Tag: fiction

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.

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.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

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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

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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.

Book review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

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Apples Never Fall is Liane Moriarty’s ninth adult novel. She’s also known for Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, both adapted for television.

Aging tennis star couple Joy and Stan Delaney have been married for 50 years. The couple have a passionate marriage as well as a few lingering resentments, including that none of their children became tennis stars. Now retired after selling their tennis business the couple lack purpose. Their four adult children – laid back Logan, blue haired Amy, flashy Troy and migraine suffering Brooke – are all independent but childless and Joy really wants to be a grandmother.

Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he’d just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.

When a young woman turns up at their door distressed and bruised, Joy and Stan take her in. Supposedly escaping an abusive boyfriend, Savannah ingratiates herself with the aging couple. Joy’s own children are unsettled by the young woman.

We’re all on our own. Even when you’re surrounded by people, or sharing a bed with a loving lover, you’re alone.

Then the day before her 70th birthday, Joy disappears, her phone is found under the marital bed and Savannah is nowhere to be found. Stan becomes a suspect due to unusual scratches on his face, despite his protestations they were caused by a hedge. Two of their children think Stan is innocent, two are not so sure. The police need to find out what really happened and the family are frustrating to deal with.

She found that the less she thought, the more often she found simple truths appearing right in front of her.

The story gradually unfolds as Moriarty takes the reader back and forth in time revealing the very three dimensional character’s secrets, regrets and hopes. Apples Never Fall is a family saga filled with bickering, alignments, competitiveness, failed expectations and small resentments. An especially good story for tennis fans.

As her grandfather used to say, “Never spoil a good story with the facts.