understand her issues purely from her perspective on the world and the lived experience of her illness. It also frustrated that very human drive to label and categorise things.
I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like.
Grisly. A faith healing cult on an isolated island divided by a fence and inhabited by wild pigs, the preacher gone mad and isolated away from his flock with his disabled daughter on one side, the rest of the faithful on the other. A story starts circulating on the mainland that a half human-half animal creature has been seen wandering the island.
Everyone hates him. Me – I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.
Journalist Joe Oakes is invited by the Psychogneic Healing Ministries to visit the island in order to debunk the myth that a devil is running around. The cult members don’t realise that Joe has history with the mad minister. Years previously he wrote an article under a pseudonym calling the minister a sham healer.
What unfolds is a gruesome, page turning thriller with a twist that will make your skin crawl. If you can’t stomach a bit of graphic violence it may not be for you. It may also give you nightmares.
Pig Island is the fourth novel by Mo Hayder, the pen name for Beatrice Bastin who died recently from complications of Motor Neurone Disease. Pig Island was nominated for a Barry Award for Best British crime novel and a CWA dagger.
Hayder wrote ten thrillers, earning herself the title of ‘queen of fear’. There is also another due out in 2022 written under the name Theo Clare:
Jack Caffery series
Birdman (2000)
The Treatment (2001)
Ritual (2008)
Skin (2009)
Gone (2010)
Poppet (2013)
Wolf (2014)
Stand-alone novels
Tokyo (2004), also published as The Devil of Nanking (2010)
Benson and Mike’s relationship has never been easy and now it’s in a rut. Their fights with words and fists end in sex. Each is unsure about what their relationship is or where its going. Memorial is a modern story of the relationship between two gay men – one Japanese, one a black man – and their relationships with their families.
That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn’t make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn’t diminish the love. It just changes forms.
Sexuality, race, class, trauma and grief are the subjects of Memorial by Bryan Washington. The story is written in three parts across two locations – Houston and Osaka – and told from the perspective of the two men.
You’re taking up space in another human’s brain, she said. You’re a foreign entity. A parasite. That’s a lot by itself.
Memorial opens from Benson’s perspective. His partner, Mike has decided to go back to Japan to see his dying father. Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, who Benson has never met arrives to stay the day before Mike leaves. Benson finds himself sharing a house with a Japanese woman he doesn’t know in a predominately black neighbourhood in the throes of gentrification. Mitsuko is disappointed that her son has run off to be with her ex-husband just as she arrives and resists Benson’s attempts to draw her out.
He came out of my body. He’s a homosexual. He left his mother with a stranger. I’ve already got everything I need to know.
Mike arrives in Japan and takes up residence with his estranged, dying father, Eiju, who runs a bar and pretends nothing is wrong. Mike communicates via sporadic text messages with Benson and equally sporadic conversions with his father.
There are a lot of spaces in this novel. The unanswered questions and awkward silences between characters draw your attention to what is not said, revealing that there is as much, if not more meaning in the unspoken than the spoken. A beautifully written insight into the ordinary life of men.
If lockdown continues for much longer, I may well complete most of that list of outstanding jobs that has been hanging around, some for longer than I care to admit. When I go for my daily walks in the forest I notice what a superb landscaper nature is. She throws together trees and shrubs and rocks and delicate flowers to create a display of visual perfection that I strive to emulate in parts of my constructed garden.
There is a patch of gravel beside my house that has been largely unchanged for over twenty years as I have never been quite sure what to do with it. The area is in a cutting and shaded and damp in winter, dry in summer. I had an inspiration after discovering some discarded pavers beneath the house and set to work over two weekends.
Before
After
I often listen to audio books whilst working in the garden and chose Seed and Dust. A Gardener’s Story by Marc Hamer. His story was the perfect companion. Told over a twelve month period when Marc tended elderly Miss Cashemere’s garden on her country estate, the story is a meditation on gardening, nature and life.
In my imagination, this life has been a path with many, many forks, each one a choice to be made. Each unchosen route fading from view as it became the past, its destination unknowable. No destination is really known until you arrive, and then it becomes merely a point along the way — a vague place rarely planned for, simply the start of another adventure. The only thing to do is be happy with the outcome, whatever it is. The path leads to the end, as all paths do.
The story meanders month by month through the seasons honing in on minute changes on the estate. Marc’s work in the garden reflects his love for nature and his distant yet intimate relationship with its owner who observes him and occasionally interacts with him is tentative yet tender. Reflections on nature are interspersed with Marc’s reflections on his own life and philosophical observations of humanity and what gardening has taught him about life. It is a beautifully written story. I really enjoyed listening to the rambling baritone of actor Owen Teale reading the audio.
By the time I got to the end I had fallen in love with the garden the man and the voice and started listening to it again.
Seed to Dust was shortlisted for the Wainwright Price in 2021 (winner to be announced next week on 7th September). I understand that the printed novel is beautifully illustrated and have ordered a copy for my shelves as well as one I have sent as a gift to someone I think will enjoy it also.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Yesterday marked the 200th day of lockdowns in Melbourne since the beginning of the pandemic. The solitude of lockdown has a rhythm, and despite the shrinking of our worlds to 5km life goes on. It is surprising how much still happens.
I wake at 5am to a dark silence interrupted only by the occasional sound of snoring from the great yellow hound languishing on my bed.
I suppose I will have to make the coffee again, I think. Sometimes I say it out loud and wonder how I might teach the dog to do the task. Though, I suspect even if Harper knew how, I would still be the morning barista as I would lose patience with her indolence before she with mine.
I make coffee and breakfast. Chicken and vegetables for the dog, muesli, yoghurt and an orange or tangelo plucked from my tree the day prior for me. I climb back into bed with my hoard (the dog will have to get up for hers).
My plan is always to write, but often I become lost in news stories about COVID, vaccines, politics and the destruction of the planet, or find myself falling blindly down some social media rabbit hole. My morbid fascination with all this unpleasantness so early in the morning confounds me. Though perhaps it is not so surprising considering some of my reading as reflected in my book reviews. My father keeps suggesting Thomas Hardy and Jane Austin to cure my macabre tastes in literature.
It is hard to know whether my staccato concentration is a consequence of social media or COVID brain, but I often become frustrated by it and apply additional effort to focus my concentration, congratulating myself for putting pen to paper and bleeding ink across the page (or screen), even if it is only 200 words. This blog generates a rigid moment of writing discipline each week that I am grateful for having imposed on myself, as even in my laziest writing periods this weekly ritual keeps me engaged.
Mornings are the most precious part of my day. They seem to me always to be filled with hope.
I leave the house with the dog just before dawn. The first kilometre of our morning sojourn traverses a quiet road running up a north-south ridge. To my left I catch glimpses of the sky burning shades of yellow, orange, pink and red from the sun rising behind the mountains to the east. I spy the occasional ringtail possum crouching in a tree as if enjoying the event. To my right, the blinking lights of Melbourne gradually fade as the sky brightens. I am transported along this enchanted path by the morning chorus as it shifts and swells and rolls with the growing illumination. I am absorbed and in awe of the beauty around me.
Away from the stories of pestilence, conflict and climate change it is easy to find great pleasure and meaning in the small things of life. An emerging flower augers the coming spring, the pure joy on my dog’s face as she wallows in the muddy waters of the Yarra and explores the bushland, the sight of Tawny Frogmouths roosting high up in a eucalypt. The ninety minute walk is a fortifying elixir and the most precious part of my day.
These Feathered Flames is a young adult fantasy reimagining the Russian folktale The Firebird. Alexandra Overy’s debut novel is about sibling relationships and politics. Twin sisters Izaveta and Asya are born into the royal family and separated at age ten. One is destined to become the next queen of Tourin and the other chosen to train as the new (reluctant) Firebird whose role is to ensure magic in the realm remains balanced.
How was it that her sister had been taken to live with a monster, but somehow Izaveta had become one? A creature molded by her mother’s manipulations, by the constant betrayals of the court. Asya might have a monster beneath her skin, but Izaveta had one in her heart—in her very essence. So much a part of herself that she no longer knew how to separate one from the other.
When the girls are seventeen the queen dies unexpectedly. The Firebird, Asya, receives a Calling that the queen’s death was due to a magical imbalance and returns to the palace. The princesses must step into their respective roles prematurely and become reacquainted with one another as they work out who they can trust and who killed their mother.
Whispers are enough to bring down a queendom
The fantasy genre is a fun way to escape the world entirely whilst still exploring the human condition, good, evil, power and morality. These Feathered Flames unfolds from the perspective of each of the sisters with political intrigue, swash buckling action scenes, magic and a little girl on girl romance. The story ends with a cliffhanger in preparation for book 2.
Rebecca Handler’s debut novel Edie Richter is Not Alone explores Alzheimer’s and the impact of euthanasia on families. Edie, her mother and sister care for their father/husband with early onset Alzheimers. When he no longer recognises her and stops eating Edie decides to suffocate her father without telling anyone.
After Dad’s diagnosis, Mom started labeling things and let Dad grow a beard. She went to a baby store and bought plastic child-protection locks for the kitchen. Just so he won’t stab me, she said, as I wrestled with one of them, trying to get a corkscrew out from a drawer. You remember Tanya from my walking group? Her mother attacked the cleaning lady and they had to move her into a home.
After the funeral Edie and her husband, Oren, relocate from San Francisco to Perth, Australia. The story unfolds with dark humour as Edie explores her new home and is incrementally undone by her dark secret. She murdered her own father. Eadie’s behaviour becomes increasingly unpredictable and outlandish. The story is a well crafted, if discomforting, study of a woman unravelling due to her own lack of insight into her very complicated grief. Oren scrabbles around in fruitless frustration trying to penetrate her emotional defences and help.
I thought that life was about moving from one thing to another, all the previous things falling down behind you, but I was beginning to see this was not the case at all. That in fact every action, every thought, and every word uttered, they all stayed with you and formed a sort of jumbled collage
I found this novel morbidly compelling, a little voyeuristic and viscerally uncomfortable. It is a study of a woman’s mental and emotional disintegration resulting from her inability to open up to others about what pains her the most. She pushes away those closest to her and behaves in such appalling ways that she infuriates others who begin to believe she really is either bad or mad. As Edie becomes more and more isolated her realtionships and inner life fray. Eventually something has to give.
A challenging, engaging and thought provoking read.
I don’t read a lot of young adult fiction, but enjoy it almost without fail when I do. The Art of Being Normal is a story about a couple of teenagers on the outer. David is on the cusp of puberty and hasn’t told his parents that he is transgender – they just think he’s gay.
Leo is the new kid at school. He’s from the wrong side of the tracks and there are rumours he was kicked out of his previous school for doing something terrible. Most of the kids avoid him as they think he’s dangerous. David decides to try and befriend him. Leo doesn’t want (nor think he needs) friends and just wants to be left alone. His councillor talks to him about anger management and thinks he would benefit from making friends.
Participating?’ I ask, screwing up my face. ‘Participating in what?
Jenny sighs again. ‘In life, Leo. I want you to start participating in life.’
Author Lisa Williams was inspired to write the story after working in the national health service in England in a department focussed on helping teenagers who are questioning their gender identity. I would be interested to know the perspective of someone with lived experience, but for me it was a refreshing read. Diversity of representation is an important progression in fiction – stories like this did not have exist in mainstream fiction until quite recently. We all want to be ‘seen’ and being reflected in fiction contributes to that sense.
For someone so convinced that life isn’t fair, she plays an awful lot of bingo.
Told in first person, The Art of Being Normal is a funny and moving story about class, coming of age, and coming out in all its multi-colours. Told with plenty of surprising plot twists, the story is beautifully and sensitively written and had me laughing out loud in places. A great book for young people who don’t fit the mould and anyone who wants to engender a greater understanding and empathy for difference and diversity.
R L Smith 