Tag: fiction

Book review: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

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A member of my writing group recommended Yellowface to me, and ironically I began reading it a few days prior to printing out my latest manuscript to give to my writing group colleagues to critique.

Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.

Yellowface is a story about two ambitious young novelists who met at college. Athena has written a critically acclaimed novel that’s also secured a deal with Netflix, and she is revelling in her success. Her friend Juniper’s debut has almost disappeared from the shelves of bookstores due to poor sales, and she struggles with jealousy of her successful friend.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

The young women go out on the town to celebrate Athena’s success then return to Anthea’s apartment where she shows Juniper her, until now, unseen new manuscript. She also decides makes pancakes to dilute their boozy evening. Suddenly, Athena is choking on pancake, clawing at her throat, unable to breathe. She dies while Juniper is on the phone to emergency services.

But the best revenge is to thrive.

On impulse, Juniper slips Anthea’s secret new manuscript into her bag and takes it home to study. Before she knows it she’s refining and editing, then publishing the manuscript as her own work, using her middle name as her surname as it, well, sounds more Asian. June Song. And Juniper’s dream of becoming a famous writer comes true.

The truth is fluid, there is always another way to spin the story.

The trouble with deception is that you set yourself up against both your internal and external worlds, and it’s a fraught space to maintain a fake self. There’s constantly needing to convince yourself that you are not a fraud, it’s as much your work as your dead friends given all the effort you put into making it publishing ready after all. Then there’s the worry about evidence in the world that the work actually belonged to Athena, managing the reactions when people discover you are not in fact Asian, and the growing whispers on Twitter about plagiarism.

But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative.

Yellowface is a literary heist about the fickle publishing industry, cultural appropriation, and writing the other. It is also a hilarious literary caper told by an unreliable narrator, about the creative life and the desire to be seen. It will particularly appeal to the writers among us. 

I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.

And, if I suddenly stop my Friday blog, you’ll know where to start looking.

Book review: Magpie by Elizabeth Day

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I heard about Magpie by Elizabeth Day on a podcast I was listening to and looked it up without paying any attention to what it was about. Initially I thought it was a run of the mill, if well written, domestic drama about heteronormative relationships and trying to have children. I was about to put it down when things started to get weird.

they had to adapt their dreams, to cut the starry cloth of their imaginings to fit the circumstance of their reality,

Marisa, a children’s book illustrator, falls pregnant only three months into a relationship with Jake and they move in together. When Jake’s work has a crisis that causes his income to dip, they decide to take in a lodger to help pay the mortgage. 

That’s the problem with charm. It means you get away with stuff. It means you never have to develop a real character because no one remembers to look for one. They’re too busy basking in the glow of your attention. They’re too busy being impressed.

Kate, a film publicist, moves in. She is nice but a bit too friendly and Marisa begins to think she could have an ulterior motive. She puts her toothbrush in the master bathroom alongside Jake and Marisa’s then starts to do things like cook Jake his favourite meal. Jake seems to be oblivious.

She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that love felt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.

Then there is a change of view point and a massive and completely unexpected plot twist, and the story takes on the tone of a baroque domestic noir thriller. And I’m not going to tell you any more as it will give too much away.

I began to realise that if I never achieved anything outwardly ever again, I would still exist. The voice in my head is not who I am.

Magpie is an exceptionally well crafted book, no wonder it was recommended on a writing podcast. It is an exemplary example of the unreliable narrator. Themes include fertility, toxic relationships, dysfunctional families, mental illness, betrayal, and the female gaze. 

Book review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

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Having last week claimed I am not a romance reader, I appear to be on a bit of a run of them. Though I would say the ones I am reading are not your standard tropes. Normal People by Sally Rooney is a short economical coming of age love story.

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,

A couple of whip smart, awkward teenagers from the same school, but different sides of the class divide begin an intense relationship in secret. Marianne, from a wealthy but dysfunctional family is determinedly her own person, but considered a misfit amongst her peers at school. 

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.

Connell is an awkward intelligent, sensitive, popular young jock of few words constrained by gender and tormented by his own vulnerabilities. His mother is the house cleaner for Marianne’s family mansion and the two find themselves spending enough time together to become familiar.

Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.

After high school they both go to Trinity college in Dublin and their roles are reversed – Marianne becomes popular and Connell the outsider. Their on-again-off-again love affair is at times beautiful and sometimes painful to observe.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.

To begin with, Marianne and Connell are plagued with low self esteem and a tendency toward self destructive behaviours. Gradually the two shape one another to understand and feel worthy of love and overcome the mistakes they have made with one another. Through their transformation, both become better people.

All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.

The character building in Normal People is excellent, and the dialogue pitch perfect as the author takes the reader on a journey that is both comedic and tragic. I soon became totally absorbed in this story and particularly fond of the awkward Connell.

Book review: My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes

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My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes is a contemporary romance that celebrates women in mid life. Not a romance reader? Neither am I usually, but I really enjoyed this novel – so read on.

There’s more to this story than the clickbait headlines, but yes, in simple terms, I had a dream life – then I took a flamethrower to it.

It’s post pandemic and Anna lives in Manhattan with her partner, Angelo, who she refers to as a ‘feathery stroker’. Their relationship is fond, equal and respectful but lacks passion. Her successful high flying PR job with a beauty firm is wearing a bit thin, she misses her family in Ireland, and she’s perimenopausal. Look out for a middle aged woman with fluctuating hormones!

The unfairness had made me deeply sad. Unfortunately I was paid to be manically enthusiastic, usually something I managed even if it was as fake as my eyelashes. This time it was almost impossible. The phrase burnout had been floating in my head for a while.

Sounds like a recipe for a midlife crisis right? Right. Anna walks away from it all and heads home to Ireland, moving in with one of her siblings while she decides what to do with the next phase of her life.

Although I tended towards optimism, I’d expected that my re-entry into Irish life would be bumpy. But nothing could have prepared me for just how bruising it had been.

Just when she starts to think she’s made a big mistake, a job comes up through her sisters friend whose plans to build a luxury hotel and spa have hit some blockers. They need some savvy PR to help to get the locals onboard with the project, and Anna is their woman.

Eventually, the universe threw me a bone… 

When she gets there, Anna discovers that the finance broker for the project is an old crush who shunned her many years earlier. The very hot player, Joey Armstrong.

Their tag line was Give us your body and we’ll give you back your soul. I wouldn’t have minded six moths there myself.

What unfolds is part mystery (getting to the bottom of why the locals are against the development and solving the problems), and part romance (working through her past relationship issues and her mixed feelings toward Joey, who says he’s a changed man). There is also plenty of small town and friendship dramas in the mix (Joey is the father of Anna’s best friends child). Ooh, ahh.

My Favourite Mistake is a funny, well crafted read. A deep rom com for the middle aged.

Book review: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Written in 1942, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a philosophical fable and allegory translated from French. It is a book about what it is to be human. The narrator, a pilot, tells the story six years after he meets the Little Prince in the desert.

The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.

A little boy leaves his tiny planet where he lived with a single rose. He departs out of loneliness, catching a ride with a flock of birds to travel the universe. Eventually he comes to Earth and is tutored by a fox who reveals truths to him as he learns about adult behaviour through a series of chance encounters.

If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara desert, he will die if he cannot repair his plane. This is where he meets the Little Prince. The pilot laments the adult world and their lack of creative thought, as a child he wanted to be an artist, but was discouraged by his parents. The Little Prince recognises his drawings immediately, and asks for a drawing of a sheep. Through his relationship with the Little Prince, the pilot begins to open up and to draw again.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Eventually the Little Prince realises the importance of the relationship he developed with his rose through caring for it, and that he must return to his plant to be with the flower. But he must die in order to return, so seeks the help of a sinister snake.

I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

At its root, The Little Prince is about how curiosity, connection and love are the antidote to uncertainty, fear and exile. A timeless story worth revisiting if you have read it before, and seeking out if you have not.

Book review: Butter by Asako Yuzuki

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Butter by Asako Yuzuki is an English translation of the Japanese bestseller. It provides a fascinating insight into Japanese culture, friendships, gender relations, societal norms about body type and beauty, and our relationships with food. 

I learned from my late father that women should show generosity towards everyone. But there are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.

One of the central characters is based on the real life Konkatsu Killer, a con woman and gourmet cook called Kanae Kijimo who was convicted of poisoning three of her lovers. But the story is much more about food than murder.

The whipped butter had already started melting across the waffles’ latticed brown surface, creating a golden trickling waterfall that pooled in their hollows. Rika bit into the dough, savoring how juicy and moist it had become with all the butter it had absorbed, with a pleasant saltiness.

Tokyo journalist Rita Machinda is determined to land an exclusive interview with Manako Kijii, a blogger and exceptional cook who is in jail for murdering a number of her lovers. Rita writes to Manako and asks for her beef stew recipe to try and get an interview with the media shy murdress. 

Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day–toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away.

Rita rarely cooks but her correspondence and visits to Manako in jail soon become a masterclass in food, and Rita is gradually transformed. When I read the scene on her first cooking instruction from Manako, I had to try it  – steamed rice topped with very good quality butter and soy sauce. It was surprisingly tasty. But you cannot go wrong with lashings of Butter.

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: 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.