Tag: fiction

Book review: Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie

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Going dark this week. Unforgiven is about a child victim turned vigilante and is not for the faint hearted, but if you enjoy gritty thrillers, this could be for you.

Lexi works part time as an escort, and part time as a hacker pursuing and trapping paedophiles she finds on the dark web to help her sister Bailee who works in child protection. Lexi is tough, street wise and drinks a lot of whiskey.

Things take an unexpected turn when Lexi, after breaking into his house, witnesses the murder of a man she has been tracking. She then agrees to help the guys wife (neither of them did it) dispose of his body, so they don’t get blamed.

On the edge of oblivion, images drift through the fog of my mind and hold, refusing to let go. Last night. The very dreamy Jonathan Davies of the chiselled features, stunning baby blues and long, dark lashes. A tall, muscular powerhouse, precision toned and sculpted to be appreciated. So commanding, so sure of himself. The images form into a memory and I groan in resignation.

‘Shit’. I have to get up. His body is still in the boot.

Detective Rachael Langley knew Lexi from her childhood. Langley was responsible for putting Lexis abuser, the Spider, behind bars. The two women cross paths again when someone claiming to be the real Spider emerges, and the pressure is on to catch him.

There are some great characters in this novel, I particularly liked Dawny, Lexis older neighbour who has a shady past, but a good heart. The two become firm friends over a deep freezer.

Unforgiven is a tightly plotted, fast paced, thriller set on the NSW Central Coast. The narrative alternates between Lexi and Rachael’s points of view, and whilst it isn’t an easy read due to the content matter – Barrie covers some confronting topics – there is not gratuitous violence or gory detail.

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: The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

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I was so taken by Elizabeth Acevedo’s lyrical Clap When You Land that I sought out her debut verse novel, The Poet X.

I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn’t that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.

The Poet X is fifteen year old Dominican girl Xiomara’s diary. The story documents her experiences growing up in Harlem with conservative, religious parents, her transition into puberty, her rage, and her discovery of a love of poetry.

My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in the pews wearing pretty florals and a soft smile. They got combat boots and a mouth silent until it’s sharp as an island machete.

Xiomara is a loud, large, ferocious, opinionated young woman who fights with her fists and struggles with her body, her religious upbringing and her relationship with the world. She exists in stark contrast to her gentle brother, Twin who is coming to terms with being gay. Her fiercely religious Mami presents challenges to both her children who don’t fit her mould.

My brother was born a soft whistle: quiet, barely stirring the air, a gentle sound. But I was born all the hurricane he needed to lift – and drop- those that hurt him to the ground.

Poet X is a story about ordinary life written in an extraordinary way – a bold, poetic, humorous, sensory delight.

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: Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder by Kerryn Mayne

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Kerryn Mayne’s debut novel Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder is a rollicking good read.

Thirty-seven year old Lenny Marks spends her days teaching at the local primary school and her evenings playing Scrabble with her imaginary housemate, watching reruns of Friends, or organising her thirty-six copies of The Hobbit.

Lenny tries not to think about the day her mum left. She likes order, routine, certainty and predictability, and uses anagrams to calm her anxieties and shut down uncomfortable thoughts. Her beloved foster-mum thinks she needs to expand and ‘get a life’.

She found tremendous peace in this level of organisation, which was as close to happiness as Lenny Marks ever planned to be. Happiness, she knew, was unstable and quite unreliable. And Lenny was neither of those things. Instead she lived for the contentment of a routine, which had served her quite well up to and into her thirty-seventh year.

A mysterious envelope addressed to Lenny from the Adult Parole Board is delivered to the school and despite her best efforts to ignore the problem, it won’t go away. Soon her world begins to unravel as Lenny starts to remember the long buried truth about her childhood.

It all revolves around her stepfather’s parting words, ‘You did this.’

No one would notice Lenny Mark’s absence in their life. She likened herself to the word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite recall. It’s there, only it won’t come to mind and it is of no consequence if it doesn’t. She was the reason you walked back into a room, thinking you’d forgotten something, only you didn’t remember what it was because it had never been that important. Lenny was a shadow.

The character of Lenny reminded me of Eleanor Oliphant or a young female more reticent Don Tillman (The Rosie Project) – forthright, earnest, intelligent but extremely awkward when it comes to personal relationships. Her story is one of darkness and light told with humour, suspense, and a few great twists.

Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder is heartwarming and heartbreaking, a page-turning story about loss, grief, abandonment, coming to terms with our past, learning to trust and finding the friendships and life we deserve.

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.