Demon Copperhead is a chunkster, its subject matter is weighty, but please don't let that put you off. It's taken me a while to get through it and it'Demon Copperhead is a chunkster, its subject matter is weighty, but please don't let that put you off. It's taken me a while to get through it and it'll stay with me forever.
Kingsolver likes to tackle big issues, connecting structural, systemic and institutional problems to the life situations of people. Here, it's the connection between capitalism & the oxycontin epidemic, and the poor, drug-addicted youth of the poorer American states, namely Virginia.
As an examination of life as a "hillbilly" or "redneck", she brings understanding, compassion, insight and clarity. I feel like it's safe to say that because her rendering of Damon Field/Demon Copperhead is so well done it honestly feels like he's real and this is his memoir. His voice, complete with grammatical diction of the area, is believable without being over-the-top.
I loved the insights into this type of poverty, and the thought processes of the people who don't seem to want to "improve their lot", a tangible pressure in a country where a chief ideology is that success is up to the individual - with its equally poisonous flipside: if you're a failure, it's your fault.
Kingsolver does well at teasing this out and bringing the complexities to the light. Not subtly, but how could it be? A taste, on living in a small rural community:
"In our [universe], you live on a tether: to family, parents if you're lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by. Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness. Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee's or the Dollar General parking lot. There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too big on your neck, the tall weed gets cut. So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everyone can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It's a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise yet to see if you're still alive." (p.377)...more
Harry Potter needs no introduction, but this play needs some context. It is set several years after the events of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter needs no introduction, but this play needs some context. It is set several years after the events of the final Harry Potter book, , when Harry and Ginny's children are getting ready to start a new school year at Hogwart's, alongside Ron and Hermione's children. The story revolves around young Albus, now eleven years old and embarking on his first year away from home. Albus is worried, soon with just cause: to the shock of everyone, he is sorted into Slytherin house - and comes to love it.
But Albus is no Tom Riddle or Draco Malfoy - he's a Potter-Weasley and adventure is never far away, nor good intentions. He becomes determined to save Cedric (he of the incredibly tragic ending in ) by going back in time - more than once, causing disturbing changes in the present.
This is a wonderful coming-of-age story for young Albus, who is marginalised and judged as somewhat lacking by others. His new best friend is Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry's old nemesis and also a disappointment to his family: Scorpius is a lovely kid, but not appreciated for who his real nature. It is also the story of Harry as a father, a loving father but a father who is floundering, struggling to connect with his youngest son and making some big mistakes. His hero status drops quite a bit, and you see the flawed human that is within us all.
While it is, in many ways, a homage to the novels, The Goblet of Fire in particular, it offers some wonderful new characters and a less polished glimpse into this world of witches and wizards. Harry is tarnished, a middle-aged bureaucrat who - perhaps because he never had a real father himself - is making a hash at connecting to Albus. Other beloved characters from the original series, now older and tired and less patient (that is to say, typical adults who frown upon the kinds of ideas, decisions and antics they themselves engaged in as children), seem more human than ever, which nicely balances the fantastical elements of the world and the story. It also does a sound job of using new crises to build strong relationships between friends, family and old enemies.
I loved this story, this play, but gosh it made me miss the full-length novels! It was just so damn short! A novella, really, in terms of length and how fast you can read it (give yourself a day or two, depending on distractions). Because it's a play it reads super fast, and I have always loved Rowling's writing and how she fleshes out her characters, settings and situations. Jack Thorne has done an admirable job here, and as I loosely string these pitiful sentences together, I am overtaken by an intense urge to re-read it straight away.
I'm a tentative fan of Sophie Kinsella's novels - some I have absolutely loved, others have been slightly annoying, while The Undomestic Goddess left I'm a tentative fan of Sophie Kinsella's novels - some I have absolutely loved, others have been slightly annoying, while The Undomestic Goddess left me cringing. Finding Audrey is Kinsella's first Young Adult novel, a sort of John Green-type story but with more human warmth, humour and, frankly, realism than Green (I might be the only person who isn't gaga over John Green, who is seriously over-rated, but the comparison is a fair one I think). Audrey Turner is a young teen suffering from severe anxiety after an incident at school the year before, in which three girls bullied her to the point of giving her a breakdown. She is slowly showing signs of recovering, but hides behind dark sunglasses, even inside, and rarely ventures out. Her older brother, Frank, spends all his time on the computer playing Land of Conquerors, and their younger brother, Felix, is a delightful toddler. Their parents are showing signs of stress, especially their mother, who puts most of her energy into combating what she sees as Frank's computer addiction - to the point of throwing his computer out of the upstairs' bedroom window. In Audrey's view, the whole family is nuts.
Her psychologist, Dr Sarah, encourages her to make a film, hoping that being behind the camera will help Audrey interact with others. But it is the arrival of Linus, Frank's teammate for LOC, that makes the most significant change. Audrey's attraction to Linus and Linus's patient bridge-building with her pave the way for real improvement, but it's a tenuous one, easily damaged.
Finding Audrey is both funny and serious, combining real-world issues like bullying with a wry, deprecating tone that helps balance the stresses I feel are coming to dominate the lives of young people. Audrey's case is an extreme one, but the number of teenagers with anxiety and/or depression seem to be rising. People, even young people, have the capacity to be truly awful to each other, but Finding Audrey is really about the positive, hopeful, loving and loyal connections we make with each other, which can help save us from our worst qualities.
Parenthood is no simple or straight road, and long after birth there exists, still, symbiosis between parent and child. Peggy Frew's novel Hope Farm dParenthood is no simple or straight road, and long after birth there exists, still, symbiosis between parent and child. Peggy Frew's novel Hope Farm deftly explores the consequences of youthful decisions, the effect of silence on love, and how a parent can represent home to a child.
Thirteen-year-old Silver Landes is used to moving around between ashram and commune with her young, single mother Ishtar, but that doesn't stop her from yearning to have her mother to herself, and a place of their own - to just stop for long enough to have a real home. The move to Hope Farm in central Gippsland, Victoria is just the most recent dislocation in young Silver's life, another grand idea that Ishtar has bought into, another new man that Ishtar is following. This time it's a man Silver only knows as Miller: thirty-six, bearded and large, he sweeps her mother up in his plans for the hippie 'commune' of Hope Farm, a run-down property rented by an odd mix of ageing hippies who have become increasingly jaded. Ishtar hands over her savings to Miller to buy a car, which he registers in his own name, and then Silver accompanies her mother on the train while Miller uses the car to get new supplies for the farm.
While Ishtar disappears into Miller's possessive, intense and narcissistic embrace, Silver is - as always - left to fend for herself. She befriends fourteen-year-old Ian, a neighbour, though the constant bullying he receives at school creates a darkness in him that Silver begins to glimpse, and is scared by. She is also scared of Miller, with his complete possession of her mother and his pornographic and violent drawing hanging over the bed that clearly show his fatherhood aim. With the arrival of a surprise guest on the farm, this temporary home is further shaken and Silver is drawn along in the adults' wake, heading towards disaster.
Silver's narration of this period in her life comes from decades later, as a middle-aged woman still haunted by events and the emptiness and loneliness left by her mother. Her silent, pent-up rage and impotent hopes are clearly drawn, sharper-edged by time and honestly come by. Ishtar - as we learn from her own poorly-spelt journal writings that intersperse Silver's narration - was only sixteen when she fell pregnant, and completely ignorant of how it happened. Living in an ordinary suburb in Queensland with religious parents in the 70s, her mother's reaction is predictable and acutely heart-breaking: she is furious, and keenly aware of the shame that Ishtar will bring to her family. Ishtar has seen what happened to another girl who was in the same situation, around whom judgements and opinions still collect, and is passively swept up in her mother's plan. She is taken to Brisbane, to a home for girls like her; after the baby is born she will sign it away for adoption and return home, all in secret. But at the home she learns from another girl who has been there before that she has a choice, and Ishtar takes it.
The repercussions of Ishtar's choice are just as hard on her as they are on Silver, in the long term. Her mother refuses to see her again, leaving Ishtar to live without support or guidance in an ashram, with the people who helped her. At such a young age, Ishtar - who took that name to replace her own when she started living there - has to give up the remains of her childhood and work for no personal gain. She loves her baby dearly, but feels increasingly guilty for the noise the baby makes, and for loving her so much. Soon, depression takes hold of her and she grows colder towards her child.
Finally when I went to bed she was still awake she must have been feeling better because she laughed and reached out her arms but all I wanted was sleep. I looked in to her face and no warm feeling came. I lay down with my back to her. She cuddled up to me and touched my hair but I lay like a block of concrete, there was this heavy sadness and some where deep under everything I wanted to break the spell and turn over and face her, it felt like an important thing to do but I just couldnt. I didnt move or make a sound and after a while she left me alone. And after that it was like some thing had broken and I couldnt fix it, I seemed to feel more and more tired like the love had been buried under the tiredness and every night I turned my back on her I lay there but I could never fall asleep because of the sad feeling I just lay listening to her breathing until she fell asleep. [p.146]
The moves begin: she finds a man and moves to his commune, then moves to another ashram to escape, and so on. Her relationship with Silver becomes rote and silent, and while there are things about Ishtar that Silver has always known - like what her real name is - there are bigger things that Ishtar never speaks about, and Silver has no words for her mother's moods, and no one to turn to.
The consequences of shaming girls and women about their bodies, the secretiveness associated with sex and pregnancy and the judgemental attitudes of others all play their part in ruining Silver's relationship with her mother. I'm not sure that we've come all that far since, though at least we don't pack girls off to wait out their pregnancy in hiding, away from the neighbours' eyes. This happened to my own mother, who wasn't in a position to marry when she accidentally got pregnant, and who was sent off to a home run by nuns in Melbourne, and treated like she wasn't even human. Unlike Ishtar, though, my mother's story had a happy ending: she and the father - my father - did marry and start a family, and the baby they had to give up for adoption came back to us and is just as much part of the family, and loved, as the rest of us. The point remains, though, of what we do to each other in the process, and the unnecessary pain and feelings of being unloved it brings. For Silver, love for her mother is the emotion she has long buried. She feels like a burden, and the silence between the two only exacerbates this.
The irony in the name 'Hope Farm' is inescapable, and encompasses not only the dead dreams of the hippies who hoped to live self-sufficiently but who now work in factories in the nearby towns, smoking pot and aimlessly strumming the guitar when at home. It also highlights the hope that fills Ishtar, temporarily, with energy, and the hope that has long been suppressed within Silver but that surges up when the two find themselves living in a decrepit old miner's cottage that, at best, resembles a cubby-house with its shabby, makeshift furniture and lack of amenities (like a toilet). It is there that Silver's dream, her one real desire to live with Ishtar, just the two of them, in a place of their own is finally, but partly, realised. Ishtar falls into her worst depression yet, and the only upside is that she turns away Miller.
Miller is the character who wasn't quite realised for me, or not in the way that he was for Silver. It wasn't until towards the end of the book that I even realised that Silver saw him as a monster - this just didn't quite come across to me. I certainly didn't like him, and his brutishness - captured in the descriptions of his hair and size, the way he 'claims' Ishtar in a physical way - was exceptionally unappealing, but I didn't fear him. I didn't realise that Silver feared him. It could partly be because, as engaging and readable as this is, I had a lot of interruptions and took about two weeks to read it; those interruptions can make it hard to feel the tension and threat. Tension was another aspect that I didn't genuinely feel: Silver directly foreshadows the impending disaster when she tells us that they were all on a "collision course", but the only tension I felt was when Ian showed her the abandoned mine shaft and she was, rightly, spooked, and things were never quite so easy between them again. The tension was in wondering what role the mine shaft would play in the story, and knowing that it would. But that tension didn't grip me, certainly not in the way I want it to, or the way the novel implies I should have been. Still, his effect is made clear:
I glanced at Ishtar's one suitcase and duffel bag sitting in the corner. They looked their usual compact, neat selves, but even they were being encroached on by the huge, looming tide that was Miller's mess - and her bedspread, crumpled down at the foot of the mattress, appeared more worn that I remembered, and smaller. I turned slowly in the small central clearing. So much stuff. As if he conjured it with his hands, brought it bouncing and skittering into his orbit, to then fly along in his wake like iron filings following a magnet. Into my mind came the twin images of Miller lifting Ishtar and putting her into the car, and then lifting and carrying her into the room at the ashram - her yielding body, her transformed face. Then I saw him raising Jindi towards the night sky. The power in those arms, and the speed with which they snatched something up - a body, a whole person - and then just as quickly let it go again. [p.90]
This is, undoubtedly, a sad novel. The sadness is in the sense of nostalgia that is vividly and realistically imagined, and in the disconnect between Silver and her mother, between a young girl desperately wanting to love her mother, and a mother trying to live life as if she weren't one. There is sadness in the dinginess and squalour of Hope Farm, in the painful, lonely and unloved nature of Silver's coming-of-age story. I came close to loving this novel, and in many ways I do love it: it is superbly written, even if the hoped-for tension wasn't quite there for me; it is memorable in its realism; and it is easy to connect to and empathise with, from the rural living 'out bush', which reminded me of where I grew up in central-north Tasmania, to the painful school bus rides and, most especially, the simple, unfulfilled hopes of Silver Landes, whose past - and especially her time at Hope Farm in 1985 - shaped her just as Ishtar's did, and not for the better.
This story will stay with me, as all well-written novels do that work on multiple levels, rich with symbolism and hidden layers just waiting to be unpacked. Above it all, I am left with this strong sense of familiarity, almost as if I had read this novel before, heard this story told another, earlier time - and I think this is not because it's a cliché, or Frew has ripped off some other book, but because it is such a human story, one that can speak to me and the girl that still lives inside me, suppressed maybe, but who - despite having had the loving family and stable home that Silver so yearns for - can still empathise with that hope and desire precisely because it is so vital. And because that sense of isolation and loneliness that Silver feels is so reminiscent of that period of our lives when we straddle childhood and adolescence. Frew writes with an openness that leaves me feeling vulnerable as I read, which directly relates to my ability to empathise with Silver. Mistakes are made on both sides, life is messy, and love is fragile and easily smothered....more
It is always hard to review a novel that contains an unexpected twist about a third of the way through - rather like (though everyIt is always hard to review a novel that contains an unexpected twist about a third of the way through - rather like (though everyone else spoiled that, especially when the movie came out). What's especially annoying in this case is that something I read somewhere gave away the twist in this wonderful book - something read in an unguarded moment, just as Nikki Gemmell gave away the twist of (without warning) in her column for The Weekend Australian Magazine. I was pretty pissed about that.
So I already knew about Fern when I started this book, making the twist vanish entirely. I don't want to do that to anyone else, but I'm not sure how to discuss this book without it - which is probably why I've let it go so long before attempting to review it.
I will say this: I loved this book, regardless. The narrator, Rosemary, a uni student in the present, explores her unusual childhood and where - when - everything changed. Her older brother Lowell is on the run from the FBI; Rosemary has made a new friend, Harlow, who gets her in trouble with the police; and, finally, Rosemary learns the truth about Fern and goes looking for her. The non-linear nature of the story's structure, as well as the tenuous nature of memory and false memories, make this a rich and unpredictable book, while the ethical and moral questions posed are compelling.
The nature of childhood, loyalty, love and envy are all explored here, as is human nature and the meaning of our relationships, not just with each other but with other creatures too. I may have been slightly disappointed by the ending, perhaps because I was expecting something darker or more climactic, but it works and feels true.
It is 1966 and Melissa Singer is only eleven years old when her mother leaves and never comes back. For Melissa, there was no warning, no clue that thIt is 1966 and Melissa Singer is only eleven years old when her mother leaves and never comes back. For Melissa, there was no warning, no clue that there was anything wrong. Her father, a bee keeper and general handyman, is non-committal - first he tells his daughter that her mother has gone to another war rally and won't be back for a few days, but after a while he simply says nothing. Instead he takes Lissy out of school for the last couple of weeks of the school year so he can take her with him on his annual rounds, distributing his bees at three different privately-owned orchards.
There is Earl Caulkins and his apple trees; an aloof and mildly eccentric author, Chance Curtis; and irascible farmer Les van den Hoven whose busy, loud and cheerful wife, Opal, is everything Lissy's mother is not. Opal takes Lissy under her wing for the week they stay at the farm, introducing her to painted nails and gossip. It doesn't quite make up for her mother's absence, but it helps. Later, over the summer holidays, she goes again with her dad and the bees, this time to wild blueberry crops and other out-of-the-way places.
It isn't until she starts a new school year at her small town's middle school that she realises something is definitely off. The mothers of girls she goes to school with are avoiding her as if she has something contagious. Her best friend Katie doesn't want to walk with her to school anymore, and arranges for her brother to switch lockers so hers isn't beside Melissa's anymore. Kids whisper around her and then suddenly stop, ostracise her or treat her meanly in the hallway. And she has no idea why, because no one will tell her. Nothing touches on her idolatry view of her absent mother, whom, she thinks, went away because she's sick - cancer, Lissy thinks, after reading about it in the library.
Whether her mother was present in the house or far away and silent, she manages to deeply affect Lissy's life. As Melissa grows up, spending summers with her dad and the bees and her school days writing stories and poems, her mother takes on a larger-than-life, demigod-like aspect. Such is how she copes with her feelings of abandonment and rejection. Nothing and no one can replace her, so it's a shock when her father moves on with his life - and expects her to move with him.
Bee Summers is a fairly short coming-of-age novel told with childlike confusion and puzzlement by its protagonist, Melissa. Set somewhere in east United States (there are references to Boston), the late 60s and early 70s provide a vague backdrop of upheaval and public protest, while the fashions, decorating styles and cars give nice period details. In the early parts of the story, there is plenty of evidence that Lissy's mother isn't someone you or I would like all that much, but Melissa is a strongly sympathetic character who misses her mother deeply. It's clear to us that her mother has walked out for her own reasons, and that Melissa is too young to understand without being explicitly told. It's hard to agree with her father not to tell her the truth, and the idea that he's both protecting Lissy and preserving her idea of her mother falls apart later when it becomes clear he just didn't want to talk about it (he was, like many men of his time, a war veteran from the Korean war, and also like many men of his time, found it hard to open up about anything). Because no one tells her otherwise, naturally Melissa creates an image of her mother as this loving, wonderful woman.
Yet Melissa also grows up increasingly lonely and closed-off, and perhaps because she does come from what is essentially a "broken home" with no motherly support or guidance, she matures slowly. I found it hard to empathise with her over her father's decisions to remarry and move. Certainly, if nothing else, Bee Summers shows how much damage can ensue when people don't talk to each other openly and honestly. Misunderstandings and a lack of communication result in what was, to me, a truly tragic ending. What's interesting about Melissa as a carefully-constructed character is how realistically flawed she is, and how clearly you can detect her mother and father's genetic inheritance in her. Her personality is her own but she has inherited characteristics from her parents; if both parents are uncommunicative, and at least one is inherently selfish, it's not surprisingly that you see it in Melissa as well. She doesn't make great choices all the time. She does live in fear, later, that because she didn't have a mother for so long, she doesn't know how to be one herself. Dugan has achieved a careful and honest balance between Melissa's vulnerable flaws and tender fragility. It's hard to dislike Lissy because so much of her character is a result of her circumstances. That said, had her mother stayed around, she probably would have grown up much like her - since she listened to her so much - and might have ended up even less likeable. It's an interesting aspect to the novel, and makes this a story that you can't read aimlessly or passively.
Where the novel disappointed me somewhat was in the development of Lissy's voice - she narrates in first-person past tense, which is a strong choice (you all know by now how much I'm coming to detest the latest fad for using present tense). However, her voice is a child's voice, rather than an adult's voice reliving a child's perspective, and I found this a bit weird and confusing. Almost as if you're reading about someone who's development has stunted. It bleeds into the later parts of the story, too, so that Melissa always sounds desperately immature.
Secrets abound in this story about silence and selfishness. (How's that for a bit of alliteration?) For me, the stars of the story were the bees themselves - I have a deep love for these precious little creatures who are so instrumental to the survival of life on earth. I can't resist any story with "bees" in the title or on the cover, whether they figure as part of the story or not. While the bee summers of Melissa's youth fade into her childhood with the blush of nostalgia - as these things do - I was left bereft and saddened that the bees had left the story. I liked hearing about them, and wanted more. But they had served their purpose, plot-device-wise, and everything must change and move on. That's always a strong theme of coming-of-age novels, that things end and we must grow up and lose our innocence. The sense of that is strong in Bee Summers, and perhaps it's that quality of honest realism that makes it hard to tease out my response. The past of our childhood always has an element of pain, humiliation, gaucheness to it, that makes us shy away from it while at the same time missing it. I'm always impressed by writers who can capture something that ephemeral, that ambiguous, and Dugan has captured it so well I'm left feeling off-footed and mildly uncomfortable. Not an easy book to review but I do recommend it for those readers who like coming-of-age stories.
My thanks to the author for a copy of this book via TLC Book Tours. for more stops on this tour....more
In 1971, Luke Kanowski leaves the small town of Seston for London with a few bags of his possessions, including his record player and notebooks. A lonIn 1971, Luke Kanowski leaves the small town of Seston for London with a few bags of his possessions, including his record player and notebooks. A long-time theatre appreciator who's never seen a play, it takes a chance encounter with two people about his own age, Paul Driscoll and Leigh Radley, to motivate him into quitting his clerk job and leaving his parents behind to embark on his own life. His mother has been locked up in the mental asylum in Seston since Luke was five; he visits her often and resents his father, a Polish migrant who once flew fighter planes in World War II, for never seeing her or talking to her. He takes the train to London and calls the one person he knows there: Paul.
Paul is not much past twenty but doesn't want to be the engineer his father pushed him to be. He wants to be a producer. Now with Luke on side, a plan begins to take shape and a fledgling theatre company arises. With several others, they form Graft, a small, artsy theatre above a pub. When handsome, charming Luke sleeps with the stage manager and then doesn't talk to her again, she leaves and they hire Leigh. The same spark of familiarity, connection and desire that was there when they first met is still alive, but Luke is taking the admonishment of not sleeping with the stage manager to heart, and steps back. Paul fills the gap, and after a while of dating him Leigh moves in to their flat and the three settle into a comfortable rhythm.
Also in London is Nina, a young actress trying to break in. Raised mostly by her absent (and unknown) father's sister, her mother has been the dominant presence in her life. An actress who didn't want the burden of raising a child she didn't want, Marianne is selfish and egotistical. All Nina has ever wanted is her mother's love and approval; she'll do anything and become anything to make her mother happy. That's how she finds herself going to drama school, even though she's so shy, and how she became a shell of a person easily sculpted by anyone dominant and confident enough to take on the task. Which is what happens when she meets Tony Moore, a producer and one of her mother's young ex-lovers. Tony arranges her, dresses her and trains her like something between a doll and a pet. Nina hides so deeply behind a blank - appeasing and pleasing - mask that it's not long before any vestige of an individual person able to break free and create a life for herself is gone.
It's at the performance of In Custody, a heavy play in which Nina stars, that Luke first really sees her. Barefoot, blind-folded and gagged, she comes onto the stage after an intense, dark opening in which the sounds of heavy doors opening and slamming shut can be heard. The experienced is terrifying for Luke, whose mother has been locked up for so long; when he sees vulnerable Nina, when her face is bared to him, he sees a frightened young woman who needs to be freed.
It is Luke's all-consuming love for Nina, and the affair they embark upon, that ruins old friendships and nearly scuttles his just-blooming career as a playwright. Fallout is a coming-of-age novel for both Luke and Nina, a vividly-real, intimate look into what drives us, what shapes us and what love can cost us.
This might very well be my favourite Sadie Jones novel to date, although I can't really say that because I really do like all her novels quite a lot and the ones I've read so far have all been quite different (I haven't yet read Small Wars; really must!). There is something holding me back from full-out loving her books, but for the first half-ish of Fallout I was definitely in the "love" zone. My copy is an uncorrected proof (an ARC), which meant it had lots of typos, nothing major, but it did also have a slightly unpolished feel to it. The prose was, at times, a bit awkward or unclear, the punctuation so technically incorrect that the emphasis or meaning of a sentence was distorted or lost, rendering some parts unnecessarily clumsy, like you've stumbled on an uneven floor. Again, hard to know if the punctuation was going to be fixed or whether this is the style she's developed, but the control over commas versus semicolons or even periods was sloppy. The comma isn't the "new" semicolon; they affect a sentence quite differently. Misuse either one and you ruin the rhythm of your words and disrupt the flow. You can be "experimental" with punctuation, but you can also create an annoyingly disjointed mess if you don't do it well.
This is a story about people, about Luke and Nina, Paul and Leigh, about relationships, love, the battle scars in our relationships and the mistakes we make - and sometimes learn from. The characters are real, believable, familiar. The most interesting and confronting of them all was Nina, someone you pity and feel infinitely sorry for, but whom you can't respect. She lacks will, she lacks grit, she lacks perspective. She is a product of her mother's critique and Tony's homoerotic desires (for instance, her mother keeps her skinny because chunky girls don't get hired; Tony keeps her skinny because he likes her to look like a boy). The arrival of Luke in her life, someone she feels instantly drawn and attracted to in the same way he does with her, presents an opportunity: a chance to take control of her life, figure out who she is and what she wants, and be fulfilled and happy.
But Nina has a diseased soul. Theirs is a love affair that begins with such hope and promise - you truly, truly want them both to be happy, and free, and together - that soon becomes something poisonous and even destructive. I sometimes hear, in movies maybe, people say that they're with the right person for the wrong reasons, or the wrong person for the right reasons, or some variation on that theme. There was a touch of that here. What I loved about it was how truthful, honest and messy it all was. Jones has a real knack for capturing ordinary, middle-class people in all their glorious strengths and flaws, and letting events play out naturally. While I did find that there was a slight sense of an author-creator (god-figure) manoeuvring pieces into place (it's the way she writes), once there the characters took over, their personalities guiding events and their ultimate fallout.
The star of the story was the setting and era itself: the backdrop for the fallout of relationships. London in the late 60s and early 70s is a place on the cusp, a place discovering love and life and excitement. A place still being held back by the tight grip of tradition and society but increasingly stretching its wings. Theatre is prominent, and popular. New bands and music rock the airwaves - which people actually listen to. It incorporates women's lib but nothing overtly political or radical. This is a story set in the hearts of its characters, rather than their heads. While there, I felt like I was there. I could picture things quite well thanks to all the British telly I've watched over my lifetime, and the flavour of their speech really helps catapult you there. Eminently readable but not exactly pleasurable, Fallout had me wrapped up in the characters so that I was going to bed thinking about them, however disquieting and somehow off the story and the writing was at times.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via ...more
In December 1969, Rahel and her twin brother Estha accompany their mother, Ammu, their great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, and their uncle, Chacko, in Chacko'sIn December 1969, Rahel and her twin brother Estha accompany their mother, Ammu, their great-aunt, Baby Kochamma, and their uncle, Chacko, in Chacko's skyblue Plymouth to Cochin. They're going to see The Sound of Music for the third time, but also - more importantly to the adults - to collect Chacko's ex-wife and daughter from the airport. Margaret Kochamma is English, and mourning for her second husband, Joe, who died earlier that year. It is the first time Rahel and Estha have met their cousin, Sophie Mol, but it will prove to be disastrous. This is the December that Sophie Mol drowns, Ammu is ostracised, and an Untouchable is beaten to death for breaching the laws that spell out who can be loved. The connection between these three events is not simply the twins, it is India's culture, caste system, and the fragility of the mother-child bond. It is miscommunication, a child's need to play, a woman's need to be loved, and a man's need to be touched.
With some books, when it comes time for me to review them, I find myself reliving the best bits, focussed on the story's strengths, and end up bumping up my rating because the things that I had thought were holding me back from enjoying it more turn out to be insignificant, or just simply vanish. Sometimes it's good to let a little time go by between finishing a book and reviewing it; other times, it's detrimental. This may be one of those cases. I finished reading this in early August and am only now, two months later, writing this review. I had given the book a "I really liked it" ranking on 카지노싸이트, but now I don't know why. I think, at the time, I was letting the writing and all the nifty literary stuff hold sway. Now, I mostly think of it as a story, and all the things that made this a slow read for me, all the things that bored me a bit or made it hard to follow are rising to the surface like oil in a broth, and the meaty stuff has sunk out of sight. Still there, but it's a cloudy view.
In truth, I have left it too late to write this review and do the book justice. Details are slipping away from me, but what remains is a messy jumble of the big truths that this story deals with - which it does not in a gentle way, but in a firm-gripped, wrestled-to-the-ground kind of way. It is both subtle and obvious, sometimes vacillating between the two states, sometimes being both at the same time. It is full of fine details, details that become relevant personas through repetition, like Rahel's "Love-in-Tokyo" hair band and Estha's "puff" hairdo. The Love-in-Tokyo is a rubber band with two beads on it, "two beads on a rubber band". Possibly a metaphor for Rahel and Estha - and it's this that preoccupies your reading, constantly wondering about the importance of things. You could read into the details, characters and themes almost endlessly, and that makes it an exhausting book to read.
Roy has her own unique, distinctive style, and it's not one that I find easy to read. It took concentration and mental effort, something that might ease with repeated readings. It really makes you aware of that vast pool of consciousness that a culture creates with a shared language, so that when you are speaking the same language you are sharing more than just grammar, you are sharing deeper connotations. But for The God of Small Things, there is no shared or borrowed cultural understanding between the Western reader and the Indian author: the flow of words isn't familiar and soothing, you can't predict the end of the a sentence, or what direction you'll go in next. Roy writes in perfect English, but with an unfamiliar, exotic and artistic handle on the words and grammar that is both fascinating and confounding. She breathes new life into the language, but it is so constant that I found it exhausting just as much as I found it beautiful, exciting, invigorating, insightful.
Long flatfeet.
Airport garbage in their baby bins.
The smallest one stretched its neck like people in English films who loosen their ties after office. The middle one rummaged in her pouch for a long cigarette stub to smoke. She found an old cashew nut in a dim plastic bag. She gnawed it with her front teeth like a rodent. The large one wobbled the standing up sign that said Kerala Tourism Development Corporation Welcomes You with a kathakali dancer doing a namaste. Another sign, unwobbled by a kangaroo, said: emocleW ot eht ecipS tsaoC fo aidnI.
Urgently, Ambassador Rahel burrowed through the press of people to her brother and co-Ambassador.
Estha look! Look Estha, look!
Ambassador Estha wouldn't. Didn't want to. He watched the bumpy landing with his tap-water Eagle flask slung around him, and a bottomless-bottomful feeling: the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man knew where to find him. In the factory in Ayemenem. On the banks of the Meenchal.
Ammu watched with her handbag.
Chacko with his roses.
Baby Kochamma with her sticking out neckmole. [p.139-140]
That's just a random passage to use as an example, which also shows the curious narrator who speaks both with Rahel and Estha's perspective and voice, and something else too. It is another mark of strangeness that is this writing: written in third person omniscient from, often, the perspective of the children, it yet manages to convey the sense that there is no narrator. Even when the "narrator" makes direct comments, they just seem to Be. It's quite intriguing. Even so, the language, the perspective, the voice, they are like the different tools in an artist's hands, each given just as much weight and attention. Through the twins' obsessions over certain words, phrases, games, misunderstandings, through repetition and a non-linear structure, you are constantly aware that a real artist is at work here.
But as I said, the real strengths of this novel are the story itself, and the characters, which of course wouldn't have been the same if the writing had been more conventional. The two main parts of the novel that will really dig into your heart and squeeze, are those in which Rahel feels she has lost her mother's love - a grey moth resides on her heart when her mother tells her that when she's bad, she makes people "love her a little less" - and Estha is sexually molested by the "Orangedrink Lemondrink Man" at the theatre and lives in fear that the man will turn up in their village; and Velutha, the Untouchable, a character who naturally resonates with the Western reader because the very concept of his lowly status and the way people treat him for no reason other than a seemingly arbitrary caste system is abhorrent, and has tragic consequences. Or rather, characters ignoring the caste system results in tragedy. There is a distinction.
There is, throughout the novel, a sense of being trapped, of being restricted by caste, gender, wealth, poverty, expectations and custom in absolutely everything, for everyone. No one is exempt, and, it seems, no one is happy either. Time is fluid, the story shifting back and forth willy-nilly, moving sometimes into the "present" when Rahel and Estha are adults - still young, but damaged, moving about like ghosts. It is a damaged country, Roy seems to say, trying to maintain some semblance of order and control by obeying senseless traditions. It is a story, ultimately, about "the tragic fate of a family which ;tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how'." (I can't find that quote just now so I'm borrowing from Christina Patterson's review for the Observer, quoted on the back cover.) In today's Western culture, such a story would be futuristic science fiction, probably labelled "dystopian" in the Young Adult market; but for India, it's a very real and very turgid past and present. With strains of political machinations and Communist manoeuvrings, life in India after the British left sees a slight shuffle as the high-status families jockey to maintain their position, which necessitates keeping the low-born, low. You can't mix, love and marry, you just can't. But Rahel and Estha see just what happens, when you try....more
1894. Matilda is just twelve, pretending to be fourteen so she can work in the nearby jam factory while her mother is ill and bedridden. She continues1894. Matilda is just twelve, pretending to be fourteen so she can work in the nearby jam factory while her mother is ill and bedridden. She continues to write to the father she's never met, who is building a home for them in the country and getting established before they move - or so her mother has always told her, and she's never doubted it.
When her mother dies, leaving her alone in the world, Matilda is left with few choices. Their landlady, Mrs Dawkins, is willing to let her stay if she works for her board, but Matilda has no intention of becoming a maid. Instead, she takes her few meagre possessions, learns which train to catch from her friend Tommy, a young boy with a knack for machinery and inventing, and heads off to find her father.
All she really knows is the name of her father's farm - Moura - and the nearest town, Gibber's Creek. When the train stops for Gibber's Creek, she finds no station or town, but the faint demarcation of a road which she might not have spotted if a wagon wasn't stopped at it. Three men are there to pick up a union speaker who rode the train with her; also waiting to be picked up are a well-dressed woman and her daughter, who's about Matilda's age. Matilda throws in her lot with the working men, who give her a lift into town where her father will be - it's a big night for the union, and her dad is the man who began it in Gibber's Creek.
When she does finally meet her father, it's a happy reunion. Her dad is full of plans, and Matilda learns a new version of the truth as to why she'd never met him before. But all too soon, a shocking and tragic event unfolds and Matilda must once again turn to her own abilities to survive in this harsh, drought-afflicted land. With the assistance of a local Aboriginal woman called Auntie Love and Auntie's nephew, Mr Sampson, and her dog, Hey You, Matilda turns her energy and willingness to learn to making her dad's dream for Moura come true. But it's not only the land she has to struggle against: her neighbour, the wealthy and powerful squatter Mr Drinkwater, presents a challenge of his own.
Jackie French is a prolific writer and the Australian Children’s Laureate; she was also, this year (2015), declared the "Senior Australian of the Year". Both are well deserved, and I hope she receives even more recognition. I was first introduced to French through her priceless picture book, . But I had to wait till I'd moved back to Australia, in late 2013, before I could start reading her novels. , the third book in the Matilda Saga, was one of my favourite novels of 2013 - it reads as a standalone, but I knew I had to go back to the beginning with this volume, A Waltz for Matilda.
A Waltz for Matilda deserves to be better known and more widely read than it currently is. It's a Young Adult historical fiction novel that is accessible to children and just as satisfying and wonderful a read for adults - it's not many authors who have such breadth in their style. French effortlessly captures the tone and feel of the era, both through period details and characterisation as well as through the way she writes. It's not that it's written in a faux "olde worlde" style - that would be naff to the highest degree - but that the articulate, intelligent, smoothly-flowing prose instantly grounds the reader in another era. French manages to incorporate the information her readers need to picture scenes and understand events, without the usual clunky exposition or conversations that sound manufactured and contrived. For instance, Matilda - a polite, considerate, well-mannered girl who knows how to write a letter and say 'thank you' - begins a correspondence with the lady she met at the Gibber's Creek 'station', Mrs Ellsmore, after Mrs Ellsmore discovers a shared tie with Matilda through her now-deceased Aunt Ann. Aunt Ann, a spinster of small income (especially compared to Mrs Ellsmore, who's upper class), is a member of the Women's Temperance League. Through these letters we get a sense of what's happening in Australia over the course of the next few decades, as Australia heads to Federation and then women get the vote.
This is a novel in which a lot is happening within a very simple, straight-forward narrative structure. It's a coming-of-age novel for Matilda, who grows into adulthood over the course of the book, from 1894 to 1915. It's also a treasure trove of insight into the history of the period, the dynamics of small rural towns, conflicts between class, gender and race, the rise of unions in Australia, the conditions of Aborigines, and of course the land. The land is one of French's main themes, throughout all her work - I recognised many details, beautifully rendered and incorporated into this story from 2010, from her 2013 nonfiction work, . This novel is educational while at the same time entertaining and engrossing.
A key scene towards the beginning of the novel is used as the fictional inspiration of the famous song, "Waltzing Matilda" (in real life, this was written by Banjo Patterson in 1895. There is a note at the beginning of the book that outlines the origins - both known and dodgy - of the song, but I did love the way it was woven into the story. It fitted perfectly. Needless to say, this is a book that made me cry as much as it made me smile. It connected with me from the opening lines, effortlessly, like that moment at the birth of your child when you hold in your arms a being that is a part of you, yet separate. (You know you're struggling to articulate a sense when you have to resort to such an intense, mind-blowing yet traumatic and over-represented event!) Perhaps it is better to say, simply, that whenever you find an author whose writing just fits perfectly with you, that you're so comfortable with and that ticks all your boxes (personally, I want stories that engage, entertain, challenge and confront me and make me feel), you know you'll never be disappointed.
One of the things I really loved about this story (and there were many) was the juxtaposition of Matilda actively listening and learning from Auntie Love, who taught her women's business, including how to find food where white people see dirt and dust, with that of Mr Drinkwater, whose character, early on at least, represents your typical white squatter. An authoritarian figure, like a local lord, who owns great swathes of land and controls pretty much everything, he too loves the land, but he also is too stubborn to learn a non-white way of farming it. The character arc for Mr Drinkwater was wonderful, and really enriches the story. Matilda is, of course, a real heroine. I can't imagine any twelve year old today doing what she did, none of it - this is another aspect of the story that makes you feel grounded in the 1890s, when children worked and often died on factory floors.
The Australian landscape is brought vividly to life, and whether you're Australian or not, it is both familiar and new. Familiar because it is the dry, drought-afflicted land so often talked about and photographed, and new because there's more to it than that. I loved that moment, early on, when Matilda puts aside her pre-conceived idea of beautiful, based on pictures in books - the pretty, neat English green fields and fluffy white sheep - for the glorious gold of her new land. It is, almost literally, a transfiguring moment, when she steps away from the English ideal into the Australian reality, and learns to appreciate it and see it. This helps to enable her to learn how to care for it, rather than mould it to fit an inappropriate ideal (something people still try and do today - if you're interested in learning more about that, I recommend you read Let the Land Speak).
I could go, but I'd rather let you read it for yourself and discover the joy within its pages. As for me, I've got books 2 and 4 (The Girl from Snowy River and To Love A Sunburnt Country) ready to go, and I can't wait to visit the next generations of The Matilda Saga....more
It has been three months, seven days and nine hours since Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard's mother died. Susan Worthington was a prolific horror wriIt has been three months, seven days and nine hours since Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard's mother died. Susan Worthington was a prolific horror writer who died young, and Ophelia, her older sister Alice and their father, Malcolm Whittard, are still grieving.
In an effort to help them recover and give them a chance of scenery, Ophelia's father accepts a last-minute posting to a museum in another country to finish setting up the greatest-ever exhibition of swords. Malcolm Whittard is, according to his business card, the "leading international expert on swords", but with only three days to go before the opening of the exhibition on Christmas Eve, it's a demanding job that takes up all his time.
Alice seems content to sit and brood, but Ophelia spends the time exploring the museum. It is a cold place, in a city caught up in a perpetual winter, and the museum is a weird and wonderful place. The guards in each room are old ladies with black handbags who spend most of their time knitting or sleeping, so Ophelia is free to wander into parts of the museum she isn't allowed to be in. It is during her exploration that she encounters a peculiar room, with a little door and a big keyhole through which is the eye of a boy, staring back at her.
The boy, who was dubbed "the marvellous boy", has been alive for over three hundred years. He was sent here on a mission by the wizards of east, west and middle, who took his name to keep him safe. He no longer remembers it. They gave him a sword, a relatively plain and heavy sword with a carving of a closed eye near the hilt, and certain instructions. He was to find the "One Other" and give them the sword, with which they would defeat the evil Snow Queen.
The Snow Queen was unable to kill him because of the protective spell on him which also prevents him from ageing and dying, and so she had him locked up here in the museum, and the sword taken away. She need only wait out the time of his protection spell, then she can kill him and be free to take over more of the world, as she did to his homeland and this place, where she has reigned ever since.
Ophelia, unlike her mother, is not prone to fantastical flights of the imagination. She is a member of the Children's 카지노싸이트 Society of Greater London and believes in logic and reason and science. But little by little, she finds herself on small but dangerous missions to find the key to his room, to set him free and find his sword before the Wintertide Clock strikes on Christmas Eve and the Snow Queen's plan comes to fruition. But Ophelia is only eleven, she's not courageous and relies heavily on her asthma inhaler. She's a little girl up against a frightening woman, with only the whispered words of comfort from her mother for encouragement.
In her search for the hidden key and the missing sword, Ophelia might just find her hidden courage, and save her sister, her father and the world.
I don't read enough of stories like this one; or rather, I don't make enough time to read stories like this one, which is a sad mistake. Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy was utterly wonderful, a delightful story of adventure, danger, loss, grief, wizards who think a lot, deception, sibling love, resilience, courage and the classic fight between good and evil. It is fantasy in the tradition of the Chronicles of Narnia and similar works, a children's story that will engage and entertain readers of all ages, an old-fashioned tale given new life.
Ophelia is a timid and sensible girl, and the request made of her by the Marvellous Boy requires her to not just be brave, but to put aside all things rational, suspend disbelief and trust the word of a strange boy who claims to be several centuries old. The more involved she becomes, the more danger she is placed in, and the more her old certainties come crumbling down. She doesn't become a new person, or a vastly different person, she simply becomes her full potential as Ophelia. She's a great protagonist, suffering through the classic coming-of-age trial-by-fire that fantasy stories are best known for.
Wizards, [Ophelia] thought, when she gained her composure. What good were they if they couldn't tell you how to do stuff, if they were always talking in riddles and saying they knew everything before it even happened? It wasn't very helpful.
If she were a wizard, she'd write reports for people. She'd make sure everything was very clear. She'd write, Looking for a magical sword? No problem. Go to the fifth floor, turn left, open a large wooden chest, et cetera, et cetera. She'd have check boxes. Found your magical sword? Place X here.
The Marvellous Boy himself remains something of an enigma, and a sad one at that. He tells Ophelia his story in segments, and the vivid rendering of his life before being locked in the little room really brings him to life. He is quite clearly something of a sacrificial lamb, a boy hand-picked by the wizards who must sacrifice everything with little say in the matter. As such, he is an infinitely sympathetic character, a little boy lost who stays calm and friendly and positive in the wake of dire circumstances. I felt so sad for him, but also proud. Foxlee deftly captures the characters and their motivations within the confines of the fantasy formula, a fantasy that is none too clear about place and time. Any apparent plot holes - a never-ending winter somehow sustaining a human population, never mind the trees, is hardly believable - simply don't get in the way of the story. Such is the strength of Foxlee's writing, that it all comes together and works, much like a fairy tale still carries the strength of its own conviction despite the fact that the details don't really make sense.
Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy oozes atmosphere and tension, suspense and the thrilling bite of danger. Among it lies the fragile workings of family dynamics and confused love, vulnerable to the atmosphere, which makes it all the more precious. While Ophelia is off exploring and adventuring, fifteen-year-old Alice is being lured in by the museum curator, Miss Kaminski, who gives her princess dresses and flattery and helps drive a wedge between the two sisters while also flirting with their father. Miss Kaminski - and it's no spoiler to say this - is the true enemy. Beautiful and elegant but infinitely cold, Ophelia sees glimpses of the woman's true self but is too young to understand it.
While the overall plot is as predictable as any fairy tale-fantasy story - whether or not you have ever read "The Snow Queen" fairy tale (which I have not, strange to say, though I don't think there are all that many similarities really), this story does follow a fairly standard fantasy formula - the story is brimming with imagination and you never really know what's going to happen next, or how things will play out. The writing is strong and near-perfect, the pacing fluid and smooth and not too fast, and the characters fleshed-out nicely. I grew quite attached to Ophelia, and the Marvellous Boy, and welcomed the satisfying conclusion. With such rich detail and atmosphere and action, the story played out like a movie in my head, and I can easily see this being adapted to film one day. It would be a costume- and set-designer's dream come true, to bring this magical story visually to life. As it was, my humble imagination did a pretty good job of it!
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via Netgalley. Please note that passages quoted here may appear differently in the finished book. ...more
This novel came highly recommended by other bloggers, and I sincerely wanted to like it more than I did in the end. It is a coming-of-age story about This novel came highly recommended by other bloggers, and I sincerely wanted to like it more than I did in the end. It is a coming-of-age story about seventeen-year-old Sophie who comes from a Lebanese-Australian family, living in Sydney. She attends a private Lebanese Catholic school which is so insular, when a half-Australian Lebanese boy joins at the start of Sophie's final year, he is ostracised and harrassed as an outsider, his mother insulted.
At home, Sophie too experiences oppression: as the oldest of four girls and one boy, Sophie is often responsible for looking after them, and her father refuses to allow her to go out, socialise or befriend people whose families he doesn't know. They live amongst other Lebanese families who all come from the same village in Lebanon, and her parents like that they know everything about them. The one black sheep in the family is her father's much-younger sister, Leila, a rebel by his standards with a sketchy history and - shock horror - a tattoo. Leila is the only one Sophie can talk to, and she helps her niece get a job at a Big W, where, it happens, the new boy from school, Shehadie Goldsmith, also works.
Sophie's tentative friendship with Shehadie confuses and scares her - she's not one to want to stand out, and while she disagrees with the way everyone treats Shehadie, she doesn't stand by him by openly being his friend. There are a lot of things in life that Sophie hates, and trying to find a balance between her Lebanese culture and her Australian identity creates an internal conflict for her. Ultimately, she feels that she would be betraying one or the other, that she couldn't have both. In this coming-of-age journey, Sophie must face up to her fears, and face up to the discrimination she sees around her, from both Lebanese and non-Lebanese Australians.
I found I learnt a lot about life in Australia for Lebanese migrants and their families, and it gave a good, compassionate insight into those, like Sophie, who struggle with the gender roles assigned by her parents' culture, and what she experiences outside the family home. But her narrative voice became somewhat grating, a bit whiny, and frustrating. Her slowness in standing up for herself and others was the cause of frustration, mostly because it was so obvious.
Ayoub's debut novel is a promising start to what I hope is a long career, writing novels, but it lacked subtlety for me, as well as an engaging, sympathetic protagonist who endeared herself to me. While I could sympathise with Sophie, and recognise that many of her experiences were irrespective of culture (being more to do with being a teenage girl in a western country), I couldn't connect as well as I'd like. Since the novel doesn't have a whole lot of plot, the strength of it rests almost entirely on the main character, and for me, Sophie just didn't quite engage me....more
Loading...
