Book reviews

Posts tagged ‘fiction’

Wait Here by Lucy Nelson

I added Wait Here by Australian author Lucy Nelson to my list of books to look out for after seeing Kim’s and Kate’s reviews (see below for links), both of which I’ll read thoroughly now I’ve read this collection of short stories about childless women for myself.

I found something to think about in each of the stories, but have concentrated my review on the stories I particularly resonated with.

Chances Are, We Were High as Kites was about two elderly twins in poor health making decisions about the end of their lives. Childless, they had no guilt about needing to continue living for their children, nor did they have to face the burden or obligation of relying on children for their ongoing and increasing care. They had friends and people they loved dearly in their lives, and a freedom that women who do have children can never have. The question of whether either woman had ever wanted to be a mother was never asked since motherhood or the lack of didn’t define them – it simply didn’t matter. The blurb on the book’s cover was particularly apt for this story; ‘These women will never be mothers. It’s nothing. It’s everything.’ For the two women at this stage of their lives, motherhood was nothing.

The narrator of Ariel. Marvin. I Don’t Want a Boyfriend was a woman who named her possessions, including her car. I get it. I’ve always named my cars, too. My first was Beau, my second was Lachlan, then came Hermoine, Grace and Henry Ford. The current car is known as The FG. The narrator and her workmate’s friendship was cemented after he told her that his car was named Ariel. They had a lot in common, but their friendship almost disintegrated when she discovered that he was a single father – not because he was a single father, but because he hadn’t told her. The friendship survived after an honest conversation where the narrator told him she didn’t want to be anything more than friends. He hadn’t wanted more either, but voicing her feelings made the narrator realise that she didn’t ever want any relationship to ever be more than a friendship.

Father Figure was the story of a woman sharing a house with her sister and young neice, Fia. The narrator was more than an aunt, but less than a mother, a story in which I found much to interest me having brought up a child who was not my biologically my own – in my situation I’ve been more than an aunt, but less than a mother. In Father Figure, Fia’s mother was a single mother and the narrator had moved in to help out two years ago, but as time passed the narrator, although she occasionally resented losing her freedom to take on the responsibility of Fia, also recognised with some sadness that if her sister ever began another relationship then her own role as the other parental figure would eventually be assumed by the new partner. The narrator also worried that Fia didn’t have any men of importance in her life.

The final story, I Am Five, I Am Twelve, I Am Twenty, began with a five-year old narrator feeling disappointed that the doll she had just been given was not a baby doll. When she turned six she pretended her dog was a baby and at eight, she realised sadly that she was now considered to be too old for dolls. At twelve she learned about reproduction; specifically, that she had eggs that might one day become babies. At sixteen, the narrator was aware that her peers were having sex, at seventeen, she and her boyfriend made an unsuccessful attempt themselves. At 23, she had an abortion after falling pregnant with the right fellow at the wrong time. When the narrator’s sister was unable to fall pregnant, the narrator offered her eggs but after much consideration her sister decided that she didn’t want children. At 28, the narrator met a man she wanted to have children with, but he didn’t want children and at 31, she loved another man so much that she was still subduing her desire to have children because he didn’t want them, either. At 34, she and a gay couple had discussions about her being a surrogate mother for them, which never went further than trying to work out how their model family might look. At 37, she asked a friend if he would father a baby for her but he declined, and so it continued. Sometimes falling pregnant at a young age by mistake is the best way.

I’m always interested in stories about women that focus on childlessness/and or motherhood, so this collection leaned into that interest perfectly. Each story had different scenarios and circumstances, and although several of the narrator’s voices were overly similar, most were distinct and their emotions only applied to them and their particular journey. I’d recommend other readers space out the stories to get the most from them.

I can’t finish without saying how much I love the cover art, Wild and Defenceless by Iranian-Australian artist, Anahita Amouzegar, who is based in Melbourne. I thought the cover suited the collection of stories in Wait Here perfectly.

The writing was wonderful, subtle, sensitive, and most impressively, judgement-free. I’ll definitely read Lucy Nelson’s future fiction.

‘Wait Here’ by Lucy Nelson

Wait Here by Lucy Nelson

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Nelson - Lucy

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

I chose the cover above for my review of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain because it represented the scene from the story that I best remembered from reading the story from a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book as a child.*

Sure enough, right there in the second chapter, Tom scammed every boy in town into painting Aunt Polly’s fence for him by making out the job could only be done by someone with particular skills while he took payment of a dead rat, a kite, a dog collar, a couple of tadpoles and other treasures, even though the task had been intended as a punishment for Tom for some misdemeanor or other. I laughed out loud when the narrator inserted himself into the story during this chapter, describing himself as ‘a great and wise philosopher.’

Tom and his goody-goody half-brother Sid lived with their Aunt Polly and her daughter Mary in St Petersburg, a fictional town on the Mississippi River, in the 1830s or 40s. Aunt Polly had her work cut out for her with Tom since he was always in trouble for something. He was often sorry afterwards, but could charm Aunt Polly into feeling sorry that she had to punish him, and when he couldn’t charm her, he tricked her to escape his punishment.

The story followed Tom’s adventures through the course of a year or so, including a night when Tom snuck out night and witnessed a murder with his friend Huck, with the aftermath of this terrible event woven through the rest of the book.

During one escapade Tom, Huck and another boy stole a boat and ran away to become pirates on an island further down the river, fishing and swimming and learning to smoke pipes. The townspeople thought they had drowned and planned their funerals, but in the most dramatic fashion, Tom and his friends turned up at the church service to prove otherwise.

Tom in love was delightful. Fickle Tom fell out of love with Amy Lawrence the moment he saw a new girl in town, Becky Thatcher and on Becky’s first appearance at Sunday School, ‘he was ‘showing off’ with all his might – cuffing boys, pulling hair, making faces, in a word, using every art that seemed likely to fascinate a girl, and win her applause.’ I laughed out loud when Tom convinced Becky to become engaged to him, then laughed even harder when Tom accidentally put his foot in it with Becky by telling her of his previous engagement to Amy. Obviously this new information meant that Tom and Becky’s engagement was off.

They only chapter I didn’t remember was of a sleepy Sunday afternoon in church, when Tom became engrossed in a battle between a pinch-bug and a stray dog. This chapter might not have been included in the book I’d had.

Superstition ruled Tom’s life. He and the other boys had chants and charms to remove warts, and amongst other signs, believed that a stray dog’s howl signified a death. I’m not sure that Aunt Polly and the other adults didn’t believe in these superstitions, either.

Despite my overall enjoyment of the story and the wonderfully descriptive writing, by the end of the second chapter, I’d become aware of an element of the story that I didn’t notice as a child; the difference between Tom who was white and another child, Jim, who was black and a slave.

I’m more bothered than I thought I would be about how to write about the racism and slavery in the story, neither of which I noticed as a child. I suspect I accepted both without question as just how things were in Tom Sawyer’s world, but as an adult reader both elements marred my enjoyment of the story. And yet, I also accept that the racism shown in by the characters in this story to Native Americans and black people (all of whom I think were slaves), was part of everyday life at that place and time. I suppose I feel disappointed that the author didn’t use the narrator or the characters to question the rights and wrongs of racism and slavery, which is probably unfair of me. Mark Twain was reflecting the world that he saw in this book, and even if he did think that there were injustices, I do understand that as an author he was not obligated to use his story to try to change the world.

Times had changed in other ways, too. Tom and the other child characters were physically punished in ways that an Australian parent would be locked up for now. Tom was particularly mischievous so was regularly beaten, but other children were given regular hidings too. As for Huckleberry Finn, the son of the town drunk, he was homeless, and considered by most to be ‘idle and lawless, and vulgar, and bad.’ Tom and the other boys wanted to be just like Huck, but he dressed in rags, slept on doorsteps and ate scraps.

So on the whole I loved the bits of this story that I probably loved the first time around, and had mixed feelings about the rest. I do think that Mark Twain was a wonderful writer, so will end on that note.

*I wish I could remember what the other three novels where in the Readers Digest book but it disappeared long ago.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was book twenty-nine of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

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The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey

I’d been meaning to read more of Australian author Amanda Lohrey’s work after finding much to think about in The Labyrinth, so hoped that The Conversion, a story about a middle-aged woman who bought a deconsecrated church to convert into a home, would be another interesting read. After all, who hasn’t looked at photos of deconsecrated churches, halls and other public venues that are no longer wanted and wondered what they might become next?*

The Conversion began with Zoe and her husband Nick inspecting a church for sale in Crannock, a fictional rural area in the Hunter Valley area of New South Wales. Nick was keen to take on another renovation, Zoe less so, as she loved the home they lived in and better remembered the pain of living in a building site than Nick did.

Next thing we know, Nick was dead and Zoe had bought St Martins, going against the advice traditionally given to people after their partner dies; don’t make any big decisions in the first year, although I don’t remember any mention of Zoe’s friends telling her this.

Zoe and Nick fell on hard times during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, although as Zoe was a solicitor and Nick a psychologist I found it hard to believe that their savings and superannuation were completely wiped out, however, their plan was to sell their larger, city home to fund the next stage of their lives. So far, so good, although I couldn’t understand why Zoe bought St Martins since she wasn’t religious, had no prior affinity with the area and her children lived in other states.

At first Zoe called the move a tribute to Nick, who had envisioned renovating the church as an experiment, something to do with the psychology of space that I never quite understood. This was explained further as how buildings inhabit people’s spirits.

I wondered if Zoe’s purchase of the church was some sort of revenge move on Nick for something Zoe was holding a grudge over, and so it turned out to be. The flashbacks of Zoe and Nick’s lives showed that Zoe was far more in love with Nick than he was with her, and that although she would always think him wonderful, he wasn’t without fault.

Zoe returned to work, taking a part-time job doing reception work at the Crannock hospital. She settled in, more or less, and enjoyed occasional visits from one of her sons and his children, and from friends from the city. Once in a while she ventured back to the city for appointments where she found the faster-pace no longer to her liking.

As the story progressed Zoe found connections with other people in the district, but her biggest struggle was how to approach the conversion of the church, to make it into a home. The height of the interior dwarfed her and her possessions, and the imagery of the beautiful but fragile stained glass windows were troubling. In many ways, Zoe seemed more comfortable with the exterior of the church; the grounds, the trees that lined the fence line and the views across the surrounding paddocks, vineyards and valleys. Since the church didn’t have any windows that she could see out, this made her decision to buy it even more of a mistake.

The many themes running through the story include grief, religion, major life changes and parenting, although it is not a plot-driven book.

I had expected to learn more about several local people who Zoe interacted with early in the story but none of these progressed. I didn’t really expect a romance, a deep friendship or even a quarrel, but the stories of these interactions seemed unfinished. Perhaps that was the idea. Neighbours and people in regional communities don’t live in each other’s pockets; they meet randomly, have a few words then disappear out of each other’s lives until the next time they come across each other.

I can imagine The Conversion being made into a film; the image of a small country church surrounded by paddocks with an old cemetery across the road, surrounded by grass so long that you need to watch out for snakes and the absolute quiet other than the noise of the magpies and other birds is so vivid in my mind, that I’m hopeful a film-maker will see the potential too. I can picture Rebecca Gibney as Zoe, but can’t think of anyone who’s just right for Nick. Not that he matters much, he only needs to be handsome and charismatic, because this is Zoe’s story.

*Living in a former church doesn’t appeal to me at all, although I’m always interested in how conversions are managed. Links to former churches for sale in the Western District, if you’re interested.

https://www.realestate.com.au/property-other-vic-warrnambool-150133216

https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-warrnambool-146660316

https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-glenormiston+north-149086264?sourcePage=rea%3Abuy%3Asrp-map&sourceElement=listing-tile
https://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-macarthur-149879024?sourcePage=rea%3Abuy%3Asrp-map&sourceElement=listing-tile
https://www.realestate.com.au/property-lifestyle-vic-caramut-700402276?sourcePage=rea%3Abuy%3Asrp-map&sourceElement=listing-tile

My purchase of The Conversion continues my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (April). I purchased this book from Ironbird Bookshop in Port Fairy.

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Australian author, Author, Lohrey - Amanda

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Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor#1961Club

Suffering terribly from FOMO, I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Everything That Rises Must Converge for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1961 Club.

Everything That Rises Must Converge was first published in 1961 in New World Writing magazine. Although it is a short story it has an awful lot to say – ‘awful’ in this context isn’t a word that I ever use, but Flannery O’Connor’s characters say this sort of thing and they rubbed off on me!

The story follows Julian, who is not long out of college and sells typewriters for a living, although he wants to be a writer. On the evening this story takes places, Julian escorts his mother to the YMCA in their Southern American city for her evening slimming class.

Julian believes he has moral superiority over his mother, who embarrasses him with her racism and outdated ideas and manners, and he’s right; in many ways his mother lives in the past. She reminisces to Julian with pride about his great-grandfather who was a former governor of the state, and his grandfather, who was a prosperous landowner, along with his grandmother, who was a Godleigh, presumably a family who had once mattered in their town. Then we learn that Julian’s great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves, and that Julian’s mother wants Julian to escort her to slimming classes because she wouldn’t ‘ride the buses by herself at night since they were integrated.’ She has strong opinions about black people and their place in the world; in her opinion the slaves ‘were better off where they were,’ and Julian is mortified when she said these things in public.

When a well-dressed black man got onto the bus Julian made a point of sitting next to him in a move intended to rile his mother and show her that her opinions were outdated and needed to change. Next, a black woman and her child boarded the bus and sat opposite to Julian’s mother. Julian realised his mother and the woman were wearing the exact same hat, a purple and green monstrosity, and he couldn’t help but laugh unkindly at the coincidence and at his mother. When they got off the bus, Julian’s mother tried to give some coins to the child but was spurned by the woman, triggering a physical conflict and a tragedy that no one could have foreseen.

I’ve lately been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and found myself comparing attitudes towards racism in the two stories. None of the characters in Tom Sawyer, or the narrator who I believe is Twain, questions or challenges the status quo relating to racism or slavery, they simply accept and reflect their world as it is, while in Everything That Rises Must Converge Julian, regardless of his reasons, goes out of his way to show his mother that the world has changed and that her racist opinions must change, too.

As always, Flannery O’Connor’s writing style is frank and the characters clearly reveal themselves through their dialogue and actions. O’Connor doesn’t shy away from showing characters as human, with good qualities and bad. Neither Julian or his mother were all good or all bad, the point was that their reasons for their beliefs, right or wrong, were held for the wrong reasons. Julian wanted to be morally superior to his mother, while his mother was racist because she thought that the older ways were for the best, and that graciousness was everything. They were both right and they were both wrong.

Warning to other readers, the dialogue and language used in Everything That Rises Must Converge is of the time, as are some character’s views.

Other books I’ve previously reviewed that were published in 1961 include:

Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook,

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Bel Lamington by D.E. Stevenson

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The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

I saw The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa at my library and leapt on it, thinking that I’d read a review or that someone had recommended the book to me, but I can’t find any notes to say where the recommendation came from. Time loop stories are my favourite genre at present and I enjoyed this one very much, so many thanks to whoever recommended or reviewed this book.

I was hooked from the beginning of the story, which was translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood. Initially I struggled a little with the unfamiliarity of the Japanese character’s names but thanks to a family tree chart and the distinctive qualities of each character, that quickly became a non-issue.

The story began with a murder. The narrator, sixteen-year old Hisataro and his family were visiting his extremely wealthy grandfather for the family’s New Year celebrations when they found his grandfather dead in the attic, smashed over the head with a copper vase. Hisataro, his family and his grandfather’s staff were shocked, but despite his distress Hisataro noticed that one of his cousins’ appearance was different to the day before. This was significant, because in this time-loop story, Hisataro experienced certain days nine times in a row and while other characters re-experienced each repeat day without any changes or knowledge of the repetition, Hisataro realised what was going on and could change the outcome of conversations and events.

The cause of the murder was presumably money, since Hisataro’s grandfather rewrote his will every year in favour of a new person, usually one of his grandchildren but sometimes one of his staff. His warring children, Hisataro’s mother and aunt weren’t in the running for the money, although they fought bitterly about which of their children should inherit. Hisataro was the only grandchild who didn’t want to inherit his grandfather’s business, and he took it upon himself to find out who the murderer was with his advantage of being able to relive the day nine times.

With each repeating day Hisataro changed his behaviour to prevent the person he believed to be the murderer from taking action, only to find that his grandfather was killed by a different person each time. As the ninth repeat drew closer Hisataro was hopeful he had both solved and prevented the murder, but unlike previous loops, the repeating day seemed to have different rules to what he usually experienced.

The story-telling style was straightforward, but the words had a formality that was recognisably Japanese. The characters addressed each other formally and often used turns of phrase that pointed to the book having been written in a language other than English.

The premise and plot were clever, although I struggled with the romance between two of characters who were first-cousins, (acceptable in Japan but a taboo in Australia), and the emotional immaturity of Hisataro’s family was hard to take. Sure, families fight over money and inheritances, but a chapter-long pillow fight? Hmm. At least when the day of the pillow fight ‘reset’ Hisataro was the only person who remembered it.

Something I hadn’t expected but thoroughly enjoyed was the exposure to various Japanese customs and words. I found myself looking up the significance of adding ‘Chan’ to someone’s name and learned it’s an endearment often used for children or a sweetheart. I discovered that the variously-coloured chanchanko jackets that Hisataro’s grandfather forced his staff and family to wear during the family visits to him are a traditional padded sleeveless vest worn for longevity celebrations. I was not surprised to find that many of the male characters were at least slightly misogynistic, but was more surprised to discover that Hisataro’s underage sake drinking wasn’t frowned upon, although in fairness to some of these points, this book was published over thirty years ago and has only recently become available in English. Perhaps some of these behaviours have changed since then.

The Man Who Died Seven Times was fun and I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy time loop stories too.

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On the Calculation of Volume 2 by Solvej Balle

I didn’t want to wait too long before reading On the Caluculation of Volume 2 by Solvej Balle after reading Volume 1 several months ago.

Volume 2 began with Tara Selter realising that time wasn’t magically going to jump into November 19 just because she had already lived through 365 repetitions of November 18.

On day 368 she woke up in Paris, having returned to the Hotel du Lison after spending most of the previous year in her home town. Tara visited her antiquarian friends again and repurchased a sestertius, an ancient Roman coin, just as she had on her very first November 18, before spending so long in Paris that she began to feel semi-transparent.

Tara then began travelling by train around France, listening in on other peoples conversations and enjoying casual interactions with other travelers. Next she visited her parents in Brussels, where she explained to them what had been happening to her, and convinced them to celebrate a pretend Christmas with her to give her the illusion that time was actually passing – I remain surprised at how easily Tara was able to convince Thomas in the first book and then her parents and sister in the second book that she was experiencing the same day over and over. I’m sure if I tried to explain to my loved ones that I was repeatedly reliving a single day they would tuck me into bed then sneak off to make an urgent call to a doctor, and yes, I’m aware that it’s irrational for me as a reader to accept the time-loop premise of the story without question, but am unable to accept that Tara’s husband, parents and sister believe her!

After celebrating Christmas with her family Tara felt that she needed to experience winter, as being stuck in an endless autumn had become unbearable to her. She left her parents to travel north, careful never to travel overnight or late in the day in case the vehicle she was travelling on reverted to its starting point when the reset happened, leaving her adrift or worse. For the same reason, Tara didn’t travel by air or overnight on a sea-going vessel.

For the remainder of the year, Tara followed the weather, creating an illusion of the seasons passing. She travelled to places that had snow, then visited south England to experience the milder weather that reminded her of spring. In England she saw lambs in the field, that added to the illusion, and ate spring onions and other green vegetables that reminded her of spring. When she was ready for summer, Tara travelled south to a holiday area where she wore sundresses, went out dancing and found an approximation of summer.

She didn’t phone or visit her husband, not even once.

At this point I was reminded me of something I think about when I see graffiti love hearts with names in them and ‘4 eva’ scrawled underneath. I don’t think teenagers (or adults) realise how very long eternity might last for. In Tara’s example, experiencing the same day with Thomas on repeat had not been challenging or enjoyable, and even making allowances for him not knowing what was going on until she explained it, they could not grow as a couple.

Eventually Tara went to Düsseldorf because there was a warm wind there and the place didn’t remind her of Thomas. Around about day 889, Tara found her sestertius in a forgotten pocket, and after thinking about the coin’s life became obsessed with Roman history, buying a laptop to research every possible aspect in the question of why the Roman Empire expansion had stopped. I enjoyed learning more about the Roman Empire than I’d previously known and found the reason that Tara discovered for the expansion to stop to be very interesting, too.

As in Volume 1, the writing in Volume 2 had a careful quality found in translated works. The narrator explored her ideas in great detail, sometimes repetitiously, much like actual thoughts – sometimes we can’t let them go until we’ve covered every possible angle. I like these introspective types of plots, but for those who like more action – I’m thinking of you, FictionFan – I don’t think this series will suit your tastes.

The story ended with a cliffhanger in Tara’s third or fourth year of repeating November 18. I remain intrigued by the idea and the story.

This book was originally written in Danish and translated by Barbara J Haveland.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

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Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel’s Learning to Talk was the author’s first collection of short stories. I wasn’t sure how I’d get along with them though; I love Mantel’s writing, especially her essays and think that her snark is entertaining, but that same snark can also feel horribly unkind.

The collection began with King Billy is a Gentleman, a story about a young fellow called Liam who grew up with a single mother. The lodger eventually became Liam’s mother’s partner even though unmarried or adulterous couples were looked down on, causing Liam to have to contend with judgmental neighbours whose children threw rocks and insults at him. The King Billy bit, which I’d never heard of, was a rhyme used by the Protestant children to cast aspersions on Catholics. The writing in this short story was so, so good, and even though my review will end up overly-long if I quote every bit of writing in this collection that thrills me, I can’t go past the sentence describing Liam’s teacher, who ‘carried a bulging tartan bag with her, and every morning deposited it, with a plump thud, on the floor by her desk, then in no time at all the shouting and hitting would begin.’ The ‘plump thud’ electrified me, I dropped my own handbag (a black canvas shoulder bag) on the floor just to hear the sound for myself.

Destroyed was a more personal story about a girl whose mother told her ‘there is no such thing as a substitute. Everything is intrinsically itself, and unlike any other thing.’ The girl believed everything her mother said, but later wondered why she was expected to call her stepfather ‘Dad.’

The intriguingly-named Curved is the Line of Beauty was a story about being lost, either physically or by being damned. The narrator’s greatest fear as a Catholic child in the 1950s was that she might die midpoint between her monthly confessions to the priest, which would cause her to go to hell if her sin was great enough. In what was becoming a theme, Curved is the Line of Beauty also featured a child narrator with a stepfather figure, although in this example, more scandalously than in previous stories, the narrator’s father still lived in the house along with Jack, his supplanter. Jack took the narrator, her two younger brothers and her mother to Birmingham to visit his friends, where she and the daughter of the other family get lost in a car wrecking yard. The anxiety from being lost was real, just as real as the narrator feeling lost in her own confusing family life.

I wondered if the title story, Learning to Talk, was autobiographical. After moving to a posh area the narrator, who wasn’t afraid of public speaking and liked to argue, was sent to elocution lessons because ‘people’ thought she might become a lawyer. This story had the snark I’d been waiting for. The narrator said of her elocution teacher, a Miss Webster, ‘She and the dog seemed alike: crushable, yappy, not very bright.’ In the end, the narrator suggested that her elocution lessons were a waste of time, deciding that after the age of seven a local accent was a permanent fixture.

Third Floor Rising told of the narrator’s first job at the department store where her mother worked. ‘Reek of armpits, rattling coughs: these were my colleagues. Life in the stores had destroyed them. They had chronic sniffles from the dust and bladder infections from the dirty lavatories. Their veins bulged through elastic stockings. They lived on £15 per week.’ Surprisingly, this story wasn’t a tragedy, although it might easily have been.

The main character in The Clean Slate was trying to get details about her family tree out of her secretive mother, as she reflected on her childhood fear of the drowned village where her ancestors had once lived. The woman’s irritation with her mother, who believed untrue things despite evidence to the contrary, rang true to me.

All of the stories in the collection had a strong sense of being autobiographical. The stories themselves might have been fiction, but the emotions, the fear, the anxiety, the confusion and the unhappiness were true in that the author must have felt them as a child or a teenager.

I read one story a day from the collection so as not to swamp myself, and thought that worked well. I’m thinking that the Wolf Hall trilogy might be the next book I read by Hilary Mantel, although I’m not ready to commit to a timeline.

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Author, Book Review, Mantel - Hilary

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The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy

My copy of The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy is falling apart; the story has been a comfort read for me since I was a teenager. If I ever find a copy in an Op Shop with the same cover I’ll replace mine, but until then the pieces are staying on my bookshelves. I chose to read The Lilac Bus this time for Cathy at 746 Books twelfth annual Reading Ireland Month.

The Lilac Bus is a novella comprised of eight short chapters that each follow a different character. The characters travel three hours together every weekend from Dublin to their home town, Rathdoon on a lilac-coloured mini-bus, with the connections between the characters evolving as the story progresses. Each of the characters face a crisis or a turning point over the weekend.

The first chapter followed Nancy Morris, who was mean with money and ungenerous of spirit. Nancy had a well-paid job at a Dublin hospital but returned to Rathdoon every weekend to eat her mother out of house and home. When a drunken Mrs Ryan told Nancy baldly that her nickname was Miss Mean Morris, Nancy was shocked.

The subject of the next chapter was golden-girl Dee Burke, who was studying the law and having an affair with a married doctor who Nancy worked for at the hospital. Dee also had a rude awakening over the weekend when she realised that her lover had been lying to her about the strength of his marriage, the moral of the story being that a man who lies to his wife will also lie to his bit on the side.

Mikey Burns was a middle-aged bank porter who everyone avoided. He missed the mark with his tasteless jokes, and although his colleagues and fellow bus travellers could see that he had a good heart, he was often left out of things. Mikey returned to his family home in Rathdoon every weekend and was made welcome by his brother Billy, sister-in-law Mary and their children. Mary looked after Mikey and Billy’s father, who had dementia, with Mikey spelling her over the weekend. In Mikey’s chapter, changes to Billy and Mary’s circumstances forced him to take on responsibilities that I like to think would soon be the making of him.

Everyone on the bus, except for Nancy Morris, adored Judy Hickey. She had a past that was still talked about in Rathdoon; as a young married woman with two young children Judy had gotten in with a fast crowd before being busted for dealing drugs. Her husband subsequently left her and took their children to America, cutting off all contact and leaving her as a mother without children. The solution to Judy’s big dilemma of how she could prevent the health shop where she worked from going broke was unexpected.

The chapter about Kev Kennedy, an anxious and secretive young man who worked as a security guard, explained how he had accidentally got involved with a gang of professional thieves and had no idea how to extricate himself without being thrown into the River Liffey wearing concrete boots. Kev went home to his father and brothers in Rathdoon every weekend to minimise his unwanted involvement with crime.

Despite Rupert Green’s relatively privileged background, he had his problems, too. He felt disconnected from his elderly parents, and despite Judy’s encouragement, felt unable to talk to them about anything. Without going into spoiler territory, the issue discussed in Rupert’s chapter was probably a risk for the author considering the book was published in the 1980s.

Celia Ryan was a nurse who came home every weekend to help her alcoholic mother out behind the bar of the family hotel. Celia, who deserved better, needed to convince her mother that she had a problem with drinking. Celia’s brothers and sisters didn’t want to hear anything about the troubles concerning their mother and infuriatingly, they also assumed that Celia and their mother was raking in a small fortune from the pub.

The last chapter followed Tom, who owned and drove the bus. To use as many cliches as I can in a single sentence, Tom was rolling stone who wouldn’t allow himself to be pigeon-holed, with a bit of the dog in the manger about him when he mistakenly thought that the woman he liked was going to make a go of it with someone else, even though he’d never made a move on her himself.

It’s the characters that keeps me returning to this book. I love how interconnected they are, in the multitude of ways that happens in small towns. The story began with them all on the bus together, then they bumped into each other throughout the weekend, at the pub, at each other’s houses or in the street. Sometimes the connections were as slight as one character’s opinion of another when they chanced upon each other, other times they discussed the ins and outs of another character’s business or history with their own friends or relatives. As always, the author’s warm and inclusive voice made me feel as if I belonged, too.

The plots in The Lilac Bus aren’t as strong as in Maeve Binchy’s later novels and there are spelling errors and typos in my edition, but no matter, this story remains one of my favourites. 

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The Drowning by Fiona Lowe

When my local library advertised they were hosting an author event with Fiona Lowe, whose most recent book is The Drowning, I booked Aunty G and myself in, then raced down the street at lunchtime to buy the book. The next day I heard an interview with Fiona Lowe on my local community radio station and thought she sounded bright and cheerful, and happy to be interviewed.

I found the story to be equally as interesting as the author’s radio interview had promised, a real page-turner. It began with a family tree and a prologue; the family tree was useful but I thought the prologue was redundant as the information contained in it was also covered in the story itself. This was a very small quibble, though.

The story itself began with CC driving down the coast to the beach shack she’d summered at as a child with her third cousins, excited to see James, Ollie, Lily and Felix together again as adults. Soon after her arrival, CC was excited to learn that she had been left a fifth share of the shack, along with her cousins, although James, now a lawyer, was reluctant to tell her the news. CC, however, was so happy to have been included in the family she could have cried with joy.

During the next few days though, resentments and family rivalries arose, as they always do when money is involved. James and Felix’s wives would much have preferred to holiday at Lorne, Torquay, or better yet, Portsea, with the who’s who of Melbournians in summer instead of at Kooramook, a fictional small town near Portland, more than four hours drive from Melbourne. Gretel and Bronte hated the asbestos-walled shack, the crappy old mish-mash of furniture, and the single bathroom that everyone had to share. Felix, an architect, wanted to replace the shack with a modern beach house with enormous plate glass windows, enough bedrooms for everyone and ensuite bathrooms, while James wanted to sell the place. Ollie and CC wanted everything to stay the same forever, and as for Lily, whose use of magic mushrooms and Ritalin for what was dangerously close to self-diagnosed ADHD was a problem, she wanted the impossible; peace and love and harmony within the family.

CC was about to take up residency at the nearby Portland hospital and asked for her cousins’ permission to stay at the shack for six months, but was not allowed. Instead, James introduced a booking system for each family member to book their time at the shack, and while Ollie, Lily and CC were happy to share their time with the others, James and Gretel, and Felix and Bronte wanted their own visits to be exclusive to their own families.

When CC received a legal notice from James saying that her share of the inheritance was being challenged, she was devastated. At that point, I would have walked away from all of them, but CC wanted to be in the family so desperately that she dug in and fought as hard as she could, with varying levels of support from her cousins.

Although the story included a drowning that might have been suicide, an accident or even a murder (to say which would be a spoiler) and a romance for CC with a local surfer/singer in a band/pharmacist, The Drowning was really a story about the shifting sands of family, constantly changing factions and the manipulations that go on beneath the surface. I didn’t entirely believe in some of the character’s attitudes after they found out something that I can’t explain here, since to say more would be a spoiler. I had a feeling about the big twist too and wasn’t surprised when the ending played out as I had expected.

I’ve visited Portland a handful of times so don’t know the area very well, but enjoyed the local references which are also common to my area of the coast. I’d never heard the acronym ‘PFM’ that the author used to describe the People From Melbourne who overrun coastal Victorian towns during holidays, but when I lived in Batemans Bay on the NSW South Coast during the 1980s and 90s visitors from Canberra were known as Yogis, because like Yogi Bear, they arrived in summer and took all of the best picnic spots. The local references to hospitals and roads and other locations rang true, though.

Despite my little quibbles I enjoyed this book very much and would be very happy to read other books by Fiona Lowe.

So, to the author event with Fiona Lowe at the library. Approximately fifty attendees attended and I think it would be fair to say that we all enjoyed the event very much. Librarian Leigh Higgins was a terrific host, and Fiona’s talk was practiced, professional and entertaining. She told the audience which local town Kooramook was based on – for anyone local, it starts with ‘N’, and explained how she had walked the streets of Portland to get the details around the town right. She talked about how she developed her plot and chose her characters, and how the story came together. Fiona has published one book per year for many years and her routine sounded absolutely grueling, and not at all like the stereotyped idea I had of a writer, merrily tapping away into a laptop in some quirky Melbourne coffee shop or other.

My purchase of The Drowing continues my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (March). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.

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A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam

I was excited to discover a copy of A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardham in an Op Shop, after reading and loving her Old Filth books years ago (before blogging).

My understanding is that A Long Way from Verona was the author’s first novel and that it was written for teens. I found the story and writing style to be suitable for adult readers too.

In the first chapter the narrator, thirteen-year old Jessica Vye told the reader she was not normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine – the experience turned out to be discovering that she wanted to be a writer. Chapter 2 began with another truth, that Jessica was not popular; in her own words, “Some people in fact do not really like me at all. In fact, if you really want to know quite a lot of people absolutely can’t stand me.” What Jessica couldn’t understand was why people began by liking her very much then went off of her. Jessica was also certain that she knew what other people were thinking, and that she always told the truth.

The story was set during the first year of World War Two, when Jessica and her schoolmates had gotten used to carrying gas masks around with them, along with their school satchels. Some of her fellow students were evacuees from London and she mentioned Polish refugees recently arriving in the area. The Yorkshire Spa town where her school was located was often bombed as it was on the ocean and close to the docks, but it was the Order marks that Jessica received from her teachers for misbehaving at school that troubled her most of all. One day, she received three Order marks, putting her at risk of being expelled.

Jessica had constant adventures, which included meeting a dangerous escaped Italian prisoner, falling instantly in love with a boy with the most beautiful blonde hair, arguing with her parents, getting over tonsillitis, and surviving an air raid bombing while on an excursion with Christian (the blonde boy) to look at the slums – Christian had discovered Communism and wanted to convince Jessica that all slums should be bulldozed.

I loved Jessica’s stubborn, independent, outspoken nature from the very beginning. She is a character made for readers to love, and I’m sure many of us would agree with her when she said, “I wish I read slower as a matter of fact because I can’t get books to last.”

Jane Gardham’s books are exactly the type of books that I wish lasted longer.

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The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce

I thought The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce was one of the best books she’d ever written while I was reading it, but several weeks after finishing reading the book I’m struggling to remember the characters and the story. Some books are like that. I wrote a rough draft for this review the day I finished reading, otherwise this review would have finished with this sentence.

Vic Kemp, a reasonably famous 76 year-old artist, arranged a family lunch at a trendy London noodle bar to tell his four middle-aged children he was marrying a fellow artist, a 27-year old woman called Bella-Mae whom he’d known for six weeks.

Instead of dragging their father off to have his mental capacities checked, Netta, Susan, Goose and Iris offered their father shocked congratulations. They were even more surprised several months later to learn via a text message that Vic had married Bella-Mae, since they’d expected the romance to fizzle out. The children were also somewhat suspicious of Bella-Mae’s true intentions since Vic was reasonably well-off.

In the same text Vic asked his children to join him and Bella-Mae for a summer holiday at the home he owned on an island on Lake Orta in Italy. The phone ran hot between the children as they agreed to ignore Vic’s text, until they received word six weeks later that their father had drowned in the lake, then they dropped everything to get there, to meet Bella-Mae and her slimy cousin Laszlo, search for a will and try to discover if Bella-Mae had anything to do with Vic’s death.

As they waited for the autopsy results they looked for the painting their father said he’d been working on, which he’d said would be his masterpiece. The children wanted the missing painting to secure Vic’s reputation as an artist, since his work to date had been popular but not particularly good or original.

I know it seems odd to continue calling siblings of this age ‘children’ but they really were, in that their charming, selfish, complicated father was still overly-important to each of them in entirely different ways, possibly as a result of their mother having died when they were very young. Netta wanted to impress Vic, to fight with him and boss him around, Susan wanted to be indispensable to him by taking care of his home and all of his needs, Iris wanted to remain the baby forever and Goose, poor Goose, wanted to be an artist. He had tried and failed, and had a mental breakdown in the process, after which he worked for his father in his studio, preparing canvases and cleaning brushes. The relationships between the siblings was fascinating, and watching cracks appear between them as they waited and waited and waited for their father’s autopsy results was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The story was slightly too long and it didn’t have the emotional pull that the Harold Fry books had for me, which was disappointing since I’ve come to expect a good cry when I read Rachel Joyce’s books. I felt as if I knew each of the characters quite well, but never got the chance to really like any of them.

Some of the twists I saw coming, and other twists that I expected didn’t arrive. I liked the very last twist at the end, though, because one of the children got their happy ending. I expect fans of Rachel Joyce will enjoy this book, and readers who know Lake Orta, will get a huge kick out of visiting the area via this story. I don’t expect I’ll ever go there myself, but it looks lovely.

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Heart the Lover by Lily King

I’d read several reviews of Heart the Lover by Lily King and wanted to read it for myself, even though I knew the narrator was a college student at the beginning of the story – I’m not ageist, but too much angst and attitude of younger characters in contemporary novels can be uninteresting to me. I needn’t have worried. The narrator owned her crap and told her story about life, love, friendships, choices, regrets and the one who got away – without any annoying melodrama.

The story was told in three sections, spanning thirty years of the narrator’s life and began with a dedication to an unknown person, someone she had clearly once loved dearly. Their story began in a fiction writing class they shared, with an assignment to write a contemporary version of Bacon’s essay ‘History of Life and Death.’ Hers was read aloud by the professor, causing two guys who sat at the front of the class to pay attention to her. One of them, Sam, asked her out and she accepted. Soon she and Sam, who she was wildly attracted to, were having an affair, although it was the other guy from her class, Yash, who she was better friends with.

When the narrator and Sam broke up acrimoniously, she took up with Yash.

Love triangles are always complicated but it was clear from the beginning, and ultimately heartbreaking, who it was that the narrator loved. A series of circumstances, miscommunications and difficult choices eventually caused the narrator and her ‘heart the lover’ to separate.

Sam and Yash had begun by calling the narrator Daisy because that was what they always nicknamed their dates, but they changed that to Jordan from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when they learned she was in college on a golf scholarship. I think Heart the Lover‘s cover is reminiscent of the original cover of The Great Gatsby, which used a painting called Celestial Eyes by Francis Cugat.

As a literature student, Jordan told her story articulately, almost conversationally sometimes, and always with grace. Her feelings rang true and I felt that everything she said or thought was valuable.

The book’s title was based on a card game, Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that the characters played as college students. Jordan later taught the game to her own children. I looked up the game but don’t think it exists. I wish it did.

Lily King has written six other books that I haven’t read yet, which is something to look forward to.

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The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, book #1 of the Cazalet Chronicles reads like a soap opera. Short scenes, an extended family of characters and lots going on left me unable to put the book down as the story skipped through the Cazalet family’s lives during the two years prior to World War Two.

The character list and the family tree in the front pages were invaluable as there was a cast of thousands, each person equally as important as any other.

William Cazalet, who was known as ‘the Brig’ had made his money in timber. He and his wife Kitty, aka ‘the Duchy,’ had three sons who were married with children of their own and one unmarried daughter, Rachel.

His sons Hugh and Edward worked in the family business, but Rupert, the youngest, was a school teacher who lived to paint. As a spinster, Rachel was much put-upon by the family although she was also much-loved, especially her many nieces and nephews, all of whom had their own distinct personalities and storylines.

The entire Cazalet family regularly holidayed together at a family property in Sussex called the Home Place, which allowed the children to play together, and the adults to come together to gossip, talk business, and play tennis or swim. I was amused by how few bathrooms the Home Place had and as a result, someone was always in the bath. The water was shared as it used to be when I was as a child – one person hopped out and the next person hopped in, with the grubbiest person getting in the bath last.

I was already a fan of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s works, but before I got to the halfway point of this novel I already knew that I didn’t want the story to end, even though there are another four books in the series. I adored most of the characters right up until when I didn’t – predatory behaviour by one of the men towards his teenage daughter left me feeling sick to the stomach. Up until then, I’d thought him a charmer and forgave him his affairs and flirtations, so this story line gave me a horrible jolt.

All of the characters were very human in that they had their good points and their bad points. I had my favourites, one of whom was the self-sacrificing Rachel, and I was also very fond of poor old Miss Milliment, who the children said had a face like an old toad. Miss Milliment was too old to work but too poor not to, an artistic nature and an extraordinarily good temper..

I felt sorry for Zoe, Rupert’s very young wife, who reminded me slightly of poor Emma from Madame Bovary. No doubt Zoe had expected something more glamorous than what she’d gotten when she married Rupert and became stepmother to his two children.

The social aspects of this book were absolutely fascinating. Money and class differences abounded, and anti-Semitism showed itself as an everyday part of life in England. Some of the storylines were trivial while others were enormous, but what I appreciated was that each was a big deal to the character involved.

And the food! As one character said, ‘If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn’t have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.’ In one scene, Mrs Cripps, the cook, spent an entire morning:

plucking and drawing two brace of pheasant for dinner; she also minced the remains of the sirloin of beef for cottage pie, made a Madeira cake, three dozen damson tartlets, two pints of egg custard, two rice puddings, two pints of batter for the kitchen lunch of Toad-in-the-Hole, two lemon meringue pies, and fifteen stuffed baked apples for the dining room lunch. She also oversaw the cooking of mountainous quantities of vegetables—the potatoes for the cottage pie, the cabbage to go with the Toad, the carrots, French beans, spinach and a pair of grotesque marrows.

The threat of war hung over everything with politics and current events of the time being discussed, and events such as gas masks being distributed and other preparations for war occurring. The story ended with Chamberlain’s peace in our time breaking out, which just like a soap opera left me frantic to know what happens in the next book, because we all know that wasn’t the case.

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Mary Bennet by Jennifer Paynter

In my experience Jane Austen fan-fiction can go either way. Sometimes it’s cringe-inducing crap and other times it’s an enjoyable look at someone else’s idea of what might have happened next in an Austen story. I’m happy to say that Jennifer Paynter’s Mary Bennet, or The Forgotten Sister as it is known in the UK was great fun and fell into the enjoyable category.

Mary Bennet uses Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as framework to tell the story from Mary’s point of view but best of all it goes further, giving Mary, who was eclipsed in the original story by her prettier, more sparkling and most importantly, more socially intelligent sisters, a life and love story of her own, with the known events (such as Mr Bingley and co coming to Netherfield, Jane’s romance in three acts, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s love-hate relationship, Mr Wickham’s seduction of Lydia and the rest), occurring in the background of Mary’s story.

Mary’s story began long before Mr Bingley came to Netherfield; instead, as a child she watched on as a scandalous plight between the previous tenants of Netherfield imploded for all to see. Elizabeth, then a young teenager, was almost implicated in the mess, having become smitten with the man at the tip of the Netherfield love triangle.

Mary was also watching on from the background as Mr Bingley and Jane fell in love and were parted, and she realised long before Elizabeth did, that Elizabeth and Mr Darcy were attracted to each other. Mary also knew who Mr Wickham was meddling with in the village long before his true nature was revealed to the rest of the Bennet family.

Sometimes Mary’s version of events were funny but other times sad, since she was far more self-aware in this version than the original. She remained socially awkward, moralising and pendantic, without Lizzie’s wit or Jane’s beauty and goodness, and she was often left out of things since Jane and Lizzie were a pair and so were Lydia and Kitty. This story allowed the reader to understand and feel sympathy for Mary, and also hope she found the courage to pursue a romance of her own with Peter, a musician and gamekeeper.

As the son of Mary’s wet-nurse, Peter had known Mary since she was a baby. Mary and Peter fell in love soon after they met again as adults, but Peter’s lower status gave Mary and her family pause.

Although I appreciated Pride and Prejudice as the foundation for Mary Bennet, I actually preferred the sections where Mary’s own story took off in entirely different directions to the original. I expect that next time I read Pride and Prejudice I’ll look on Mary with much greater sympathy and far less irritation.

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The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Australian author Holly Ringland was recommended to me by a work mate who said it was her favourite book from last year.

The story began with a child dreaming of setting her father on fire in the hope that his demons would be destroyed so the best of him could rise again phoenix-style, like the Black Fire Orchid of Western Australia.

Alice lived her life on tenterhooks, socially isolated and terrorised by her angry, controlling father, as was her mother, who bore the brunt of his beatings. When she was nine, Alice’s parents died in a fire and Alice’s grandmother stepped in, taking her shocked, non-verbal granddaughter back with her to Thornfield, a flower farm. The flowers were put together in bouquets by the women who worked on the farm (who were known as the Flowers), to send messages to the recipients in the language of flowers. Each of the Flowers had demons of their own, and many had made the farm, a place of peace and solace, their permanent home.

June, Alice’s grandmother, had cut her son off years ago, realising that his temper would make him unworthy of inheriting the farm when the time came, but in doing so had condemned Alice and her mother to a life of anxiety, pain and torment. As Alice grew up June continued to keep these secrets from Alice, and since domestic violence and trouble caused by keeping secrets is circular and ongoing through generations, by the time Alice became an adult, she formed a relationship with a dangerous man of her own.

My edition had the most beautiful line-drawing illustrations of Australian flowers at the beginning of each chapter, along with the local name, Latin name and a description of each plant. I enjoyed these very much, far more than I enjoyed the actual story. My work mate is a keen gardener, so I expect this element added a lot to her enjoyment of the book.

Every single character was emotionally damaged in some way, and the story only hinted at the huge issues that each of the minor characters was facing. For me there was far too much going on.

I began to skim in the final third of the book but really should have given it up long before since the story wasn’t for me. I’ve read too much grief-lit of late and wished the steady stream of misery in this story was balanced by slightly more positivity and hope. I didn’t feel an emotional connection with Alice or June, which made me wonder if I had missed the point – the intention might have been to provide a contrast between the beautiful language of the flowers and the stilted emotions of the characters.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is now an Australian miniseries. I suspect the story has been rewritten somewhat to expand on the minor character’s issues. The miniseries features some well-known Australian actors however I don’t see myself watching this.

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Retreat and other stories by Irwin Shaw

Retreat and other stories by Irwin Shaw is a collection of short stories by an author who I have never read. I’d heard of Shaw, Rich Man, Poor Man was a best seller, although long before my time. I had the mistaken idea that Shaw’s stories might be too dated and sexist for my taste – perhaps I confused him with Harold Robbins, who I think was popular around the same time.

The collection began with Retreat. As the German army prepared for retreat from a week before the liberation of Paris in World War Two, a German Major forced a conversation on a Jewish musician at a cafe. The German sought forgiveness, saying that the German Army were a separate entity to the Gestapo, but the Parisian was having none of it, stating that the German Army had enabled and facilitated the Gestapo.

The main character in Part in a Play was a middle-aged actor called Alexis who had steady work playing bit parts on stage, unlike his friend and flatmate, Philippe, who was always offered main roles. During World War Two Philippe made a moral decision not to work while Paris was occupied, and he convinced Alexis not to work, either. However, times got tough, money got short and when Alexis was offered the role of a lifetime he took it. Phillipe immediately cut Alexis out of his life, although as the war was drawing to an end Alexis did everything he could to redeem himself with his once dear friend.

The Veterans Reflect was set on the day peace was declared after World War Two and told two alternating stories. An American soldier who was recovering from being shot in the stomach during an air-fight reflected on war and his fellow men as he travelled home to Chicago by train, while in Germany, Hitler reflected that he could have won the war if the Russian winter hadn’t been so cold, and the Americans and Russians not entered the war.

In The House of Pain, a young playwright offended a well-known actress when he told her that the role he was proposing for her was as a ‘slatternly, tyrannical, scheming, harsh woman who ran a boarding house.’ I expect that no woman really wants to be seen like that, no matter how good the role being offered.

Does anyone remember what it was to be fourteen-year old and desperately in love with someone who loved someone else? Once experienced, never forgotten, right up to the fisticuffs between one heart-broken boy and another who didn’t care at all for the girl in the middle of the love triangle in Pattern of Love.

I Stand by Dempsey began with a conversation between two men as they left a fight at Madison Square Garden. Not surprisingly since this often happens after men have watched a boxing match, their discussion soon descended into a physical fight, with the bigger man eventually compelling the smaller man by way of physical force and humiliation to agree with his opinion. The saying ‘might versus right’ came to mind, although I don’t know which of the men’s opinions was correct and neither did they, since their argument was purely hypothetical.

The next story, Stop Pushing, Rocky described a ‘fixed’ fight. The boxer who was supposed to lose fought as if he thought he was supposed to win, while the boxer who was supposed to win had his work cut out for him to make his opponent look good even though he wanted to beat him to a pulp.

In The Deputy Sheriff, the titular character desperately wanted the department to send him from New Mexico to Hollywood to collect a criminal who had robbed a train box car of $9 worth of goods, but since the trip was going to cost $90 that the department didn’t have, he wasn’t going anywhere.

The Greek General was another crime story, this time of a man hired to burn down someone’s house. The job went wrong and the would-be arsonist was sent back under duress to try again.

The last story, Residents of Other Cities, circled back to war, although this time the story was set in Kiev in 1918. During World War One Kiev changed hands from the Bolsheviks to the Whites and back again many times, and when the Bosheviks held power Jewish people were safe, but when they didn’t, pogroms were the order of the day. This story followed a Jewish family through terrible, terrible times. The father prayed and lamented he had not taken his family to America when he had the chance, while the son he respected least stepped up and used his cunning and courage to try to keep the family safe.

The entire collection was very strong, and I thought all of the stories were well-written, thought-provoking and often surprising. Many of the story’s themes linked to the next story, sometimes quite subtly, and included war, theatre, boxing and crime. Residents of Other Cities left the biggest lump in my throat, although I would be hard pressed to choose a favourite. I can see Rich Man, Poor Man in my future.

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Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood is a collection of fifteen short stories, many featuring a couple who I think are fictional versions of the author and her late husband.

The first story, First Aid, introduced Nell and Tig on a day that Tig cut his hand and had to go to hospital, leaving blood all over the place for Nell to find when she got home and worry about. Many years later Nell and Tig attended a St John Ambulance First Aid training course so they could work as guest speakers a nature-tour cruise ship. As their instructor taught the class how to manage a variety of scenarios, from choking to drowning to traffic accident victims, Nell was reminded of life-threatening experiences from their own lives, such as the time a spark from their chimney set fire to the roof and Tig climbed into the ceiling space to put it out, or when their canoe was tipped over by a freak wave in the middle of a huge lake, as well as traffic accidents, chainsaw incidents and an encounter with a bear while hiking.

Two Scorched Men featured Tig and Nell again, this time with Nell narrating the story of two friends they knew long ago in France, then Morte de Smudgie, which was about Nell’s deep sense of loss following the death of her beloved cat, Smudgie.

The middle stories in the collection moved away from Nell and Tig.

My Evil Mother had a teenage narrator whose mother used her supernatural powers to get her daughter to dump an unsuitable boyfriend. The narrator’s mother said that while she liked Brian, the Universe didn’t, and that the Queen of Hearts said that if her daughter went anywhere in a car with Brian, he would die in a terrible accident, but if she dumped him, he would live. Brian grew up to be a drug dealer and was shot to death at a young age, so I suppose he lived a few extra years after being dumped. When the narrator became the mother of a teenage daughter herself, she used her own witch-like powers to stop her own daughter from going out running at night.

Have you ever wondered what Margaret Atwood and George Orwell might talk about if they used a medium to communicate? Well, wonder no more, because in The Dead Interview they discussed families and writing and Orwell’s wife and other writers and science and the environment.

Impatient Griselda made me laugh. The main character was an alien who got stuck babysitting a group of humans as they quarantined from a plague. While telling the humans a fairy tale, it transpired that the alien could not tell the difference between men and women, and was from a place that does not have a word for vegans and where entertainers were of low status. I don’t have a problem with vegans, how much entertainers are revered, or men, women and everyone in between, but there is a funny side to a lot of things that are taken very seriously and it tickled me to have these pointed out.

Two very old friends who had spent a lifetime niggling at each other starred in Bad Teeth. One of the women teased the other about an affair she had supposedly had many years ago with a man with bad teeth, even though the niggler knew perfectly well that the story wasn’t true since she had made it up herself.

Death by Clamshell was an odd story narrated by the ghost of Hypatia of Alexandria. She was a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a mob of Christians, later becoming an icon for women’s rights. Her ghost wondered why paintings of her death depicted her as young and attractive when she was aged around 60 when she died.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the main character of Metempsychosis, who was a snail reincarnated as a woman with memories of her past life, wished that she was still a snail. This story made me wonder if we have the idea of reincarnation right, that is, if someone lives a good life they get to live their next life as a higher organism. A snail’s life sounded fabulous compared to being a human.

Airborne was the story of a group of elderly women, feminists who met regularly to fund raise for their goal to create an endowed chair for a young woman at a university. The women in this story reminded me of my grandmother‘s friends who met every Tuesday afternoon and cackled their way through conversations and afternoon tea. The only real difference was that my grandmother and her friends met for the joy of their friendships, rather than for a cause.

Tig and Nell returned in A Dusty Lunch. This story was told by Nell about her father-in-law, who was known in the family as the ‘Jolly Old Brigadier’ despite being tormented by PTSD.

The next story, Widows, was two versions of a letter written by Nell to someone called Stevie after Tig’s death. In the first letter Nell told Stevie how she was really doing without Tig, in the second, she wrote the letter that she thought Stevie would rather receive. Widows felt quite autobiographical to me.

The last story, Old Babes in the Wood, featured Nell and her sister Lizzie as they holidayed at the cottage in the woods they had helped their father to build many years ago. The story began with Nell wading into the cold water to rescue a favourite pair of pants that had blown off the dock, then wondering if she would be able to climb back up onto the bank. The cottage had no running water or power, was mice-infested, nothing was built to code and the list of repairs needed was immense.

Most of the story’s themes and styles differed, although the Nell and Tig stories followed the lives of these characters more or less chronologically. My favourite story was My Evil Mother, but I also liked the bittersweet essence of the later Nell and Tig stories.

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Atwood - Margaret, Author, Book Review

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The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker by Joanna Nell

The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker by Joanna Nell is unashamedly the genre that some bookshops shelve under ‘women’s fiction.’

In this case though, I was pleasantly surprised to find the story had more depth than I’d expected.

The story followed an elderly woman, Evelyn Parker, or ‘Mrs Henry Parker’ as she insisted on introducing herself as she muddled her way through life on the Golden Sunset, a cruise ship home-porting out of Sydney.

It was clear that most of the staff on the ship knew Evelyn well and were fond of her, which suggested that she had lived aboard for a long time. Evelyn, however didn’t remember any of the staff, although sometimes she touched on the edges of her memories. She often muddled up the time, for example turning up to a formal dinner dressed to the nines only to discover it was breakfast time, and she got lost looking for venues on the ship that she would once have known like the back of her wrinkled hand. The most confusing thing of all for Evelyn was the whereabouts of her husband, Dr Henry Parker, who was a former ship’s doctor. Evelyn spent her days and nights roaming around the ship looking for her missing husband but when she asked staff directly where he was, their answers were ambiguous.

In some ways the story was quite repetitive, as Evelyn asked the same things of the same people over and over. Some young staff members couldn’t help but smirk at her questions although they turned away to compose themselves before she noticed. Other staff members showed that they were tired of her questions by the briefest of facial expressions, but still answered her questions politely and with kindness.

When Evelyn met Frank and Nola, fellow passengers on the current cruise and was befriended by them, she told them the story of meeting Henry in the 1950s as she sailed from England to Australia to become a nurse. Evelyn and Henry’s quirky personalities were well-suited to each other and she made the snap decision at the end of the cruise to marry Henry when he asked, fully aware of the pros and cons of the life he was offering her. The pros were that she would sail the world with him while he worked, the cons being that if they had children Evelyn would have to leave the ship to bring their children up alone for extended periods. Evelyn’s descriptions of her life with Henry at sea during these early years of their marriage were wonderful.

The repetition irritated me so I skimmed slightly, although I do understand that it was necessary to Evelyn’s story as a glimpse into how her mind worked. I found it surprising that Evelyn’s personality didn’t reflect the difficulties that she faced every day in the form of anger, although she occasionally expressed her frustrations.

The story’s resolution was unexpected. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that I liked the ending and thought it was well-done. Now I’m dreaming of living on a ship myself, although since marrying a ship’s doctor is out of the question I expect I’d have to work in the galley washing dishes to be able to afford to!

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Nell - Joanna

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The Women by Kristin Hannah

Kelly from Kelly’s Thoughts & Ramblings recommended The Women by Kristin Hannah to me after I read Vietnam; a reporter’s war by Hugh Lunn last year, to get an American woman’s point of view of the Vietnam war.

I ended up reading The Women from start to finish on New Year’s Day, crying more times than I care to remember as I read.

The story began in California in 1966 when Frankie’s parents threw a party to say Bon Voyage to her brother Finley, who had just graduated from the Naval Academy and was leaving for Vietnam as a ship’s officer. Six months later, Frankie, whose parents expected her to marry well and have children, had just signed up as a registered nurse for the Army when two Navy officers knocked on her parent’s door to say that Finley had been killed in action in Vietnam, shot down in a helicopter.

Frankie was unable to get out of her commitment to the Army, and nor did she want to. After Basic Training, which didn’t prepare her in any possible way for what was to follow, she found herself on a plane to Vietnam, the only woman amongst 257 men. The story then dumped Frankie into hell, a make shift hospital in the middle of a war zone where she quickly recognised that her nursing skills were not good enough for what was required.

Overwhelmed, Frankie learned to nurse brain-damaged soldiers before being thrust into what was essentially a triage ward with two areas; one for patients who were expected to die from their injuries and where if there was time, someone might hold their hand during their final moments, and another for those who might or might not live but either way, needed urgent medical care. Before long Frankie was carrying out emergency operations and procedures that would ordinarily be carried out by a doctor at home.

When they were off duty, Frankie and her permanently exhausted fellow medical officers lived just as hard and fast as they did when they were working. They drank and danced and had affairs, although Frankie, whose morals would not allow her to compromise herself, resisted acting in what she believed was an unfair manner with the married doctor who she had fallen in love with. He was later killed, leaving Frankie devastated.

For two years, Frankie watched a great many people die, but she also helped many, many soldiers to live. Unbelievably, she signed up for a second tour and eventually fell in love again with her brother’s best friend, but suffered another heartbreak when he was killed in action. The friends Frankie made during this period were her friends for life.

The society that Frankie returned to didn’t recognise her courage or her work in Vietnam, and neither did her parents, despite her father’s obsession with the military men, who he saw as heroes, in their family tree. Frankie’s parents were actually embarrassed about what she had done, telling their friends she had been in Florence for an extended holiday instead of saying she was an Army nurse in Vietnam. She was also vilified by the general public for having been in Vietnam; spat at, abused and treated as if she were a criminal.

Frankie was vastly overqualified to work in a hospital as a nurse when she returned stateside.

The story spanned twenty years of Frankie’s life, and most of them were brutal. Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse for Frankie, they did. She suffered from nightmares, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was gaslit by just about everyone, being told time and time again that there had been no women in Vietnam, all of which invalidated and disrespected her service. The vilification continued, also.

Some of the storylines were predictable, but this didn’t make them unnecessary to the story or out of place. Instead, I felt they probably reflected many Vietnam veterans’ life journeys, not just the women’s who were there.

I thought the Vietnam setting was very well done. I could easily imagine the heat and humidity, the stickiness of the green jungle, the mud and the rain and as for the constant fear, the idea of living on the edge and partying like there’s no tomorrow, and the horror of the war, and the injuries and the gore and the death, well, they all seemed real to me, too. Real enough that I couldn’t tell you the last time I cried so much when I was reading a book, and not only did I feel sad, but I also felt angry, frustrated and shocked.

I would highly recommend The Women to anyone interested in reading about this time and place from a different point of view. Kelly said she read the book with her book group, who I imagine had a very interesting discussion.

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Author, Book Review, Hannah - Kristin

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Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler left me wondering why I haven’t read more books by this author. It was good. And, better yet, it was a novella – a well-told story told in exactly the right amount of words. The other Anne Tyler book I’ve read, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was good, too. When I reviewed it, I said almost the same thing; that I enjoyed the story and didn’t know why I hadn’t read more of her books. I think this was because the film of The Accidental Tourist was so sad that it put me off her stories. Like most readers, I’ve got to be in the right headspace to take on a sad story.

The main character of Redhead by the Side of the Road was Micah, an almost middle-aged man who found peace and comfort in routine. Micah mopped his floors on Mondays, Thursdays were for cleaning his kitchen and on Fridays he vacuumed. He saw his girlfriend Cass on set days, although Micah called Cass his ‘woman friend’, since Cass was in her late thirties and Micah was as particular about using the correct word as he was about everything else in his life. In his business, Tech Hermit, Micah solved his customer’s computer problems, which he generally found satisfying. He was also the super for his building, putting out the tenant’s rubbish bins on bin nights and making small repairs around the building.

A phone call from Cass saying that she thought she was about to be evicted from her apartment followed soon after by a visit by a young man who thought he might be his son turned Micah’s world upside down.

I was charmed by this book and by Micah. He was a good man who tried really, really hard, but he was so completely literal, so absolutely unable to read between the lines that unspoken conversations and questions passed over his head, frustrating Cass and Micah’s noisy, messy sisters and their noisy, messy families.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a quiet story of an ordinary man’s life, but I found it to be very powerful. The writing was so clear, and the characterisation so good that I felt as if I knew Micah, Cass and the other characters, including the building tenants who continually left their cardboard boxes out on bin night without having already flattened them, of whom Micah’s opinion was, ‘Some people, they just didn’t have a clue.’

I absolutely have to read more of Anne Tyler’s books.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

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Author, Book Review, Tyler - Anne

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On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle

I wouldn’t have read On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle based on the cover art since I found it dull, but after seeing glowing reviews all over the place and realising that the story fits into the Groundhog Day genre or what I’ve since learned is known as a ‘time loop’, I reserved the book from my local library.

The story is narrated by Tara Selter, who is married to Thomas. They have a comfortable, happy life and run an antiquarian book business together. When Tara’s narration into her journal began, she was experiencing November 18 for the 122nd time, hiding out in the spare room of her and Thomas’ home and surreptitiously living her life around the routine Thomas consistently followed on this day.

Tara was in Paris for her first November 18. She’d travelled there by train on November 17 to stay at the Hotel di Lison. She woke up, had breakfast, visited other antiquarian book shops, called in at a friend’s shop, then returned later in the afternoon to spend the evening at the shop with her friend and his new girlfriend. She bought an ancient Roman coin for Thomas, and burned her hand on a heater. When she returned to the hotel late that evening Tara phoned Thomas and they told each other about their day.

When Tara woke up the next morning it was November 18 again. The newspaper from November 18 was on her table again at breakfast, and the guest at the next table dropped a piece of toast on the floor at the same time and in the same way they had on the previous day. Not surprisingly, Tara spent her day in disbelief, phoning Thomas to check the date, calling into shops to look at calendars and in a scattered fashion, reprising her movements from the previous day. When she visited her friend’s shop, Tara saw the coin that she had bought for Thomas back in the cabinet she had chosen it from, although some of the books she had purchased on her first November 18 remained in the hotel room with her.

In her next November 18 Tara returned home to Clairon, where Thomas was surprised to see her. Tara explained what was happening and Thomas believed her since she was able to prove to him that she had foreknowledge of certain events that had already occurred.

The next day, though, Thomas was surprised to see Tara when she brought breakfast into their bedroom, since in his mind, it was November 18 for the first time and he had expected Tara to still be in Paris. Thomas always accepted and believed Tara’s explanation of what was happening to her, based on the more and more minute details she could tell him, such as a bird chirping at a certain time. This played out again and again, until eventually, Tara became exhausted with the gap in between hers and Thomas’s realities, and began hiding in their spare bedroom, showering or cooking something for herself when Thomas was out of the house. Later, to give herself more freedom, Tara moved into a vacant house in another part of their town, going out only when she knew Thomas was reading or doing something at home, since his routine never changed.

Tara, who was 29 when the story began, continued to age. Her hair grew longer, and her burned hand healed. Food that she consumed disappeared from supermarket shelves forever.

By the time a year’s worth of November 18 had passed by, Tara had become very solitary, meditating on time and ideas as she sought a way to get back in step with time, to move onto November 19 with the rest of the world.

I found that the story required slow, carefully reading, and I used the spaces in between each paragraph to pause and think about what had gone before. This book was originally written in Danish and translated by Barbara J Haveland. I have a lot of questions and am very, very keen to read Volume 2 of what is to be a seven-book series.

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Author, Balle - Solvej, Book Review

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The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower

I found The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower to be hard going. The writing was excellent; Harrower had a clear, realistic writing style that left the reader in no doubt of what was going on, but the plot, while interesting, left me feeling distressed – angry and sad with the female characters’ plights. By half-way through the book, I had to force myself to keep reading.

The story follows two sisters, Laura and Clare, whose father, a doctor, died when they were children. Their mother, who may well be one of the most selfish women ever depicted in fiction, pulled the girls out of boarding school and set up a flat in Sydney, where she manipulated her daughters into running their household while she sat back smoking cigarettes and filing her finger nails. Laura, who had wanted to become a doctor and an opera singer, was sent to business school then took a menial job at Shaw’s Box Factory.

Not long after Laura started her job, her mother told her and Clare that she was returning to England because she said she had been brought up for better things than the life they were living, but the girls were to remain in Australia because they knew no different.

Felix Shaw, the owner of the box factory, swooped in to marry Laura and take on the care of Clare. He initially seemed like the answer to a prayer, with his lovely harbour-side house and his jokes and gifts for the girls, but very soon Felix was shown to be as or even more manipulative than their mother – the difference was that she had been indifferent to them but he was cruel.

Laura became a complete doormat as she placated and tried to please Felix, while Clare longed to escape the household. Laura, whose behaviour was enormously frustrating to me, begged her sister not to leave them since Clare had the knack of being able to cajole and flatter Felix into a good humour.

Laura’s character reminded me that relationships like hers and Felix always require at least two people to exist, one to be the bully and one to be coerced. Laura and Clare’s narcistic mother, who brought her daughters up not to know their own worth also played a part, as did the neighbours who turned a deaf ear to the women’s plight when Felix’s abuse turned physical.

I would have said that men don’t come out of this story particularly well except that most of the women don’t either. I read Down in the City by Elizabeth Harrower a few years ago and thought the same thing; good writing, interesting plot, but oh, such unhappy characters. Both novels were set in Sydney, but I had more of a sense of the city being important to the story in Down in the City. Apart from references to the harbour and occasionally certain streets, The Watch Tower could have been set anywhere.

The sadness of both plots made me suspect Elizabeth Harrower was an unhappy, troubled woman, which led me to wonder if there was something in her name (Harrower – harrowing) that subconsciously affected her personality or the types of stories she told. I looked this up and found the term ‘nominative determinism,’ although this usually refers to a person’s occupation, for example, a piano teacher named Ms Scales. I couldn’t find an exact term to describe a possible connection between someone’s name and their personality but I’m leaning towards this being a real thing.

My library has a copy of Hazzard and Harrower: the letters by Brigitta Olubas, so I suspect I will read this in future to gain more insight into Harrower’s personality (the letters were between Elizabeth Harrower and fellow author Shirley Hazzard).

No doubt I will read more Elizabeth Harrower fiction in future, but it might take some time to get over this one.

Down in the City by Elizabeth Harrower

My purchase of The Watch Tower concludes my New Year’s resolution for 2025 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (December). I purchased The Watch Tower at North Melbourne Books in Melbourne.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Harrower - Elizabeth

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Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

The narration of Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson began on December 21, when Ernest Cunningham’s ex-wife Erin phoned to tell him she’d been arrested for the murder of her boyfriend at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.

Ernest, a writer of detective novels and an amateur detective, dropped everything to drive up the pass from Sydney to help Erin. Foolishly, Ernest lied to his fiance Julia by telling her he was going to Katoomba to check out Rylan Blaze’s show, after his uncle booked the magician for their upcoming wedding entertainment. I say foolishly because Julia, who Ernest met during the events of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, would have understood had he been truthful.

Ernest’s first stop was the police station where Erin was being held, her hands still covered in Lyle’s blood. After questioning Erin about the circumstances, which made no sense to her at all, Ernest made his way to the theatre to interview Rylan Blaze and the theatre staff before Rylan’s performance, a pre-Christmas fundraiser for Lyle’s foundation.

Less than an hour later Rylan was murdered while performing a show-stopping (pun intended) magic trick, leaving the audience traumatised and Ernest with two murders to solve.

I liked that Ernest stuck with the self-imposed rules of the Golden Age mystery writers, although the author had fun with these, including identical twins, magicians and hypnotists amongst the characters. It also amused me that Ernest justified writing (and solving) a holiday murder by reminding readers in the story’s prologue that ‘the favourites aren’t immune to a little cash grab. Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle both caved to the whims of the popular desire for holiday murders.’

Each chapter began with an Advent calendar with a clue behind each window. Amongst the clues were Secret Santas, presents and plenty of gore for readers who like their murder victims well-bloodied. I didn’t guess who the murderer was until the big reveal inside the cable car as it travelled between Echo Point and the clifftop on the the other side of the valley.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret was a fast and enjoyable read. This is the third book in the Ernest Cunningham series and can be read as a stand-alone book, although I think the story would be more enjoyable for readers who have read the previous two books.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Stevenson - Benjamin

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The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume* had me bouncing around in excited recognition of places I know in Melbourne throughout the story, beginning with the Argus newspaper (long-gone) reporting that a Hansom cab drove to the police station in Grey Street, St Kilda** where the cab driver reported to police that while driving down Collins Street east past the Burke and Wills statue*** he picked up a drunken passenger on the Scotch Church corner**** who was later found to be murdered in the back of his cab.

I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the book was a best seller in Melbourne when it was first published in 1886. Reading this almost 140 years later was akin to taking a guided tour around the city as it must have been then, although many of the buildings referenced in the story no longer exist. I was constantly looking up buildings I hadn’t heard of only to learn that they had long since burned down or been demolished to make way for less charming but more practical structures than the original Victorian buildings.

Although the city was almost a character in the book, the story actually revolved around the murder of the initially unidentified man. Early chapters included newspaper reports and a transcript of the inquest, but it wasn’t until a one hundred pound reward was offered that a detective, Mr Gorby, became interested in the mystery and was able to identify the dead man as Mr Oliver Whyte.

Using a combination of a hunch and solid logic, Gorby inspected Whyte’s rooms at a boarding house in St Kilda and amongst mostly French novels and sporting newspapers, found a Zola book on the shelves. Another leap of recognition from me, because I have a copy of The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola patiently waiting its turn on my shelves to be read! I assume the dead man had probably read and re-read his Zola book, whatever it might have been – the detective didn’t say. Gorby wasn’t impressed though, because he said of Zola, ‘I’ve heard of him; if his novels are as bad as his reputation, I shouldn’t care to read them.’

Gorby soon found a suspect in Mr Brian Fitzgerald, a handsome and likeable Irishman who had been vying with Whyte to marry Madge Frettelby, the daughter of a prominent business man. Madge favoured Fitzgerald and had recently become engaged to him, but on the basis of the detective’s evidence, Fitzgerald was arrested.

That wasn’t the end of the story, though. Gorby also had a rival in another detective, one who wanted nothing more than anything to prove Gorby wrong. Engaged by the Frettleby’s lawyer and aided by Madge and what occasionally seemed like a cast of thousands, Mr Kilsip began his own investigation.

The story was fairly complex, with twists and turns along the way and the author never used five words when he could use forty, but I enjoyed the lengthy descriptions, the rabbit holes the author occasionally went down, the story and the humour just as much as I enjoyed gallivanting around Melbourne with the characters. Each characters had a backstory and their own little ways, for example, Mrs Sampson, Fitzgerald’s landlady, had a relative with the exact experience necessary for her to recount a warning story for every imaginable issue, crisis or ailment.

I thought I knew who the murderer was and what their motivation was early on, but I was wrong. I’m not certain if the clues were actually in the text or not, but I forgave the tricky ending since the story had thoroughly entertained me.

Text Classics, who began in Melbourne, print Australian fiction and non-fiction. All of the books I’ve read from this publisher have been terrific, and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was no exception. Earlier this year Text was bought by Penguin Random House, and I don’t suppose I’m alone in hoping they continue to print Australian books, including classics.

*Fergus Hume was born in England, but grew up in New Zealand, before moving to Melbourne for a couple of years – enough time to learn the city’s landmarks well-enough to write The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, before returning to England where he wrote over 130 novels.

**When Honey-bunny moved out of home many years ago she lived in a funny little shared house in Grey Street, not far from where the old police station was located on the corner of Barkly and Grey Street. When she was there the once-grand street was overrun by prostitutes, drug sellers and customers of both, but I suppose when people first move out of home adventure comes with the territory!

***The Burke and Wills statue has been relocated several times since it was on Collins Street. I worked for several years in a building on the next corner down from the statues’ original location.

****My oldest friend was married at what is now known as the Scot’s Church thirty-odd years ago.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was book twenty-six of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028. This was also my CCC spin #42 book, which was to be read and reviewed by December 21, 2025.

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Author, Book Review, Classics Club, Hume - Fergus

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The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp

When I found a battered copy of The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp in an Op Shop (otherwise known as a thrift shop or charity shop, depending on where you’re from), I thought myself very lucky indeed, as I’d adored The Nutmeg Tree, which featured a charming, disreputable heroine who lived her life with pleasure and without guilt.

I didn’t like The Foolish Gentlewoman quite so well. It was a more serious story sent in more somber times. It was still very enjoyable, though; the plot was good, the characters felt real and so did their various predicaments.

The story was set soon after the end of World War Two in London, when bombed homes were being rebuilt and food was still being rationed. Disapproving, set-in-his-ways Simon Brocken was forced to live with Isabel, his brother’s widow while the roof on his own home was being repaired, along with a menagerie of people and animals that Isabel had collected.

Along with Humphrey, a nephew of Isabel’s from New Zealand who sunbaked naked below the terrace, Isabel also had Jacqueline, a young companion who was a poor-relation of someone or other living with her at Chipping Lodge, plus a dog that Simon said in Isabel’s hearing should have been put down. Old friends of Isabel’s popped in and out and were made more or less welcome, while the house itself was managed by a Mrs Poole and her young daughter, Greta.

All was well until Isabel went to church and caught a few words of a sermon, which was surprising, because she freely admitted that she’d never really gotten into the habit of listening to sermons. The gist of the fateful words was that time did not absolve a person who had carried out an unkind act of having been unkind, which caused Isabel to reflect on something she had done a long time ago to another girl. In short, Isabel had prevented a romance from blossoming between a young man she was in love with and Tilly Cuff, another of Isabel’s poor relations, out of jealousy. Tilly had been very poor, and after leaving Isabel’s home soon after the thwarted romance, had always worked as a companion or as a nurse for her elderly, dying relations.

Isabel’s conscience got the better of her and she invited Tilly to stay with her at Chipping Lodge with the intention of signing over her home, money and worldly possessions to Tilly to make amends for the wrong she had done to her.

Simon, not surprisingly, was horrified, as was Humphrey, even though he knew and freely acknowledged he had no claim on his aunt’s property. The group already living at Chipping Lodge were even more dismayed when Tilly turned out to be a nasty troublemaker who completely upset the delicate balance in the house.

There were some very funny moments in this book, including a description of the other housemates sidetracking Tilly when she was going to do something terrible by saying they’d found a Colorado beetle, which backfired on them when Tilly phoned up the Ministry of Agriculture to report the find. When the Ministry phoned back, Humphrey intercepted the call and described the beetle as ‘being bright red, with black spots, and responsive to the cry of “Fly away home”; exchanged a few sentiments on the unreliability of women, and parted from the Ministry on friendly terms.‘

I enjoyed several references within the story to Jane Austen’s works, including the description of Humphrey and Jacqueline’s courtship as being at ‘Jane Austen’s tempo’, which seemed to me to be lovely, a slow-paced, leisurely romance compared to the speed of modern romances. I also enjoyed one character’s musings on seeing a sign over a shop that said ‘Elizabeth Collins’ – of course her imagination led her to wonder what might have happened if Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice had married Mr Collins.

The Foolish Gentlewoman can be read on several levels; as witty, light entertainment, or as a deeper, thoughtful look at how people live with and atone for past behaviour that they believe was a sin.

I’ll continue to seek out other books by Margery Sharp.

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp

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Opal by Patricia Wolf

Mum, who likes thrillers, passed on Opal by Australian author Patricia Wolf for me to read.

I don’t think Mum read the blurb on the back cover, because it said this book was the third in a series featuring a character called DS Walker and I know she hasn’t read the first two books. I haven’t read the first two books either but found that this story stood-alone, despite occasional references to previous events.

Opal began with an affair between two people who were married to other people, Mark and Karen, in a remote outback opal-mining town in Queensland. After they dozed off in her marital bed, an unknown person killed the pair with a hatchet.

Two days prior to the murders, Detective Sergeant Lucas Walker was preparing to have a week’s holiday from his position with the Australian Federal Police. Lucas’ half-sister Grace was over from the United States and their plan was to visit family in Queensland.

After the long drive Lucas and Grace arrived at his cousin’s place, where Lucas learned that his cousin Blair was stranded another four hundred kilometres north in Kanpara, a boulder-opal mining town. Lucas volunteered to drive up to collect Blair, and Grace, who just wanted to spend time with her brother, went with him.

On arriving at Kanpara in the Queensland Channel Country, they found a town socially divided between the locals and the opal miners. Rumours were swirling that Mark, Blair’s boss, had just found a million-dollar opal, and tensions were high. The brothers who recently sold the mine to Mark were angry, and one of them, who had just got out of jail, was quick to wave his knife around during a bar fight. Vero, Mark’s wife, was partying hard, and Todd, Karen’s alcoholic husband, was drunk.

The next morning, Lucas, Grace and Blair were all set to leave, but found themselves stranded in Kanpara after floodwaters that had risen overnight from the north cut the town off in every direction. In the meantime Todd found his wife and Mark dead, so Lucas stepped in to start the investigation until members of the Queensland Police force could be helicoptered in to the town.

Two nights later, Todd died in a house fire in Blair’s house that appeared to have been deliberately lit. The Queensland Police arrested Blair for the three murders, leaving Lucas to work to clear his cousin’s name.

The story had a cast of thousands, with vigilante townspeople, weapons everywhere, criminals hiding out in the bush, and all sorts of red herrings to lead readers astray. I had my suspicions about who the murderer might be early on though, and I was right.

Opal was an exciting, fast read, although the story was occasionally bogged down by too much irrelevant information. I was also annoyed by the detail provided about one character’s karate skills that never came into play – you know the old saying – if there is a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act, it has to have gone off by the third!

I can’t say for certain if I’ll read other books by this author or not, while I enjoyed the story this genre isn’t really my thing. I guess I’ll wait and see if Mum buys another.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Wolf - Patricia

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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles #DoorstoppersInDecember

Forgive me, I’m going to rave in this review, because I thought The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles was terrific.

I’m late to the party, as usual. Several reviewers whose recommendations consistently suit my reading tastes said A Gentleman in Moscow was fabulous, but based on the title, it didn’t appeal. When I saw the old Studebaker on the cover of The Lincoln Highway, thought, I liked it enough to take the book out (of the library) for a spin.

I found this book to be almost un-put-down-able (I’m saying this in what I imagine to be Woolly’s upper-class accent, if you’ve already read already this book and know the character).

The story is set over several weeks in June 1954 with chapters alternately following a number of characters, beginning with Emmett, who I began by thinking of as the story’s hero. It began with Emmett arriving at his recently deceased father’s farm in Nebraska, driven there by Warden Williams after having been incarcerated for 18 months in a youth facility for manslaughter. Once home, he was met by his father’s banker, who advised Emmett that since the farm had failed after his father’s death, the bank would be foreclosing on the loan. Not long after Emmett signed the bank’s paperwork, his younger brother Billy was returned to the farm by Sally, the neighbour who had been looking after him. Billy was overjoyed to see Emmett and had already packed his bags in readiness to leave town with his brother.

The next chapter was flamboyantly narrated by another character, Duchess, in the first person. Duchess wasn’t supposed to be there, but explained to Emmett that he and their mate Woolly had absconded from the youth facility, hitching a ride to the farm in the boot of the warden’s car. Emmett suggested to Duchess that he and Woolly should return to the youth facility rather than risk being caught and jailed in an adult prison, but there was no way that Duchess would ever have agreed to that. Instead, when Emmett agreed to drop Duchess and Woolly off once they reached the Lincoln Highway so that Emmett and Billy could go to California, parting ways with Duchess and Woolly who were going to New York to get their hands on a large amount of cash that was Woolly’s inheritance, Duchess stole Emmett’s car.

The story then alternately followed Emmett, Duchess, Woolly and Billy, plus others they met along the way as they all made their way to New York where Emmett and Billy managed to track Duchess and Woolly down at Woolly’s sister’s home.

Emmett and Billy travelled to New York on freight train boxcars, and their part of the story included people they met or spent time with along the way. After not hearing from Emmett as promised, even Sally (the neighbour from Nebraska) dropped everything to follow them there, and got caught up in the adventure, so had her own chapters, too.

The story had more twists and turns than I could have imagined, and every chapter left me wanting to read on to find out what madcap thing would happen next, not to mention how the characters would manage in whatever mess they were currently in.

It was the four main characters, Emmett, Billy, Duchess and Woolly, who made this story for me. I came to care for each of them, despite some of their serious moral flaws.

They were all complicated, just like real people. Duchess in particular was fascinating. His sense of right and wrong was unusual, in that he saw nothing wrong with dispensing physical harm or even death as revenge on people who had harmed him or other people whom he respected, but he also had no problem with stealing Emmett’s car to get him and Woolly to New York. In fairness to Duchess, he originally intended to return the car to Emmett, but Duchess’ father was an actor, and Duchess reminded me of that two-faced mask that you often see around theatres – he was both good and evil, happy and sad, clever and stupid, charming and abhorrent.

Woolly, poor Woolly. He was a lost boy, a trust-fund boy with mental health issues and a drug addiction. He and the others stayed with his beloved sister when they arrived in New York, but she had been picking the pieces up after Woolly’s escapades for a long time. Woolly had the same kindness in him as his sister demonstrated, he would do anything for anyone, give anyone anything, and he was often taken advantage of as a result.

Billy was in some ways the most straightforward of the characters, a precocious eight-year old whose most prized possession was a book about heroes, adventurers and intrepid travellers. Billy took some convincing not to follow the rules, and he was vital to the story’s heart.

Emmett was also a straightforward character, had a strong sense of right and wrong, and he had a plan for the future. His intention on leaving the farm was to go to California and buy an old house, do it up and sell it, then repeat the process until he had secured a life for Billy and himself. The last time Emmett lost his temper he punched a troublemaker, who hit his head when he fell and died. Since then Emmett had done his best to follow Billy’s advice and count to ten when he was riled.

I struggled slightly with Sally’s character. Sometimes I thought the author got her exactly right, for instance when she wished that her father would remarry a much-younger woman so that Sally would no longer have to keep his house, but other times her behaviour and motives were inconsistent – she complained constantly about having to look after houses and the men who lived in them but she went out of her way to do the same for Emmett and Billy.

By the end of the story I thought that every single character in it, even the ones who I didn’t like, or those who were only in it briefly were heroes, not just Emmett. Every single character was the hero of their own life, they all had a trajectory, a reason for being. Even the Lincoln Highway itself felt like a hero, a road that was built by the people for the people, with busts and fountains of Abraham Lincoln in many of the small towns along the way.

The writing itself was so addictive that I found it really difficult to stop reading. Every single chapter finished on a cliffhanger, but while I wanted to know more about what was going on with the character I’d just left, I also became instantly engrossed in what was happening with the character I’d just taken up with.

The author isn’t overly wordy, but the descriptions of place, character or events were full, and gave me a mental picture of each, that seemed real to me even though I’ve never been to any of these places, wasn’t born when the story was set and, most importantly, the characters and the story weren’t real!

At 576 pages, The Lincoln Highway is a doorstopper of a novel, but happily for me, every single word was worth reading. I’m including this in Laura Tisdall’s Doorstoppers in December but admit to cheating since I started reading this book in November!

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Author, Book Review, Towles - Amor

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Crossing the Lines by Sulari Gentill

Crossing the Lines by Sulari Gentill is the second book I’ve read by this author. The first, A Few Right Thinking Men, was the first book in a series featuring Rowly Sinclair, a wealthy Sydney-sider, and amateur detective from the 1930s. Crossing the Lines is a contemporary stand-alone mystery, although intriguingly, it contained several characters whose names I recognised. Some of you will too – read on to see who these people might be!

Crossing the Lines, which was published as After She Wrote Him in the United States, won the 2018 Ned Kelly Award for best fiction.

The story is really unusual. Super-clever. In fact, I’ve never read anything like this story before, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The story has two main characters, Madeleine d’Leon and Edward McGinnity. Both are writers. Maddie is a corporate lawyer who writes crime novels and Edward is an independently rich man who writes the kind of literary fiction that nobody ever reads. Maddie invented Edward as the main character in a crime novel where he quickly became a suspect, and Edward made up Madeleine, to write about the inner-life of a woman who may or may not be having a nervous breakdown.

As Madeleine and Edward became intrigued with each other, the point of view in the story changed from one to the other, sometimes within the same scene. This never jarred, always made sense and never once left me wishing that the scene had stayed with the other character. Madeleine and Edward knew the same people socially and eventually, they started to see and interact with each other. By the time this story finished I couldn’t decide if one character was real and the other a figment of their imagination, or the other way around, or if both characters were in fact real. Funnily enough, it didn’t even occur to me while I was reading that both characters were fictional and that the actual author, Sulari Gentill, was the writer pulling all of the strings.

I don’t know if other ‘real’ people made it into this story, but I had a serious jolt when Madeleine attended a writer’s festival and was seated next to Australian authors Tom Keneally and Angela Savage, who both actually exist. And yes, this Angela Savage is the same Angela Savage who blogs on WordPress! My head was spinning!

One small criticism is that Edward’s character seemed older than he was, out of time almost, as a result of the formality of his dialogue. I suspect this was a result of the author’s other novels being set in the 1930s, with the language of an older time creeping in without her realising.

A larger criticism is of the typos in my large print edition from Read How You Want. The heroine’s name was mis-spelled on the blurb along with another spelling mistake, and there were multiple errors within the text that interrupted the flow for me. These typos were frustrating, particularly since they could easily have been righted with a little more care.

My biggest problem with the book was a handwriting-style of font being used on the last two pages that I couldn’t read! I’m hoping this won’t be the case with a ‘normal’ copy of the book since I plan to visit the library or a bookshop so I can find out what happened on the last two pages. There are mysteries and I want them resolved! Or if they aren’t resolved, I at least want to know what the last two pages say!

I suspect the author wrote a lot of herself into this intriguing story, which has reminded me that I must get on with reading the next books in the Rowly Sinclair series before too much longer.

A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Gentill - Sulari

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Our Magic Hour by Jennifer Down

Even though I adored Bodies of Light by Australian author Jennifer Down, I’ve been avoiding Our Magic Hour for the simple reason that Bodies of Light left me feeling terribly sad.

Our Magic Hour, which was Jennifer Down’s debut novel, is also grief-lit. I usually avoid this genre but made an exception due to the quality of the author’s writing.

The story followed Audrey as she, her boyfriend Nick and their group of friends, who began the story at an age when people generally think they are invincible, lived through the aftermath of their friend Katy’s suicide.

On top of losing Katy, Audrey’s job as a social worker for children included details that I often found distressing to read about. Audrey’s work left her feeling traumatised, frustrated, angry, and saddest of all, occasionally helpless. Nick’s job as a paramedic was no less demanding. Katy had been a nurse, the three of them called to careers that require enormous amounts of resilience.

Audrey had a lot on her plate besides her work. She, Katy and another friend, Adam had been a tight trio, and after Katy’s death Adam leant heavily on Audrey emotionally. Audrey’s sister had a family of her own and did none of the heavy lifting when it came to dealing with their mother, who had a mental illness, or their brother, who was living independently while finishing high school. I say independently, but the reality was that he leaned on Audrey also, financially and emotionally.

On top of all this, Audrey and her family were also survivors of domestic abuse. Nick was fascinated by Audrey having had terrible experiences growing up, but also having had happy family memories.

Perhaps not surprisingly, life got to a point for Audrey where she had no more to give to Nick, Adam and their friends, her mother, brother or sister, or her work.

Even though I loved the familiarity of the Melbourne setting, the story itself and the writing, this book obviously has serious trigger warnings. Suicide, domestic violence, sexual abuse of children, an eating disorder, mental health issues, and possibly others that I might have blocked.

I could only read this story a little at a time, and often felt overwhelmed by sadness while I was reading. Despite this, the writing is beautiful and for readers who can cope with the subjects in this book, I think Our Magic Hour is well-worth reading. The story finishes on a hopeful note, if that sways anyone towards reading this.

The book’s title, Our Magic Hour is taken from a sign (sculpture?) by Ugo Rondinone of the same name that is sited on a building in an inner-city Melbourne suburb that is walking-distance to the MCG. I believe similar signs have been installed as temporary art installations in other parts of the world.

My purchase of Our Magic Hour continues my New Year’s resolution for 2025 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (November). I purchased Our Magic Hour at The Hill of Content in Melbourne.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Down - Jennifer

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Daisy Miller by Henry James (#novnov25)

The blurb for Daisy Miller by Henry James is quite specific; it states that Daisy flouts the ‘rigid European social code’ while travelling through Europe and as such, is disapproved of by her fellow American travelers before paying ‘for her indiscretion with her life.’

The story followed Mr. Winterbourne, a young American as he travelled through Switzerland, supposedly paying attention to his rich aunt but otherwise chasing pretty girls. An unnamed narrator told the story, with Daisy’s story told from Mr Winterbourne’s perspective.

By page 43, halfway through the book, I could already tell that the blurb was accurate. It was clear that Daisy either didn’t recognise or care about societal expectations as she raised eyebrows by gadding about unchaperoned with Winterbourne, whom she had met quite casually in Switzerland. Daisy‘s mother seemed too tired out by the antics of Daisy’s younger brother to care what Daisy was up to. Daisy’s father, a businessman, was absent, which seemed to be usual for the family.

By this time I was just as irritated with Daisy‘s behaviour as the society hostesses were who were shunning her. Even I, a reader from 150 years in the future, could see that her free and easy manners and disregard for conventions wouldn’t end happily.

By the end of the book though, my feelings had changed. Daisy did indeed die, and not in the way I’d expected her to, even though the author laid clues earlier in the story about the way she might die. But by then, Mr Winterbourne, who had previously been enamoured of Daisy, had lost respect for her, was fed up with her flirting, and no longer condoned her lack of care for society’s rules. While I’m not 100% convinced that Daisy was so innocent that she simply didn’t see why these conventions existed, I felt angry with Mr Winterbourne for changing his attitude towards her.

I recently came across the expression ‘pretty privilege’ and suspect this applies to the character of Daisy. She was very pretty, beautiful even, which makes me wonder if she might have been able to behave as she did with condemnation if she been less attractive. She was certainly rich enough to almost do what she wanted to. I’m not certain about Daisy’s brains – her conversation didn’t appear to be scintillating, but as everyone knows beauty, wealth and great charm go a long way towards making people seem more intelligent than what they really are.

I don’t know what it is about Henry James. I almost care about his characters – but not quite. His writing is good – but it doesn’t move me. His plots are interesting – but I never remember them after I’ve finished his books. I want to love Henry James’ stories – but I don’t.

For all of these reasons, I’m glad Daisy Miller was a novella rather than a full-blown book.

Daisy Miller has filled two spots for me this month, Novellas in November, hosted by Bookish Beck and Cathy746Books.

Daisy Miller was book twenty-five of my second challenge for The Classics Club, to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

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Author, Book Review, James - Henry

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