Tag: book review

Book review: Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak

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Bridge of Clay is the second novel of author Markus Zusak who also wrote The Book Thief.

Five wild brothers, the Dunbar boys live unsupervised in a Sydney suburb amongst badly behaved pets. The eldest, Matthew, who supports the household and is guardian to his brothers, is the narrator.

Each boy stood, slouched yet stiff, hands in pockets. If the dog had pockets, she’d have had her paws in them, too, for sure

Matthew introduces his brothers – Rory who is prone to getting into fights, Henry who makes them all watch bad movies, Clay the dark horse who loves to run and is the central character through whom others are changed, and Tommy who collects stray animals including Hector the cat, Telemachus the budgie and Achilles the mule who has free range of the kitchen.

He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are: A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.

One day the boy’s absent father, known to them as ‘the murderer’ reappears after disappearing into the outback, leaving his sons to fend for themselves after the death of his wife, Penelope, to cancer. He asks his sons to help him build a bridge. Clay goes to join him to the chagrin of his brothers. The bridge building threads through the 600 pages of the book and represents reconciliation after the destruction of grief.

She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off. She looked just like a Dunbar boy. With that haircut she was one of us.

The novel tells the scrambled story of the Dunbar tribe starting with piano loving Penelope’s emigration as a teenager from Eastern Europe. Bridge of Clay is a tender, poetic, chaotic and sometimes violent patchwork story about a blush of boys bringing themselves up after they lose their mother to illness and their father abandons them. It is a story about family, grief, what makes a home, forgiveness and love. A complex, yet simply beautiful tale.

Book review: Exit through the Gift Shop by Maryam Master

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Exit Through the Gift Shop is Maryam Maser’s debut middle grade fiction novel that deftly covers some challenging territory.

Part-Persian, Anahita Rosalind Ghorban-Galaszczuk (aka Ana) is the 12.5 years old daughter of divorced parents. Ana is also dying of non Hodgkins lymphoma. She is a circumspect and pragmatic kid who carries on with life, trying to make the best of it – school, friends and family whilst juggling chemo treatment and symptoms.

The thing is that when you’re losing your hair, no shift in focus, whether it be diving head-first into maths homework and tackling a curly algebra equation or playing Jedi mind tricks on Spanx by hiding his kitty litter, will make you feel better about yourself.

No one at school knows about her illness and Ana is relentlessly bullied by a girl called Alyssa – about how she looks, her name and her heritage. Ana dreams of Alyssa dissolving in shame when she finds out about her illness. The day finally comes when Ana decides to tell the school about her illness, but the news has no impact on Alyssa’s behaviour, if anything it gets worse.

Ana’s wingman, Al, asks her loads of questions and he always sticks by her and tries to cheer her up when she’s down. Ana and Al plot revenge on Alyssa.

Rocking a purple punk mohawk, I strut my way past the Science block as if I were showcasing the latest Gucci range on a Paris catwalk during Fashion Week.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is written as an English assignment about the last year of Anna’s life and includes plenty of illustrations. Told in first person, the story covers difficult and sensitive themes such as death and dying, and bullying that shows how evil children can be. But the novel also includes much joy and explores themes like the importance of the love of family and friendship. The book is well written and punchy, but not for everyone due to the sensitive content.

Book review: The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

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One day unfolds at the same time as Elle Bishop’s life unfolds in the dual narrative novel The Paper Palace. Elle is at the family cabin at Cape Cod where she has spent every summer of her 50 odd years.

I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head, the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things that I have done.

I was quite blown away and discomforted by this story. In the first chapter, I thought…saucy…when the main character recalled her secret sex in the dark against the wall of the cabin with her friend from childhood, Jonas, whilst their respective partners were inside talking and Elle’s mother washed the dinner dishes.

There are some swims you do regret, Eleanor. The problem is, you never know until you take them.

But as the story unfolds, interweaving a series of past and present decisive moments in Elle’s life, her frailty is exposed and it becomes apparent that many of her decisions have been driven by tragic events buried in denial, secrets and lies.

But it’s what we do, what we’ve done for years now. We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were.

I found The Paper Palace to be a beautifully written, emotionally demanding read. From the beginning Elle’s life is a series of trials that explore themes including failing marriages, blended families, abuse, trauma, lost opportunities, infidelity, and the complexity of intimacy and betrayal. It is dark, heart wrenching and wistful.

Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had?

Book review: Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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In Red, White and Royal Blue you will find out what happens when America’s first son falls in love with the Prince of Wales – it’s funny, romantic and sexy, with a good dose of awkwardness.

Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves that they’re straight.

Charismatic Alex Claremont-Diaz is the son of the first female President of the US. He has a beef with his nemesis, Prince Henry and it’s proving to be a risk to US/British diplomacy. The young men’s parents and handlers hatch a plan to make them play nicely together.

‘You are’, he says, ‘the absolute worst idea I’ve ever had.’

At first they are all frenemies, but their attraction to one another soon becomes apparent when they find themselves locked in a broom cupboard together. Of course the world power’s leading men being gay presents a whole lot of other issues.

Love is like a fairy tale, it would come sweeping into your life on the back of a dragon one day.

Red, White and Royal Blue is a delightful, feel good, empowering love story with an imaginative premise. Highly recommend it.

Book review: Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Clap When You Land is a stunning verse novel about two sisters. One lives in the Dominican Republic, the other in New York. Neither is aware of the others existence.

Camino and Yahaira have the same father. He has compartmentalised his two lives and two families, keeping the sisters existence a secret He spends his summers in the the Dominican Republic and the rest of the year in New York.

Fight until you can’t breathe, and if you have to forfeit, you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.

Camino goes to the airport to meet her Papi and finds a crowd of crying people rather than his plane. Yahaira is called to the principles office to be told her father has died in a plane crash. Papi’s secret begins to unravel, and as the plane sinks to the floor of the ocean the girls lives are irrevocably altered. Then they find out about one another’s existence.

How can you lose an entire person, only to gain a part of them back in someone entirely new?

Clap When You Land is told with a dual narrative drawing out the grief of the two sisters and the impact of their father’s death as their lives are drawn closer together. The prose is exquisite – especially to listen to as an audio book read by the author and Melania-Luisa Marte. Clap When You Land is a beautiful and compassionate exploration of family secrets, the effects of socio-economic differences and toxic masculinity.

Maybe anger is like a river. Maybe it crumbles everything around it. Maybe it hides so many skeletons beneath the rolling surface.

Highly recommended, I will definitely be seeking out more from this author.

Book Review: A Case of Madness by Yvonne Knop

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The thing that struck me first about A Case of Madness, debut novel by Yvonne Knop, was the voice of the protagonist and how it so perfectly reflected his personality, bringing the awkward, nerdy Andrew Thomas to life on the page.

For most of my teenage years, I questioned why I was so different from the others. Everyone else was colourful fruit salad, and I was the oatmeal.

Andrew Thomas, a Sherlock Holmes obsessed academic has just been fired. He is also going to die – whether from illness or his own hand is to be determined. Thomas is an old school conservative nerd by nature, but harbours a deep secret about his sexuality that he can’t even admit to his best friend Mina.

When asked to describe herself, she’s always quick to reply that she’s just like her favourite coffee: dark, bitter and too hot.

Free spirited, Pakistani Mina, whom Thomas describes as a ‘stray cat’ compared to himself as ‘a scared house cat,’ is the only person who can bring him out of his shell. Mina is his complimentary opposite, his personal Watson, his only real friend, with whom he shared a flat for a period following his divorce.

Thomas is a man so deep in the closet that he ‘turns into a plank’ when anyone touches him, drinks away his personal angst and can only admit his attractions to his imaginary friend, Sherlock Holmes – and even then it’s a struggle. That is until he meets the theatrical Matt after rescuing him from a homophobic attack in the street.

I had always run away from feelings, and the urge to just jump right out the bathroom window was overwhelming.

Sherlock, Thomas’s obsession comes to life via random appearances in which he cajoles Thomas, offering him unsolicited advice or insults in an attempt to help him ‘solve his case’.

I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. I was up against Sherlock Holmes cool intellect. I wish I’d made another fictional character my psychiatrist.

A Case of Madness is a story about coming out, coming into yourself, and the transformative power of love. There is some lovely magical realism scattered throughout this novel in the form of Thomas’s hallucinations, which are essentially his subconscious speaking to him to try and save him from himself. There are plenty of Sherlock references throughout, but you don’t have to be a Holmes fan to enjoy this sweet queer romcom.

Thanks to Yvonne for the ARC!

Book review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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Nora Seed’s cat just died, her brother isn’t interested in her, she’s lost her job, is alone and feels useless. Overtaken by despair, she decides to end her life. But instead of dying Nora finds herself in the Midnight Library suspended between life and death with her primary school librarian and volumes of books on the shelves – each representing a different version on her life.

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.

When she opens a book she steps into the life written on its pages and discovers the different destinies she could have had, from being an olympic swimmer, to a rock star and an Arctic researcher. She is variously a mother, wife and orphan, famous and ordinary. If she finds one that she thinks is the good life she craves, she can stay.

You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.

The Midnight Library is a speculative fiction novel by English journalist and author Matt Haig. The Midnight Library celebrates the ordinary and how the small choices we make each day can shape our lives.

A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile

At its essence this book confronts depression and anxiety by exploring the many worlds theory that postulates that a new universe blooms from each choice we make. The butterfly effect is also alive on the pages of The Midnight Library – the notion that the world is deeply interconnected in such a way that a small occurrence in one part of our complex system can influence larger consequences in other parts of the system in a non-linear fashion.

You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.

I found The Midnight Library to be a delightfully though provoking and easy read.

Book review: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

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In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, 86 year old Francie is admitted to a Hobart hospital with a brain bleed and her three adult children assemble at her bedside. As in many families the children are worlds apart. Anna is a distracted famous architect, Terzo is a wealth manger full of certainty, and kind Tommy is a failed artist and the the family underdog.

the measure of us is not what we say or think, but what we are when we are tested by suffering.

There are decisions to be made about Francie’s treatment and the three siblings cannot agree. Tommy wants to let her go, Terzo is defiant, and Anna sides with her more ambitious brother. So begins a heart wrenching and disturbing tale of ever more extreme interventions to try and keep a dying woman alive.

The lie was one they – children, doctors, nurses – all encouraged. The lie was that postponing death was life. That wicked lie had now imprisoned Francie in a solitude more absolute and perfect and terrifying than any prison cell.

In the outside world Australia is experiencing bushfires, bleaching reefs and the demise of bees. Events Anna follows with macabre fascination on social media.

For so long they had been searching, liking, friending and commenting, emojiing and cancelling, unfriending and swiping and scrolling again, thinking they were no more than writing and rewriting their own worlds, while, all the time—sensation by sensation, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, fear on fear, untruth on untruth, feeling by feeling—they were themselves being slowly rewritten into a wholly new kind of human being. How could they have known that they were being erased from the beginning?

As Francie declines despite her children’s insistent attempts to keep her living, Anna is experiencing vanishings of her own – possessions and body parts mysteriously disappear – money, computers, fingers, breasts, a nose – and no one seems to notice.

Between her little finger and her middle finger, where her ring finger had once connected to her hand, there was now a diffuse light, a blurring of the knuckle joint, the effect not unlike the photoshopping of problematic faces, hips, thighs, wrinkles and sundry deformities, with some truth or other blurred out of the picture.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan is a metaphor for climate extinction and the anguish of ecological collapse. Both extraordinarily beautiful, emotive, disturbing and brutal. The story is brimming with magical realism and realism. It is both a family drama about dealing with aging parents and a cry of warning about what humanity will lose if we keep focussing on the wrong things as indicators of success.

Book Review: Chaos Agent by Lee Winter

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I reviewed book 1 of Lee Winter’s Villain series last week. I read book 2 on the train from Sydney to Melbourne and it did a great job of helping pass the time. In Chaos Agent Michelle Hastings has hired Eden Lawless to work at the Fixers – an excuse to keep Eden in her orbit, given she can’t bring herself to admit her attraction.

The problem is that Michelle knows that the work the Fixers does would not sit well with Eden’s ethics if she found out the truth. Michelle seeks out the ‘less bad’ jobs that could be interpreted as aligning with Eden’s view of the world and assigns them to her. She also tells her EA to make sure others in the office know to keep the truth from Eden (aka the Panda). Meanwhile Michelle starts to question her own ethics as she believes deep down she is evil.

Eden starts her first ever office job and sets out to do what she does best – community building in an office full of ex-FBI, CIA, hackers and criminal types. She starts a weekly coffee club focused on ethically grown beans and fills the office with plants to improve the air. Her colleagues soon fall for her just as much as her boss has.

“And I, for one, worship at your stupid, unfashionable, vegan-leather-wearing feet,” Daphne said. “Between our boss and these evil little reprobates, I declare you The Asshole Whisperer!” She lifted her glass and smirked at her colleagues amidst good-natured cheers and boos.

The charade fails when Eden discovers that the Fixers really is a depraved company that will do almost anything to protect and advance the rich and powerful. Eden leaves and sets out to expose the Fixers. Michelle fights back. The problem is the women have a persistent attraction to one another.

Chaos Agent is an unusual romance with loads of subplots. The push-pull between the women is a vehicle to explore what it means to be good, how we are accountable for our mistakes, that we can hold opposing feelings about others, and that the lines of right and wrong are not always clear.

It had been a month since Lawless had quit, and Michelle’s office was in disarray. Employees were cranky, mistakes were being made, and everyone seemed to silently blame her for the absence of their favorite colleague.

Eden is witty, kind and funny, if a little black and white in her idealism. Michelle is distant, strategically scheming, (mostly) ruthless and tormented by self-loathing – the classic ice queen. Their journeys are supported by a cast of unique and interesting characters from Michelle’s grandmother, Hannah, to Phelim, the Fixers brutish head of security. Chaos Agent is another slow burning romp full of adventure, fun, moments of cringe, and a bit more edge than The Fixers. I loved it as much as the first in the series.

Book Review: The Fixer by Lee Winter

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Eden Lawless is a brilliant, idealistic, if somewhat naive activist fighting the good fight. A change maker sticking up for the underdogs of society.

The downside of being a minor revolutionary was the fact Eden spent most of her life living out of her van. Gloria smelled of dirt collected from across America no matter how often she cleaned her.

Misunderstood ice queen Michelle Hastings is a corporate CEO of a secretive corporation with tentacles everywhere. The Fixers make the problems of the rich and powerful go away in order to make them, well richer and more powerful.

Cheeky. Michelle put down her phone with a smirk, deciding that, if nothing else, Lawless might be marginally entertaining. As long as she didn’t cross any lines or disrespect Michelle, she would allow it. She leaned back in her chair and gazed out at her view as she mentally ran through her task list. Something unsavory floated to the top of the pile.

Hastings hires Lawless to return to her hometown of Winpago and prevent her old nemesis, the town Mayor from winning the next election. She soon nicknames Lawless the Panda behind her back on account of her naive idealism.

Whilst supervising her new employee, a push-pull attraction grows over their weekly zoom meetings where Eden reports in her progress with the Mayor. The denial of attraction between the two women throws them both off their game just enough to create great tension amongst the action. After Eden completed her assignment, Hastings doesn’t want to let her go, nor admit her attraction, so she hires her.

‘Hey, Michell,’ Lawless said cheerfully, ‘How’s it going?’

Michelle. The impertinence of calling her by her first name still burned a little, but she was in too good a mood to argue the point when Lawless was never going to budge. ‘It goes,’ Michelle said neutrally. ‘Report’.

The Fixer by Lee Winter is a funny, cute, character driven, adventurous romp. It is the first book in the Villian series and was so much fun to read I immediately got the second one to find out what happens when Eden starts her first ever office job…review to come.