Tag: book review

Book review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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: The 10pm Question by Kate de Goldi

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn Reviews2 Comments

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

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.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Jodi Picoult is a fascinating author. She’s prolific, and a master of the moral dilemma. Unafraid to tackle any issue in popular fiction her stories have shone a light on racism, abortion rights, gun control, and gay rights. She has also penned several issues of the Wonder Woman comic book series. Picoult is highly popular but has received little critical acclaim, and has even been the subject of book bans in Florida.

My father taught me that beekeeping is both a burden and a privilege. You don’t bother the bees unless they need your help, and you help them when they need it. It’s a feudal relationship: protection in return for a percentage of the fruits of their labors.

Apart from liking the title of Mad Honey, it’s a cleverly written, easy to read suspenseful story packed with subplots and surprise twists. Mad Honey is a collaboration with Jennifer Finley Boylan.

Sometimes, making the world a better place just involves creating space for the people who are already in it.

Olivia McAfee fled her outwardly perfect life with her son after her cardiothoracic surgeon partner’s violence put them at risk. They moved to live back in a small town where Olivia grew up, taking over the family home she inherited and her father’s beekeeping business. Olivia’s son, Asher goes to the local school and life is peaceful until Asher is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend Lily. Suddenly Olivia finds herself having to defend her son’s freedom, whilst managing a niggling worry that he could be like his father.

I think there is a reason they call it falling in love. It’s the moment, at the top of the roller coaster, when your heart hangs in your throat. It’s the time between when you jump from the cliff and when you hit the ocean. It’s the realization that there’s no ground beneath your feet when you miss a step on the ladder, when the branch of the tree breaks, when you roll over and run out of mattress.

Here’s what they do not tell you about falling in love: there’s not always a soft landing beneath you.

Mad Honey has great character development and is written in first person between the points of view of Olivia and Lily. It is a story about the impacts of family violence, gender, the fluidity of nature, and the importance of acceptance. And it includes lots of information about bees – I enjoyed learning about beekeeping.

Book review: Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

The story opens with a man approaching two young girls over the fence at their kindergarten. One girl leaves with the stranger, the other does not. The one who is left is destined to spend her life wondering what happened to her friend who was never seen again.

The long ago man had a sloping walk with deep biting steps and an exaggerated spring that to Till now suggests someone unencumbered by regret and lifted up by small pleasures and anticipations. She has never forgotten it.

Fast forward and Till, the girl left behind is now 23. It is just after the COVID lockdowns, and walking the streets of Brunswick, Till notices how others are watchful and cautious of each other, a state that has existed in her since her friends disappearance. Till decides to leave town with her dog and heads west, driven by her trauma.

At the time Till began her journey to the town that became her home, she didn’t know exactly where she was headed, much less how long it would take.

Till finds herself in a sparsely populated town called Wirowrie and settles there to restore an abandoned railway station. She gradually gets to know the local residents, but a lingering menace hovers in the background as Till struggles with her sense of identity.

Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar is a story about identity, loss and redemption and evokes Gothic fiction as the story slides across time and space, driven by Till’s hyper-vigilance and anxiety.