Category: Reviews

Book review: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

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At only 186 pages, The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a short intimate narrative about daily life. Asya and her husband Manu have lived abroad in an unnamed foreign country for a few years. Asya is a documentary filmmaker and Manu works for a not-for-profit. 

Asya, my grandmother said, don’t complicate the point. We named you after a whole continent and you’re filming a park.

They worry that they are not living a normal life trajectory, they are playing at being adults rather than committing. They made two decisions to in response to that anxiety. Asya decides to make a film about a local park, and the two decide to look into buying a house.

In a moment of panic, we decided to look for a home.

The story follows Asya as she makes her film and interviews people in the park, and we go with the couple as they look at properties to buy. While these two activities comprise the spine of the plot we also gain insights into Asya and Manus’s lives – their friends dynamics, their parents, and their elderly neighbour with declining health who they visit for tea and to read poetry to.

All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park. I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, positioning them into a fluid conversation, I’d begun to understand that there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of the day.

The story is told from Asya’s point of view and reveals her reflections on her days, and ponderings on what she wants her life to be. The ordinariness and subtlety of The Anthropologists, along with the beautiful prose are what make it a delight to read. The ordinary moments of life can also be the most significant.

Where do I feel most like myself? I don’t know how to answer that question. I guess I’m still looking.

The style and feel of The Anthropologists was reminiscent to me of other tender novels like Cold Enough for Snow and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. 

Book review: Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

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Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors is a pre-covid New York urban fiction novel populated with flawed, and sometimes unlikeable characters – simply because they are ordinary humans. The characters are at times lacking insight, bad at arguing, codependent and avoidant.

When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.

Twenty four year old Cleo is a painter with ambition but not motivation, and her student visa is about to expire. Enter Frank – they meet after a New Year’s Eve party. Frank is a fortyish advertising agency owner. The chemistry is instant and the two marry after a very short courtship – Cleo swears it’s not just the visa, there are others she could have married for that.

Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.

The relationship soon begins to unravel into addiction, loneliness and betrayal, both haunted by past baggage that prevents them from functioning well together. As their relationship turns sour, they start to turn on one another.

I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness….Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map.

They are surrounded by friends, who due to their own struggles, are unable to support them. Frank’s half-sister, aspiring actress Zoe, relies on him for handouts to support her, and his best friend Anders is in love with Cleo. Cleo’s best friend Quintin struggles with his sexuality.

He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other….

Due to their inability to connect effectively with one another, Frank turns to Eleanor and Cleo turns to Anders.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a meander about the ordinary struggles of life with the self and others, and about falling in and out of love. The novel is primarily character driven with lots of big intense feelings. If you like action, it might not be for you as the plot is loose.

Book review: Liar Liar by James Patterson and Candice Fox

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Ok, so I may have had a little binge…Liar Liar by James Patterson and Candice Fox is book 3 in the Harriet Blue series.

Detective Harriet Blue is clear about two things. Regan Banks deserves to die. And she’ll be the one to pull the trigger.

In Liar Liar Harry is on a mission to hunt down serial killer Regan Banks who killed her brother. But she is not searching for him with procedural justice in mind. She’s gone rogue and wants to kill him. Because some people deserve to die. But it is not a one way chase because Regan is hunting Harry as well, and the police are looking for both of them. 

Police bungle Regan Banks arrest, deadly serial kiler still at large. Two found dead; scene suggests Regan Banks alive and well. Where is Harriet Blue? Speculation rife detective is in league with killer.

Regan knows a lot about Harry and the people she cares about, going all the way back to her childhood. He’s using what he knows without remorse to try and draw her to him.

The public had never liked Harry. Had never believed that a Sex Crimes detective didn’t know her brother was a serial killer. 

The authors take us deeper into Harry’s psyche as she walks on the wild side driven by grit, determination, loyalty, and a thirst for vengeance. It is hard not to like Harry, as crazy as she is.

I didn’t sleep much. But when I did, my mind turned in circles, repeating their names like a mantra, connecting them end to end. When I was really tired, my lips moved. I sometimes woke to the sound of my own whispering.

Liar Liar is all action, violence and plot twists. It’s dark and gritty and suspenseful.

Book review: Fifty Fifty by James Patterson and Candice Fox

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Fifty Fifty by James Patterson and Candice Fox is book two in the Harriet Blue series. I have not read book one, but it didn’t matter, so don’t let that issue put you off. I read the novel as I am a huge Candice Fox fan and her finger prints are all over this one.

I’d been talking about the ‘key’ to my brother’s case since his arrest. The thing that freed him. A piece of false testimony. A surprise witness. Something, anything. I’d been looking into Same’s case, and I hadn’t found the key that proved he wasn’t the killer. But I had high hopes.

Detective Harriet Blue has a short fuse and anger issues stemming from an upbringing in foster care. When her brother Sam is arrested and charged with being a serial killer, Harriet is the only person who believes he is innocent and she is determined to catch the real killer. 

The only sound was the dull thump of his body on the pavement, the whisper of his styling robes, a big bird bought down out of the sky by a rifle blast.

There is one person who holds the key to Sam’s innocence, but she is locked up in a cellar being starved by the real serial killer.

You’re a hothead. And I love that about you. It’s half of what makes you a good cop. Your fearlessness. Your fire. But you need to get away from here before you do some real damage.

After losing her cool on the steps of the courthouse and assaulting a prosecution lawyer, Harriet is sent to Last Chance Valley in the outback where a diary has been found by the roadside containing plans of a massacre in the town of 75 people. It becomes apparent the plot may be legitimate when the former Chief of Police is blown up out in the scrublands. Harry has the local (not very experienced) cop to work with along with Elliot, an over enthusiastic counter-terrorism task force member who thinks he should be in charge.

I flipped through the diary. The only thing I could think that united the spree killers in the diary was their rage. Their desire to be punishers.

Back in Sydney, Harry’s partner Detective Edwards Wittacker is keeping an eye on her brother’s trial and notices some of the evidence doesn’t make sense.

Most of my life I’d wavered over a very thin line between light and dark shades of my being. There were things in me that were frightening. How quick I was to anger. How much I liked hurting people sometimes…Most of the time, my light half won out, and the shadows and smoke were sent recoiling to where they belonged, not completely driven out, but controlled…But sometimes the halves collided. 

Fifty Fifty has two plots for the price of one. While at times a bit overly dramatic, it’s a pacey novel that keeps the reader hooked. Harry’s wild antics steal the show. She’s ferocious, smart, quick to fight, has nerves of steel and a heart of gold. If you like a quick, gritty bold crime read, Fifty Fifty could be for you.

Book review: The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary

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Who doesn’t love a road trip?

The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary is set in Scotland. Sisters Addie and Deb are on a road trip in their Mini to attend a friends wedding in the north. Accompanying them is some random guy from Facebook called Rodney who needed a lift. 

But that’s the thing about almost: you can be ninety-nine per cent there, you can be an inch away from doing it, but if you stop yourself from stepping over that line, nobody will ever know how close you were.

Part way into their trip another car slams into the rear end of the Mini. The offending driver is Addie’s ex, Dylan who she’s been avoiding since their break up two years prior. Dylan is accompanied by his best friend Marcus, a spoilt, rich man-child with addiction issues.

Everyone’s got the potential to do the wrong thing—if we were measured that way, we’d all come up short. It’s about what you do.

Dylans car is wrecked, so Addie offers he and Marcus a lift. The Mini is soon straining with sweat, resentment, unfinished business, bottled up frustration and seething anger. And just a little bit of sexual tension.

The story line covers two time frames, the current one in the car and the time when Addie and Dylan first met, while she was working as caretaker of his families villa.

Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.

The big question is will Dylan and Addie reunite?

The Road Trip is a rollercoaster with many laugh out loud moments, plenty of tension and awkwardness, misunderstandings and misdirections.  An easy light read.

Book review: The Quiet and the Loud by Helena Fox

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Contemporary young adult fiction The Quiet and the Loud by Helena Fox begins with a childhood memory of our protagonist, George. Her father wakes her in the middle of the night on a camping trip to go on an adventure. Then he abandons her in a dingy in the middle of a lake. Fast forward and George lives with her grandfather, her mother and Mel, her mum’s girlfriend in Sydney near the harbour.

Ugh. Words. If only I could paint what I mean or turn it into water – then I could move over the surface of the story as it spoke. I need to talk. I want to talk.

George is eighteen and working in Mel’s art store during a gap year. She carries a lot of responsibility for other people’s emotional lives and holds a lot in. George supports her very emotive and demanding best friend Tess who is about to have a baby as a single teen, deals with a constant stream of messages from her alcoholic father, falls in love with a girl called Calliope she meets when out paddling her kayak. On the water is where George finds peace.

I get off the bus and run. I run through the fuzz of car exhaust. Past traffic lights, and lights turning on in houses…run through heat thick wind, along the up down cracked pavement, Weaving past walkers carrying their groceries. I run and breathe. I breathe out the baby crying, and Tess’ darkroom dyes and me not calling Calliope, and Laz not coming by, and Tess crying, and my dad dying. I breathe out the feeling if my body. I move so quickly, feet hitting the pavement, I stop being human, I become the path to the water, the choppy waves, all the hooded boats. I become parks and trees, leaves and fences, bikes, and bins, and houses being knocked down or built, I become breath, and bone…over, and under and away. My mind opens, splays itself as I run.. this is all there is.

The Quiet and the Loud is a gradual unveiling of the characters as wildfires rage around Sydney. The story contains weighty themes include teen pregnancy, trauma, substance abuse, anxiety, and friendships but is buoyed by Fox’s lyrical and evocative writing.

Book review: There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

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Water will always find a way. Water is life-giving, scarce (despite covering over 70% of the earth’s surface) and political.

Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak revolves around the points of view of three characters, spans centuries and moves between London, Ancient Mesopotamia, Turkey and Iraq.  Shafak is also the author of The Island of Missing Trees.

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.

Narin is a young Yazidis girl who lives near the Tigris and is gradually losing her hearing. Her grandmother is determined that Narin be baptised in the Valley of Lalish in Iraq. The Yazidis community has been subject to persecution since the year 637 of the Common Era.

Better to be a gentle soul than one consumed by anger, resentment and vengeance. Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.

Arthur is highly intelligent and has a brilliant memory but was born into extreme poverty in London in 1840 near the river Thames.  Arthur begins his working life in a publishing house, but his passion is a quest for the sacred tablets that depict poems dating back to Mesopatamia. Arthur’s character is based on Assyriologist George Smith, who first discovered and translated the The Epic of Gilgamesh.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.

Zleekhah is a hydrologist who moves to live in a houseboat on the Chelsea Embankment on the River Thames in 2018 after her marriage fails. The houseboat is owned by a tattooist who befriends her, and then becomes her lover. Zleekhah studies the lifecycle of rainfall and her character gives voice to the water crisis unfolding from climate change.

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

The story begins  in ancient Mesopotamia with a droplet of water falling into the hair of erudite king Ashurbanipal. We follow the raindrop through cycles, forms and centuries as it interacts with each of the characters until it intersects in 2018 with the main protagonist Zaleekhah Clarke who is fascinated by the notion that water might have memory.

She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.

It is hard to imagine initially how the disparate threads will come together, but they do. Along the way you learn about the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, the architecture and art of Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the horrors of living under ISIS, as well as about life along the River Thames in the UK.

For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.

There are Rivers in the Sky is an exquisitely written, vibrant, rich and meticulously researched story. Sharak is a great story teller and the novel is both intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. 

people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognise it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.

Book review: The Awkward Truth by Lee Winter

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The Awkward Truth by Lee Winter is a fun light lesbian mystery-romcom.

Protagonist Felicity Simmons is a socially awkward but brilliant corporate lawyer, and a tough negotiator who takes independence and self-sufficiency to the extreme. Totally career focussed, she doesn’t need friends, though she does worship her mentor-boss. Felicity is the protégé of Elena Bartell, media tycoon and owner of Bartell Corporation and is in training to become COO because Elena wants to move to Sydney.

“I’m perfectly calm,” Felicity snapped. “You know, this is not the first time I’ve been treated as though I’m some zoo oddity to be picked apart. People often assume the worst about me because I don’t conform to how they think I should be. I’m not warm enough. I don’t smile enough. I don’t hold my tongue or lie or coddle to protect fragile egos. Apparently, I have ‘all the maternal instincts of an alpine glacier.’ Direct quote from my previous boss.”

Felicity is a bit prickly. Her boss Elena sends her protégé off to investigate the charity Living Ruff that provides vet services to the pets of people experiencing homelessness. The charity has announced it’s in financial trouble and about to fold and Elena wants to know what happened to a significant $1.4 million donation she gave it recently. She also wants to test whether Felicity has a heart.

“Then it seems to me you have a choice. Show her she’s wrong about you. Or do absolutely nothing. Those are your options. But understand that if you want to know what your life will be like in ten years, change nothing now.”

Felicity is eager to impress, and takes her logic and smarts off to visit the homeless charity and sort it out. This is where she meets the kind, humble amazonian veterinarian Dr Sandy Cooper. Gradually Felicity starts to see the world through different eyes.

As long as she lived, Felicity would never forget what she’d just seen. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that a powerful, imposing woman might need a Harvey in her life. He seemed to recharge her emotional reserves. That’s why Rosalind loved her mild-mannered bookkeeper. Among other things, he kept her going when she was drained by a demanding world.

The Awkward Truth is a fun engaging opposites attract mystery with bold characters. The story reflects on the notion that the peaks of success are a lonely place without a passion, compassion and people to connect and share you endeavours with. It also explores homelessness, human-animal relationships, and how being confronted by those things can impact and change others. I particularly liked the charity/cute pets element.

Book review: Cactus Pear for My Lover by Samah Sabawi

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Cactus Pear for My Lover by Samah Sabawi is a memoir that traces her Palestinian family history over more than 100 years from the post-war formation of the state of Israel to the Six Days War in 1967 which resulted in many deaths, ethic cleansing, and the exile of around 250,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Cactus Pear for My Lover is on family’s experience of that time and highlights the injustices of dispossession and oppression in Gaza.

They gave them everything. They gave them the official government buildings, the airports, the seaports, the military equipment and the training. Everything! And they gave us checkpoints, prison cells, torture chambers and targeted assassinations for any one of us who tries to resist.

Sabawi’s father Abdul Karim Sabawi, a renowned Palestinian poet, was the son of a highly intelligent man with a disability and a strong, loving and illiterate mother. We first meet Karim as an elderly man in Australia in 2018 when Sabawi says she wants to write his story. The narrative is told through Karim’s eyes as a child and young man between 1918 and 1967. It recounts Karim’s birth, education, marriage and his work as a journalist and teacher as well as his exile from Gaza after the Six-Day War for his part in the Palestinian resistance. It would have been too dangerous to stay.

It wasn’t until they had finished their dinner, and began sipping on their meramieh tea, that something shifted in the air. An unmistakable sense of foreboding hung thick in the spaces between them, and settled itself in the room like an uninvited guest who kept returning. Pride and joy gave way to an irrational but real fear of loss. That was how this family had become. That is what life had shaped them into. Happiness was always a reminder of grief; pride a reminder of disappointment; and joy always brought his evil cousin, foreboding.

Cactus Pear for My Lover is about day to day life, family, love, history, politics, conflict, resistance, displacement and exile. Sabawi uses fictional characters and dramatisation along with careful research to reconstruct the Palestinian experience of the time.

Sweet cactus pears are in season, and tonight I will personally peel them with my own hands the sweetest cactus pears for my beloved.

The characters in Cactus Pear for My Lover are rich and three dimensional with extraordinary resilience. It is an evocative beautifully crafted but heartbreaking story to read due to the immense human suffering depicted, suffering that continues to this day.

Book review: Day One by Abigail Dean

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Day One by Abigail Dean is a story about the fallout from a shooting that takes place during the school play at Stonesmere primary located in a small coastal English town. Ava Ward was a teacher at Stonesmere for many years and while her class are performing, a helmeted man with a rifle started firing from the back of the room. Ava died trying to protect the pupils. Marty, Ava’s daughter, who says she was there on the day of the shooting is one of the point of view characters.

More red flags than a matador convention.

In the months following the incident conspiracy theories start to swirl. Trent Casey who knew the shooter and lived briefly in Stonesmere is involved in promoting the conspiracy theories. Trent is also a point of view character.

My memories trembled. I reassembled the room, just as it should have been. Gathered the children back to the stage. Put the chairs back in place. Dried the floor. Tucked phones back into pockets, handbags, palms. There I was, in the heart of the audience, with my mother’s hand in mine.

Both Marty and Trent are unreliable narrators, but gradually the truth about what occurred leading up to the shooting emerges and what really happened on that fateful day at the school unfolds. 

They had both been children, and when you were a child it was easy to mistake almost anything for love.

Day One contains multiple points of view, split narratives and non-linear timelines that keep the reader guessing as the truth unfurls through pared back prose. A tense, gripping, tragic mystery brimming with secrets and miscommunications. It’s an engaging ready, but not a story for sensitive souls.