Tag: book review

Book review: The Maiden by Kate Foster

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In 1679, Lord James Forrester was stabbed to death beneath an old sycamore tree with his own sword. Lady Nimmo was beheaded for the crime, and is said to haunt the site of the deed.

In the end, it did not matter what I said at my trial. No one believed me.

Lord James Forrester of Corstorphine, a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was a womaniser, gambler and drinker, who hid his debauchery behind the veil of being a respectably married Presbyterian. Lady Christian Nimmo, niece of Lord Forrester, was said to be wild, impulsive, and passionate, and a woman with a ferocious temper. She was married to a respectable fabric merchant, but it was portrayed as a sexless union.

It is this story that Kate Foster’s debut historical fiction novel, The Maiden is based on. A Maiden, is the name of the guillontine-like execution device used to behead criminals at the time. Foster’s novel is a sympathetic exploration of what would drive a relatively privileged, intelligent, married young woman, to murder her lover (nowadays an uncle hitting on his niece would be sufficient, but back then its wasn’t unheard of to get together with a relative).

The story is narrated by Lady Nimmo and Forrester’s maid, Violet, who is also a sex worker. A young Violet was cut adrift after her family died and had to work in a brothel to survive. She was paid to spend a month living in luxury in a turret at Lord James castle in exchange for sex.

Foster does an excellent job of capturing the period – from the stench of the rat-ridden city streets, to the violent lives of prostitutes, the class divide, and the luxurious country lives of the wealthy. There is superstition, reputation destroying gossip, god of course, and repentance. You could even buy a mutton pie and watch a hanging, like olden day football entertainment.

Although I read avidly and wrote with flair, far exceeding the direction of the tutor who came to Roseburn, these assets were not considered to be as attractive as obedience or serenity or silence.

Personally I am surprised there were not a lot more murders like this given the way women were treated at the time. The Maiden is a gripping read and would make a great film.

Book Review: Scrublands By Chris Hammer

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Australian noir, Scrublands by Chris Hammer has one of the most compellingly visual openings of a crime fiction novel that I have read. A hot dry country town, a gathering Sunday congregation, and a murderous priest.

Byron Swift has changed into his robes, crucifix glinting as its catches the sun, and he’s carrying a gun, a high-powered hunting rifle with a scope. It makes no sense to Landers; he’s still confused as Swift raises the gun to his shoulder and calmly shoots Horrie Grosvenor from a distance of no more than fives metres.

Journalist Martin Scarsden visits Riversend a year after a mass killing. He’s been tasked with writing a human interest story on how the town is going in the aftermath of its young priest gunning down five men outside his church one Sunday. Scarsden had been a roaming journalist reporting on conflict zones until an incident in Gaza left him with PTSD. The assignment to Riversend is a chance to help him get out of the office and find his feet again.

Riversend is hot, dry and depressing. A dying town hiding a lot more than a murderous priest. Why did the priest who was popular with the local youth, police, and many of the locals murder all those men?

He looks up at the hotel; there is no sign of life. What must it be to live in this town? To be young and live in this town? Every day, the same stifling heat, the same inescapable familiarity, the same will-sapping predictability.

The stories Scarsden hears from the caste of cagey and eccentric locals don’t marry up the public narrative first reported about the incident. There is Mandalay, the beautiful single mum who runs the bookshop, the local copper and hero, Robbie, who killed the priest to end his killing spree, the wily old dero, Snouch who loiters in the shuttered up Wine Saloon, and Codger the old man living alone (and mostly naked) in the remote scrublands.

As Scarsden begins to unpack the story, and wrestle with his own demons, another tragedy strikes and masses of media descent on the town, throwing Scarsden into the spotlight. His reasons for finding out what really happened suddenly become very personal – his reputation depends on it.

Who knows what dark thoughts and obsessions can take hold in the small hours of the morning, when the mind chases itself down dark passageways and perspective is lost?

Scrublands has many complex, interwoven plot lines that make the reader think and keep them guessing, and Hammer’s attention to detail in building the world of Riversend is absorbing. Published in 2018, Scrublands won the 2019 CWA Dagger New Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel. It is a compelling read and has recently been made into a series showing on STAN.

Book Review: The Philosopher’s Doll By Amanda Lohrey

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The Philosopher’s Doll by Amanda Lohrey is about domestic politics and conflict between the head and the heart. What happens when a woman’s biological clock is ticking and her partner is reluctant to commit to children?

I was fascinated by this novel, in part because I have never experienced the biological clock phenomenon, though I have been witness to it in friends. The Philosopher’s Doll delivers a deep three-dimensional dive into the inner thoughts of couples grappling with the issue.

Lindsay, a Melbourne philosophy academic and Kirsten, a counsellor are renovating their house. Their divergent priorities lead increasingly to arguments and perverse behaviours. He has other plans he wants to pursue, including completing the house renovations before committing to having children. He decides, without telling her, to buy Kirsten a puppy as a kind of substitute. Kirsten’s biological clock is getting louder, and after a drunken night of sex, she falls pregnant and finds herself with a conundrum. She is unable to tell Lindsay and unable to decide to terminate her pregnancy.

But now she is even more withdrawn from him, and has taken to compensating for her indecision with a series of ruthless fantasies. She will deliver an ultimatum and if he reacts badly, she will leave him. She will live somewhere in a small, light-filled apartment and it will just be the two of them, mother and child. The sperm has flown to the mark: the father has served his purpose and he can be dispensed with. These fantasies come to her like little jabs of false cognition, and then fade

As the story unfolds, Kristen and Lindsay reveal less and less of themselves to each other and more and more to the reader through their inner narratives. There is then an abrupt entrance of a third narrator some ten year later, Sonia, a student infatuated with Lindsay, who reveals what happened after the events, the decisions Lindsay and Kristen made, and who they became.

The Philosopher’s Doll is a rich, multi-layered dive into a very real life conundrum and how people grapple with very personal decisions when life throws them wildcards. Lohery is also author of The Labyrinth, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction in 2021. Her writing is not light, but it is elegant and marked by profound characterisation and is beautifully meditative to listen to in audiobook form. Her work is born out of deep thought, clashing personal narratives, vexed choices, and meditations on the complexity of interpersonal relationships.

Harley Loco: A memoir of hard living, hair and post-punk, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side by Rayya Elias

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I read Harley Loco with my book group, and what a wild ride it was! Rayya Elias’s memoir is about migration, not fitting in, trauma, drugs, hair, music and survival.

Rayya Elias (1960-2018) is Syrian. She was born in Aleppo and grew up with three siblings in a big flat with French windows and marble halls. A couple of childhood accidents – one involving leaping from a wardrobe and her brother failing to catch her, and another where she broke her leg and was bed bound in traction for an extended period were shaping moments for her.

Pain makes you stronger, and nothing is too great for us to achieve.

Orthodox Christians, her family fled Syria as the Ba’ath party rose to power. They headed for the promised land, the USA, and went from being landowner farmers with a father who was treated like a king to being poor immigrants, where the only work her father could find was as a janitor.

One of the first photos I saw of myself was when I was about four or five years old. I was at my brother’s first communion party and I was singing for a table of archbishops and priests with a cookie in my hand…When I look at these pictures, I love myself, and I think I look perfect and adorable. These pictures spark memories of happiness and elation at all the attention I got for singing.

Rayya’s family socialised mainly within the Syrian community in Detroit, but she went to an American school, where, despite her best efforts to fit in and make friends, she was an outsider and mercilessly bullied. Her experiences changed her from being high spirited and fun to developing a tough exterior and taking drugs to numb her discomfort and grief, and because to begin with it felt like fun.

I learned from a very young age that life was chaotic, but if I could hold my breath long enough (even while kicking and screaming), and come up for air once in a while, they I would have the chance to fight for what I wanted or needed.

The drugs soon took hold, but Rayya also discovered she had a talent for cutting hair and making music and started to become successful at both after finding her tribe through those pursuits. She also discovered she preferred girls to boys, a more complex issue for her to grapple with – particularly given her cultural background and that she had a devoted boyfriend at the time.

I could be free. The edge on life that I’d been looking for all along could be mine now: my work, my goal, my pride, and my dream. It seemed easy and obvious and like the only conceivable choice. All I had to do was be clean, that was the edge.

Her first big female lover refused to choose her over a man, and Rayya’s path to self destruction was sealed. Her emotional void was filled with coke, casual sex, porn, crack and eventually heroin and it was not long before all her success in hairdressing and music started a backslide into theft, betrayal, hustling, drug dealing, homelessness, multiple arrests, and jail.

People talk about that moment of clarity for drug addicts. I sat there, in the pile of dirt and sweat I’d woken up in, and I cried. Unable to get up, unable even to turn off the hideous TV, I cried and cried, out of fear for myself and sadness at the mess I’d made of my life. There were no police, parents, rehabs, shrinks, friends, or lovers to tell me what was wrong with me. There was only a voice inside my head, first low and weak, but quickly gathering strength and conviction till it rumbled through me as powerfully as the call for heroin had the evening before. It said: Rayya, you don’t need to do this anymore. You can be free.

Her family never gave up on her, but multiple attempts at getting clean with violent withdrawals failed, until sobriety eventually prevailed. It was either that or die, and she figured given she had overdosed several times and survived, death could not come from drugs.

The calm and smooth ride of life, without all the peaks and valleys, is a goal I constantly strive for now. But back then, it felt unnatural.

English was no Elias’s first language. The writing of her memoir is sparse, frank and brutally honest. She paints herself frankly as she descended into a spiral of self destruction, self absorption and cruelty and she sucked others into her addiction. Harley Loco was uncomfortable to read, but ultimately triumphant as Rayya did escape addiction and find her way to a good life after drugs.

Book review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is an original, laugh out loud, keenly observant romp through through the world of sexism, discrimination and stereotypes of the late 50s and early 60s.

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun

The story opens in 1961 and is told (mostly) by the no-nonsense Elizabeth Zott, a quirky, self-assured pioneering chemist, feminist, cooking show host, mother of an illegitimate daughter, and a very intelligent and insightful dog.

I don’t have hopes,” Mad explained, studying the address. “I have faith.” He looked at her in surprise. “Well, that’s a funny word to hear coming from you.” “How come?” “Because,” he said, “well, you know. Religion is based on faith.” “But you realize,” she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, “that faith isn’t based on religion. Right?

Elizabeth Zott’s profession was as an unapologetically blunt and brilliant research chemist, but her career had been frustrated because a) she’s a woman b) she’s unapologetically independent c) she lives with the man she fell I love with (her soul mate) but refuses to marry him d) her lover dies and she bears his illegitimate child e) misogyny.

No surprise. Idiots make it into every company. They tend to interview well.

By an accident of fate she becomes the star host of television cooking show, Supper at Six, after the love of her life dies and she is fired from her job at the research institute. She decides to ignore the show’s producers and uses the platform to speak to millions of housewives about realising their own potential.

“I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you ladies — a chemical reminder that if things are too good to be true, they probably are.”

Lessons in Chemistry is brimming with idiosyncratic characters including Elizabeth’s soul mate, fellow scientist and Nobel-Prize nominated, grudge holding, orphaned, rower who doesn’t like rain, Calvin Evans; her highly inquisitive and intelligent daughter Mad Zott; their pooch, failed bomb disposal dog Six-Thirty; neighbour Harriet Sloane who hates her husband but holds out the hope of true love; and Walter Pine, TV producer and single father of Mad’s friend who steals her lunch.

Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change – and change is what we’re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others’ opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future.

Garmus’s debut, Lessons in Chemistry covers serious themes with dark comedic grace and absurdity through a fresh lens. The novel won the Australian Book Industry Awards International book of the year. It was a joy to read and one of those rare books I couldn’t put down, and I love that Garmus was 65 when it was published – what an inspiration!

Book review: Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter

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Sedating Elaine is a tale about broken hearts, bad decisions and unresolved childhood trauma told with dry, dark humour.

Young Londoner, Francis drinks and takes drugs to avoid her feelings, problems and a girlfriend she doesn’t really want. Inevitably the drugs become her problem when she finds herself in debt to her drug dealer for a lot of money she doesn’t have. Her job in a restaurant won’t raise what she needs before her dealer comes good on his threat and sends his debt collectors around to teach Francis a lesson.

This is the problem when a person makes everyone feel special; it means none of them are special.

Francis is still hung up on the last girlfriend who dumped her. She doesn’t particularly like her current sex crazed girlfriend Elaine who she picked up at a bar one night and has been hanging around ever since. But she asks Elaine to move in and pay rent so she can pay off her debt.

Francis was the sort of person who accumulated incredibly short, intense relationships that ended explosively, beyond repair, well beyond salvaging a friendship

When Elaine moves in with all her stuff and her noise, Francis starts to be driven mad. She craves quiet and alone time, so she decides to drug Elaine to keep her quiet until she’s paid her debt. Then she’ll dump her.

Elaine greeted her at the door wearing g a face of concern and nothing else.

The morally unhinged cringeworthy protagonist in Sedating Elaine will take you on an outrageous rollicking ride through her dysfunctional life. The debut novel was an easy, if uncomfortable read that had me laughing inappropriately all the way through.

Book review: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

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I have been know talk to trees and animals myself, so a novel that includes the point of view of a fig tree was enticing. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is a beautiful story about the turbulent history of Cyprus and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. The story contains three narratives.

Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.

A forbidden marriage between a Greek Christian and a Turkish Moslem during the post colonial violence in Cyprus is so disapproved of that Kostas and Defne Kazantzakis move to England. As young lovers in 1974 they met in secret at The Happy Fig, a tavern owned by two men who understand forbidden love.

That is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Kosta and Defne’s 16-year-old Ada in London in the 2010’s is grieving her mother’s death when her aunt Meryem arrives and unravels the Cypriot history of Ada’s parents.

So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.

The third narrative belongs to the talkative fig tree originally growing at the The Happy Fig tavern. A cutting of the fig is transplanted into an English garden by Kosta.

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else’s starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected

The Island of Missing Trees is about beauty and violence, secrets, history, natural history, love, trauma and resilience. The story examines ordinary lives can be recast by societal events, what compels someone to leave their homeland, the adjustments of immigration and the impact of the consequent loss of culture.

Book review: Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is an odd, but compelling genre-bending work of fiction. It is written in the style of a biography, including photographs, bibliography and references with footnotes, by a narrator who is a journalist. Biography of X is set in a USA with an alternative history in which the southern states have succeeded during the ‘great disunion’ of 1945 and become a dictatorial theocracy.

The sky was moonless and blasted full of stars, and as I looked at them, exhausted into naïveté, I felt almost fearful of the vastness above me.

X was an eclectic artist, of books, music and art installations. Before her death in 1996, the mysterious X had collaborated with the likes of David Bowie and Tom Waits. She took the name X in 1982. It was unclear whether any of her many prior pseudonyms where her real name.

The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain—and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk.

The narrator/author of the biography is, CM Luca, X’s widow. She is obsessed with trying to find the truth about the woman to whom she was married. She is motivated to write the biography after becoming infuriated by another published by someone else that she feels misrepresents her beloved.

This pathetic boy—no biographer, not even a writer—was simply one of X’s deranged fans. I don’t know why she attracted so many mad people, but she did, all the time: stalkers, obsessives, people who fainted at the sight of her. A skilled plagiarist had merely recognized a good opportunity and taken it, as people besotted with such delusion hold their wallets loosely.

Despite their marriage, when X died, Luca did not know her birthplace, date or real name. She sets out to piece together X’s past, untangle fact from fiction and process her own grief through a series of interviews with former spouses, lovers, and friends. Luca trawls through papers left behind by X trying to make sense of who her wife was and by extension their relationship and herself.

We cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live. Everything blurs when held too near.

X was clearly brilliant, difficult and troubled in the way that great artist often are. Her relationship with Luca was imbalanced and dysfunctional. Luca traces X’s origins to the Southern Territories and seeks out her family of origin, her roots as a revolutionary or terrorist depending on whom she speaks to.

But I did not find this so awful. Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

Biography of X is one of the most unusual and ambitious works of fiction I have read in a long time. Its mesh of genres, bending of history, and melding of the real with the imagined is discombobulating and enthralling.

Perhaps your ability to feel it waned, perhaps you are the one who ruins things, it was you, you—and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.

There was so much in this novel, both in form, content and emotion that it took me a long time to read it, but I am glad I did.

Book review: Cleave by Nikki Gemmell

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Cleave by Nikki Gemmell is a story about the relationship between a father and his daughter set against the stark landscape of the desert in the Australian outback.

The story begins with a cheque. The envelope that carried it was bruised with grubbiness and worn thin from too many hands. The envelope took two months to find her. The amount of the cheque was substantial and the typewritten instructions were blunt: hunt him down

Thirty year old Snip Freeman is a nomadic loner and artist based in Sydney. Her grandmother died and left her enough money to buy a ute and a request to return to Alice Springs and find her father, Bud. Dave responds to an add Snip places for someone to share the journey and the two strike up a relationship of sorts. Dave is fascinated by Snip’s free spiritedness, even after she abandons him.

A man told her once she’s the type of woman men never leave. They don’t. She leaves them. She gives them the feeling that any minute she’ll be off, so while they’re with her they’re obsessed.

Snip and Bud’s relationship is complicated. He absconded with her when she was a child after his relationship with her mother ended, cut Snip’s hair and turned her into a boy to disguise who she was. Their reunion almost becomes deadly when the two of them take trip into the desert.

People without curiosity are like houses without books: there’s something unsettling about them.

Cleave was written in 1998, but its outback setting gives it a timeless quality. The story includes Indigenous characters written without appropriation – perhaps a consequence of Gemmell’s personal experience of living in Alice Springs.

Book review: The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow & Liz Lawson

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The Agathas by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson is a fun twisty young adult mystery.

Alice Ogilvie is a financially privileged A-lister but her upbringing is largely outsourced. She has been ostracised by the popular group at school after disappearing when her best friend stole her basketball star boyfriend. Now she refuses to talk about it and just needs to stay out of trouble.

Three hours back at school and I’m already in trouble? Good lord, I’ve barely had time to pee.

Iris Adams lives in a working class area with her single mum who works hard to provide for her daughter. Iris is asked by the school to become Alice’s tutor. The two are an unlikely pair, but soon become friends as they bond trying to solve a mystery – the disappearance of Alice’s best friend Brooke.

Well,” I say, “I once saw a show about a guy who bludgeoned his mother to death in the kitchen and then cooked a full meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes, so anything is possible.”
“Iris,” Alice says wearily. “You seem like such a nice person and her your brain is full of horrible things.

As the title suggests, the book pays homage to Agatha Christie. Alice is a big fan and is inspired by what she’s learnt from the mystery writers novels, using the strategies in her own search to solve the mystery of her missing friend.

We are probably this far from donning trench coats, smoking Lucky Strikes, and slinking furtively around town, taking notes in a little black book.
Which doesn’t actually sound all that bad, truth be told.

When Brooke’s body turns up and her boyfriend is arrested, the girls decide they need to find the real truth and fix the miscarriage of justice. They are aided by the hard drinking, smoking, disheveled female lawyer representing the boyfriend who also used to be Iris’s babysitter.

An English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. Also known as the bestselling author of all time. Also, one bad bitch.

I really enjoyed the characters, the teenage dramas, the red herrings and the Christie references. Something in this one for young and old.