Category: Reviews

Book review: Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down

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Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down is fiction written in the style of memoir. The book won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. 

The story spans the years from 1975 to 2018 in the life of Maggie Sullivan and takes us from Australia to New Zealand to America. Bodies of Light is not an easy book to read – it’s emotionally demanding on the reader, and leaves a lasting impression.

I became a new person a long time ago, and by the time I got that message, I didn’t think anyone was looking for who I used to be.

Maggie spent her childhood institutionalised, or in foster families, after her drug addicted father went to jail for injecting and killing one of this friends. Her mother was already dead from an overdoes when Maggie was just two years old. She soon discovers that the world of ‘care’ is not always caring and suffers at the hands of various people who take advantage of the vulnerability of parentless children.

I have a good memory, but there’s no space for my mother in it. She is only a feeling, very faint; a map of nothing. She’s a straw sunhat, a clip-on earring in the shape of a fish, a bowl of peanuts.

Maggie becomes adept at compartmentalising her life, but at 19 experiences catatonia and psychosis and lands in a psych ward for a period. In her 20s she marries and is then accused of infanticide after her three babies die. She makes herself disappear, then is alarmed when a man from her past contacts her and asks if she knows what happened to a woman who looked a lot like her and disappeared twenty years earlier.

The Sydney of this time was a different place to the honeymoon city I’d visited with Damien. That one was the crescent of the bridge, the rolling waves beneath the ferry, the shaded streets in The Rocks where we’d bought touristy postcards to send home. Everywhere was so lush, everything blue and green. 

In Bodies of Light the narration of Maggie’s life tackles heavy topics head on, including sexual abuse, suicide, drug addiction, infanticide, suicide and broken relationships. It is story about the effects of trauma, resilience, hope, reinvention and kindness as Maggie strives to find a place where she belongs.

Book review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

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Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a novel about what happens when you go too deep. Leah is a marine biologist who goes on deep sea missions. Her most recent mission went horribly wrong after the vessel lost power and disappeared for six months. They saw otherworldly sights in the depths of the ocean, and one colleague died.

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognise the teeth it keeps half-hidden.

Miri thinks life will return to normal once Leah is home, but soon realises that Leah has been changed by her deep sea experience, and continues a metamorphosis, both physically and mentally, on dry land. She spends entire nights in the bathtub and drinks saltwater.

I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quietened, a froth of activity tapering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.

Miri reminisces about the love they had before her Leah was lost to the ocean floor, and watches on in despair as her lover slowly dissolves.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a story about grief and love, and living with uncertainty, told in alternate points of view by Leah about the mission, and Miri about what happens after the mission. It is a weirdly beautiful and at times grotesque book.

Book review: Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz

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Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz is a crime novel with a difference that rocked my foundations. The story flies in the face of the usual crime fiction structure. It is told from the point of view of an eighteen year old protagonist who tells us early on that she only has weeks to live. She continues telling the story after her murder.

Maybe the people who appear brave are merely doing the thing they have to do. It’s not a matter of courage, then, to pack up and leave a life. Just a lack of any other option, and the sudden realization you probably don’t have anything left to lose.

Two women separately go to New York, arriving on the same day. Eighteen year old Alice Lee has fled a relationship with a lecherous school teacher, stealing his camera. Australian, Ruby, is escaping an affair with a colleague who is engaged to someone else. 

How many times does politeness keep us rooted to the spot? We stand on the brink, making a choice whether to tip over into trust or disgust, and we remember all our training, the lifetime of it. The doctrine of nice, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings.

Alice and Ruby’s paths cross when Ruby is out running along the Hudson River on a stormy day and finds Alice’s body in the water at the rivers edge. Ruby soon realises she must find out what happened to Alice, not let her just disappear and be forgotten. She joins a Death Club to meet and be supported by others who have been up close and personal to death.

The thing is. When the dead speak back, we are seldom loud enough to be heard over the clamour of all that living going on.

Before You Knew My Name is a feminist novel about gender power imbalance, loneliness, love, sex, shame, mortality and the ordinary human fears that result from our vulnerability. It is also something of a commentary on the standard ‘dead girl’ story, because it makes us look at, and know the victim, something crime novels seldom do. It is rare that the dead girl gets to tell her story and be seen as a whole person.

Book review: The 10pm Question by Kate de Goldi

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Young adult novel The 10pm Question by Kate de Goldi is about 12 year old Frankie Parsons. He’s a worrier. 

Frankie lay in his bed. He lay facing the wall, his eyes open, but seeing only blackness. His entire body ached. He wanted to cry but it wouldn’t happen. His insides were dried out, somehow. He was prickly and withered and exhausted

Frankie worries about all the illnesses he could catch, about his mother who never leaves the house, the fat content of his food, whether his cat has worms and smoke alarm batteries. He recites the names of birds to try and keep his unruly mind, the rodent voice, under control. Then, at 10pm every night he goes to his mother’s room for comfort, to tell her about his worries and hear her tell him everything will be ok.

He was a funny guy, and a smart one- and the smartest thing about him, in Frankie’s view, was that he never, ever, ever worried.

Frankie marvels that his best friend Gigs never seems to worry. The two of them love to sneak up on, and frighten the yappy dog they pass on the way to school every day. The dog falls for it every time. Frankie’s carefully controlled world is disrupted when a new girl with dreadlocks starts at his school. Sydney is opinionated, loud, spontaneous and vibrant and makes her own clothes. She also asks a lot of awkward questions that make Frankie look at his life through different eyes.

‘She has to be a caged bird, doesn’t she?’ He kept looking ahead. ‘Something that’s had its wings clipped. Something really pretty, but a bit sad.’

The 10pm Question is overflowing with eccentric three dimentional characters beautifully bought to life. A whimsical, heartbreaking, hilarious, thoughtful eccentric story about anxiety and mental illness more generally, told with great compassion. Enjoyable for young people and grown-ups alike.

Book review: Trust by Chris Hammer

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Trust is book #3 (following Scrublands and Silver)of Chris Hammer’s Martin Scarsden series. If you’re not a ‘series person’, Trust is also perfectly readable as a standalone. The thing I love most about Hammer’s novels is their tightly woven, complex plotting, and book #3 did no disappoint. 

I liked him. He had a commitment to the truth. Lawyers don’t, as a rule: we just seek and reward the better argument.

When Martin listens to a phone message from his partner Mandy and hears a terrified scream, he races back to their isolated house on the hill to find her missing, and an unconscious policemen on the floor. He goes in search of Mandy and finds himself in Sydney. Meanwhile Mandy’s kidnappers reveal themselves to be violent people from a past she’s been trying to forget, and they have tentacles reaching into her and Martin’s present lives.

They didn’t live quarantined from the consequences of their actions; they could not travel unimpeded to new worlds; there was no vaccine against the past.

What ensues is a fight for survival in a plot mired in power-games, greed, corruption, privilege and fraud. Martin and Mandy must uncover the truth in order to free themselves from the past.

Trust is fast paced, action packed, Australian noir, with a dense plot that takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride. A novel for crime fiction lovers.

Book review: The Horse by Willy Vlautin

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The Horse by Willy Vlautin was a very random selection for me, but I am glad I picked it up.

67 year old Al Ward is a jaded, drunken country singer/songwriter living alone in an abandoned mine in the Nevada desert where he goes to try and dry out. Only his memories are keeping him company until one day an old injured horse appears blinded and bloody at his door. 

‘There’s a horse’, he whispered. ‘An old horse that’s standing in front of my house. He’s blind and he won’t eat and I don’t know what to do.’

When the horse doesn’t leave and coyotes and bad weather start to close in Al decides he needs to try and save the beast. It is after all a kind of metaphor of himself. His journey with the horse is interspersed with memories of his life as a musician, his bandmates and his loves.

“…I like sad songs and sad singers the best…You write with a broken heart and I understand broken hearts.”

The Horse is a short, bleak, melancholic but heartfelt story about devotion to creativity, loneliness, addiction, regret, love and the underbelly of America.

Book review: Devotion by Hannah Kent

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It is rare for a novel to draw tears, but Devotion by Hannah Kent was one such story. At its heart Devotion is a love story, but it is also an exploration of devotion in its many forms – human bonds, faith, and nature.

In 1930s Prussia two young girls who don’t fit in find one another and forge a friendship that blossoms into love. Hanne, who can ‘hear’ nature like music and is finding the changes in her adolescent body challenging doesn’t share the same dream of marriage as her peers. Hanne meets fellow outsider and newcomer, Thea in the woods and the two form an instant friendship, discovering unconditional acceptance in one another.  

Somewhere in the press of time, I was caught, and now I remain here, like a flower turned to paper, untethered to the soil.

They are from the Old Lutheran community that is being subjected to Calvinist reform including the closing of their Lutheran church and the banishment of its priest. The congregation meet in secret while they petition the government for permission to leave so they can find a home where their faith is accepted.

Eventually permission is granted to emigrate to South Australia and the community decide to flee Prussia. Both girls families board the claustrophobic ship to begin the torturous six month journey across the ocean. Hanne dies from illness but becomes stuck in the world, an almost invisible presence in Thea’s life.

Dying is unlike living. The smooth running of time is for the beating heart only. The dead stutter. The hands on my clock do not turn to numbers but to each other.

Emotion spills from the pages of Devotion – love, loss, yearning, joy, beauty and heartbreak. Kent’s writing is beautifully poetic as it traverses Prussia’s magical forests, the wild ocean crossing and the dry bush of South Australia. Devotion is a beautifully vivid mesmerising story.

Book review: Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton

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Trent Dalton is a divisive author – people seem to either love or hate him. I have had a crush since hearing him interviewed for Adelaide Writers Festival back in 2019. He was so earnest, sentimental and open. Lola in the Mirror is Daltons latest novel and has a good dose of his signature magical realism, which I love. The story takes place in the lead up, during, and after massive floods in Brisbane.

Mum never told me where she was born or how, or who her parents were. The past is dangerous for girls on the lam. I think she was born from a rock fertilised by a rainbow. 

The protagonist is a 17 year old girl with no name, living homeless with her mother since she left her partner with a paring knife in his neck to escape a domestic violence situation. They live in a 1987 Toyota HiAce van with flat tyres parked in a scrapyard besides the Brisbane river surrounded by a community of other homeless people. The girl is a talented drawer and dreams of becoming a famous artist exhibiting in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She said my father was a good man on the outside, but it had taken her too long to see his insides. She said you gotta be married to a man at least five years before you really see his insides. She said sometimes you can find a light inside a feller that burns so bright that it starts to burn inside you, too. But all my mum found inside my dad was black monster blood. 

The magical realism comes in when the girl looks into an old mirror she picked up from a kerbside rubbish collection and sees the reflection of an older woman. Sometimes the woman is glamorous, sometimes bruised and broken, but the girl finds solace in her presence.

Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what’s my future? What’s my past?

Themes include homelessness, friendship, domestic violence, family dynamics, addiction, crime, and the impact of natural disasters. A whimsical, sometimes sentimental tale of good prevailing over evil, and the transformative power of art.

Book review: The Night in Question by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

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The Night in Question is book 2 of young adult series, The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

That underneath all her cattiness, the bragging she would do about stupid Hollywood events she wormed her way into, her obsession with being an actress, she had a decent heart.

While snooping around the castle where the school dance is being held, Alice Ogilvie stumbles across one of her classmates, Rebecca Kennedy, lying in a pool of blood with another, Helen Park, standing over her holding a bloody knife. The clumsy coppers think it’s an open and shut case, but Alice and her friend Iris believe there’s more to the incident that first impressions.

“This is so Agatha Christie: a secret passage, a hidden staircase, sneaking around in the dark with a storm raging outside. A shiver of pleasure runs through me.”

The ghost of Agatha Christie is sprinkled through The Night in Question as the story unfolds from the perspectives of misfit friends and polar opposites, Iris and Alice. Using their expert mystery solving skills learnt mainly from reading Christie novels, they realise the incident may be connected to events that took place in the castle in the 1940s. They set out to solve the puzzle and save Helen Park.

“They’re a little flashy. I think I remember my parents kind of joking about them at some point, like they can buy whatever they want, but the one thing they can’t is respect.”

YA can be just as brutal as adult fiction and The Night in Question does not shy away from topics such as domestic violence, class, corruption, betrayal, mental illness, and of course teenage friendship and family dramas. The Night in Question is a well plotted, fast paced, entertaining YA read.

Book review: Cutters End by Margaret Hickey

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Debut outback noir set in South Australian, Cutters End, by author and playwright Margaret Hickey is a dual time line police procedural mystery.

DI Mark Ariti is recalled from long service leave to reinvestigate a cold case in the remote country town of Cutters End. He is aided by the cheerful and detail oriented local Senior Constable Jagdeep Kaur. Ariti is from the area himself and soon discovers a personal connection to two of the witnesses – an old girlfriend and her best friend from school, who share a long buried secret.

Ingrid laughed. ‘Haven’t done much hitching, have you, Mark? And it would be different for a man. For a woman, there’s always the pressure to entertain, be funny, make them feel like they’re pleased to have picked you up.’

The investigation revolves around a death on New Year’s Eve in 1989, in the scrub off the Stuart Highway 300km south of Cutters End. The incident was initially believed to be due to a car accident. The man who died was something of a local hero due to having saved a girl and her mother from drowning in floodwaters. The girl grew up to be a celebrity and used her influence to initiate a relook at the case, claiming the original investigation was botched.

Ariti’s digging unearths the disappearance of a number of women in the same area around the same time, and soon there are multiple deaths to investigate.

Two hours into the trip, driving in the police lease car on the highway heading east, Mark clipped a roo on his side window. The grey body ramming his car gave a sickening thud and for a split second he thought he’d hit a women wearing a beige suit. The roo jumped wildly into the middle of the road and he braked, heart pumping. Natalie Merchant crooned. The roo stood, stunned, before lurching into a nearby paddock. 

While Ariti investigates, he is also trying to coparent and repair his relationship with his wife following indiscretions by both of them. Revisiting his past gives him pause for much contemplation about life and more broadly, about purpose in work, and ageing.

The outback has a reputation for quirky eccentric characters and Hickey milks the trope in Cutters End. In typical police procedural and cold case style there is a slow build up in Cutter End, as well as plenty of twists, layers and a climatic conclusion.