Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk

For a Swallows and Amazons fan, Christina Hardyment's Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk was a pure delight from start to finish. Published in 1984, it came out forty years ago -- less than the 37 years which had passed between the publication of the final S&A book in 1947 and this labour of love.

Hardyment visits the locations of all the S&A novels and hunts for real life parallels in geography and characters. The lake of the first adventures is a combination of Coniston and Windemere, but most of the terrain seems faithfully copied from one or the other (with the exception of the Swallowdale valley, which she leaves for future readers to pin down). She is greatly aided by the contents of Ransome's trunk, now in an archive, which contains notes, drawings, maps and unpublished material, much of which is shared here.

Hardyment was also able to interview many of the children (now adults) who inspired the characters, like the Altounyan family (including the real life Titty and Brigit!) and gather their recollections of Ransome. Most of these people are sadly dead now, so it's wonderful that Hardyment took the opportunity when it was available. She explores some of the waterways by windsurfing -- much easier for a solo sailor! -- and includes many photographs of Ransome, his boats and various children posing for the book illustrations.

One marvellous inclusion is a draft first chapter for Peter Duck, showing Captain Flint and the S&As beginning to invent the story of Peter Duck, which was eventually published without this framing device, but showing how different the final book might have been.

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk is the kind of treasure I scour Brotherhood Books for -- a delicious treat and one I will definitely devour again.
 

Help Yourself

How many stories do you need to make a collection? In the case of Curtis Sittenfeld's Help Yourself, it's THREE. Not complaining about the quality, but a volume of well under a hundred pages has trouble qualifying as a book, in my opinion! This is the problem with buying sight unseen from Brotherhood Books -- of course I don't take note of the number of pages when I'm eagerly clicking Add to Basket.  

Having said that, the stories themselves are excellent: wry, self-aware, slightly painful. In White Women LOL, a middle class woman makes some ill-judged remarks at a bar, and pays the price in community  and self-judgment; Creative Differences ponders the trade-offs between commercialism, art, exposure and money. Show Don't Tell deliciously returns to one of Sittenfeld's favourite arenas, the world of students, this time creative writing students, but enlarges the horizon with the inclusion of a difficult housemate.

I devoured these stories in a single greedy gulp, but they've just left me hungry for more.

 

A Language of Limbs

I heard Dylin Hardcastle's recent novel, A Language of Limbs, recommended on the ABC Book Shelf program. It's a kind of sliding doors story. Two young girls, growing up in regional NSW in the 1970s, choose different life paths. In 'limb one,' she acts on her lesbian desires, is thrown out of home, makes her way to Sydney and finds a new community, under siege from the law and social opprobrium and soon to be ravaged by AIDS, but also joyful, loving and supportive. In 'limb two,' she suppresses her illicit feelings and follows a more conventional journey, through university and marriage, but still facing personal tragedy.

For quite a while I thought these two characters might be alternate universe versions of each other, their experiences eerily echoing or brushing up against each other; but they do come together at the very end. There was a bit more poetry than I'm really comfortable with (I'm a bit allergic to poetry), but this is a beautifully written and constructed novel that also provides an overview of queer history in the 20th century, quite a bit of which I remember living through. There's probably more sex in it than I'm really comfortable with, too, but each to their own! A Language of Limbs is a wonderful, deeply emotional, moving and passionate novel.
 

Stay Well Soon

By chance, I read Emily Gale's comments on Penny Tangey's Stay Well Soon just as I was in the middle of reading it. Gale was writing about funny books, and complained that no one would ever guess that Stay Well Soon is a funny book by looking at the 'sad girl on the cover.' She pointed out that Stay Well Soon is a sad book, too, and it is -- it's a book about sibling illness, cancer, death and dying -- but seen through the eyes of our narrator, eleven year old Stevie, it's also very droll and delightful to read.

Stevie is a great protagonist. She's having friendship problems, and all she wants from life is a pony. She fantasises about riding her dream horse, Atta Girl, along beaches and through the desert, communicating telepathically. 'She'll let me know when the campfire is going out.' But when her brother gets sick, suddenly everything revolves around Ryan and his hospital treatments. Very plausibly, Stevie tries to push away her knowledge about what this might mean, but reality intrudes.

I loved Stevie, her friendship with Lara from the hospital, her family, her harassed Mum, who we can see is barely holding on, 'Dad Ben,' new friend Morgan, teacher Mr Parks. There are lots of funny schoolyard scenes, like when the group play Kidnappers and even more when they're playing Royal Family. I absolutely loved Stay Well Soon and Tangey strikes the perfect balance between poignant and snort-giggle.
 

The Pangs of Love

I'd forgotten how much I love Jane Gardam's writing, though I was very sad to hear of her death just a couple of months ago. I'd previously read some (but not all) of the short stories in 1983's The Pangs of Love in a big fat story collection I acquired years ago, but enough time had passed that I was able to enjoy them freshly.

The collection opens with The First Adam, a story from the point of view of a familiar Gardam type, an expatriate engineer who has lived abroad for years without compromising his essentially English outlook. He feels sorry for an older woman by the pool, invites her to a drink in his room, but doesn't try to seduce her, ultimately more absorbed in his work. Fittingly, the collection ends with The Last Adam, told from the woman's point of view -- and she actually has a more interesting backstory than the bloke, and she in turn feels sorry for him, and calls him 'the poor old man.' The title story, a rewrite of the tale of the Little Mermaid, was probably my least favourite.

Many of these stories centre around a disconnection between appearance and reality, between perception and truth, image and fact. I could understand criticism of Gardam for her narrow English, middle class lens and perhaps for exoticising some of her settings: India, Hong Kong, Malta, Italy, are always seen through colonial eyes. But I respect the honesty of that; and I can forgive a lot for the sharpness of her writing and the poignancy of her characters.
 

Maria Petranelli Is Prepared for Anything (Except This)

Still reading my way through the Notables list. Maria Petranelli is Prepared for Anything (Except This) won the Ampersand Prize for first-time author Elisa Chenoweth, and while this book didn't make it to the shortlist, it's a very cute novel. Sixteen year old Maria has built a defensive shell to protect herself from her bossy, intrusive (but very loving) Italian family, and her impulsive decision to go on student exchange to Italy is part of separating herself from their influence. But the trip is not straightforward. Not only does Maria meet an exciting new friend, Kennedy, but both girls become tangled in murder, kidnapping, corruption and undercover police officers.

MPIPFA (ET) is part frenetic adventure story, part sweet queer romance, with some Italian travelogue thrown in. It's quite a ride, often funny, though it took me a little while to settle into Chenoweth's style. At times Maria seemed closer to twelve than sixteen, burgeoning romance notwithstanding; in fact, now I'm thinking about it, perhaps the style of the book reads more as junior fiction, while the subject matter is YA? Maria's grandparents also seemed to belong to a generation older than they actually were -- perhaps Chenoweth's own family memories might have played a part there!

I very much enjoyed Maria Petranelli, especially as it reminded me of my own backpacking trips to Italy when I was a few years older than MP (where I behaved like a twelve year old myself, to be honest). I'm looking forward to seeing what Elisa Chenoweth Does Next.

Searching for the Secret River

Having read Kate Grenville's brilliant Unsettled not long ago, it seemed like fate when Searching for the Secret River popped up on Brotherhood Books. It made a very interesting companion read, because it covers some of the same ground, but from quite a different angle. As a writer, it was fascinating to follow Grenville through the process of writing this big, important, successful novel, from the first scratch of interest in her family history and the stories handed down, all the way to the final edit, and the multitude of decisions along the way. In Unsettled, the emphasis is squarely on her awareness and assumptions about First Peoples, and interrogating the family stories with fresh knowledge. One of the very first prompts for rethinking came early on, when a First Nations writer helped Grenville to query what 'taking up land' really meant -- it meant 'taking.'

This is a story Grenville also tells in Unsettled; it was clearly a formative moment. Despite its wide success, The Secret River was not an uncontroversial novel. It was criticised for not including the voices of its Aboriginal characters; Grenville reveals that was a deliberate, and in its own way, respectful choice. Inga Clendinnen fiercely argued that Grenville confused history and fiction; I'm not sure that's true. The project of fiction is not the same as the project of history, and Grenville is aware of that all the way through.

I'm so glad I read this book, though it might not be as totally fascinating for everyone. It got me through a long night in the emergency department of our local hospital, if nothing else!
 

Three Days in June

I had completely forgotten that I'd reserved Anne Tyler's latest novel, Three Days in June, at the library, and by coincidence, my turn arrived just after I'd finished reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It's a very slim novel, almost a novella really, just over 150 pages, and it's a distillation of all Anne Tyler's more sprawling family sagas into a compressed time frame: the wedding day of Gail's daughter, Debbie; the day before, and the day after. But as with all Tyler's novels, it reaches back through time to see how we ended up in this place, and in this case, looks forward to a future where past mistakes can be forgiven.

Three Days in June is a slight but enjoyable comfort read, gently funny, poignant, observant and compassionate. Many years ago, Gail blew up her marriage, but now Max, Debbie's father, is back for the wedding and apparently wondering why he allowed Gail to throw away what they had. This issue comes into sharp focus when we learn that, perhaps, perhaps not, Debbie's future husband might have made a mistake of his own. Unusually for Tyler, the narration is in the first person.

One of the back cover blurbs calls this book 'a joy to read in a single relaxing afternoon,' which strikes me as a perfect description.
 

Shadow Tag

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's novels for a while now, but I hadn't come across Shadow Tag from 2010. It's unlike the other Erdrich novels I've read in that it focuses in narrowly on the dynamics of a marriage and its ultimate breakdown. Irene America is the wife and muse to painter Gil, and mother of their three children. When she realises that Gil has been reading her diary, she starts to write deliberate lies for him to read; mistrust, alcohol and violence brew a destructive mix.

The parts of this novel I enjoyed the most were probably the sections written from the perspectives of the three children, who are trying to hold it together while their parents are falling apart. Erdrich writes exceptionally well about family relationships and the currents of feeling that flow between parents and children, and between siblings. As a parent of seven children and a survivor of several relationships, she obviously has a lot of experience in this area. 

I did pick up one slip, where a side character is referred to just once as 'Louise' rather than 'May.' Erdrich has written herself into at least one other novel as a character and I wonder if she initially intended to do the same here, changed her mind, and let this one reference slide through uncorrected. Shadow Tag feels like an outlier in Erdrich's oeuvre and while at first I feared it might be a dull middle class marriage story, there was a lot more going on -- about images, art and ownership, identity and parenthood.

Fishing in the Styx

 Ruth Park's second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (great title), picks up where the first left off, after her arrival from New Zealand to Australia in the middle of the Second World War and her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. The two managed to scratch out a living, against everyone's predictions, as full time writers, chiefly by never saying no to a commission and by entering every prize going. Park wrote thousands of radio scripts for children as well as the award-winning novel, The Harp in the South, informed by her own experience living in the slums of Surry Hills. I didn't realise that this book had been so hugely controversial at the time, with Park herself being publicly vilified for daring to write on such a topic. She (probably correctly) deduced that she attracted particular vitriol for being a) female and b) a foreigner. She went on to write many more books over several genres, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult.

Park and Niland's struggles are very moving and quite relatable to any working author! Still, they had five children and lived in various houses, occasionally travelling back to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and Park tells a beautiful and mysterious story of a visitation at the moment when her father died. Niland was haunted by a heart complaint which caused his own death at just 50, leaving her a widow with five half-grown children and a weighty burden of grief. Not surprisingly, the rest of her life was shaped by this terrible loss. She never remarried.

Fishing in the Styx is in some ways much sadder to read than A Fence Around the Cuckoo, but it's also the joyous story of a creative couple who never failed to support and encourage each other, even though Niland did do some characteristically male things, like claim the dining table as his work space without considering where Park might do her writing (the answer, predictably, was on her lap). My God, they worked so hard! This book was published in 1993, but Park lived until 2010, when she was 93, after a long, productive and richly lived life.

Liar's Test

  

Still continuing my read through the CBCA Notables list, and I've come to Liar's Test by established First Nations author Ambelin Kwaymullina. This is a briskly-paced speculative fiction novel, plunging the reader immediately into a detailed, fully formed world, where Bell Silverleaf, a member of the oppressed Treesingers, competes with six other girls to become Queen for the next twenty five years. There is a Hunger Games flavour to this structure, but there are more layers here. Bell's world has been colonised by a group of so-called 'gods,' who have attracted followers called the Risen to their various temples. But the world is really -- I think -- a sentient kind of spaceship? Or perhaps the whole world is sentient?

I must be getting old because while I enjoyed lots of elements of Liar's Test, I struggled to follow the revelations and the backstory at times. The story, packed with action, perhaps could have done with a few pauses to let the reader catch their breath and sort out the details. That said, the parallels with First Nations culture and the use of the church's and religion to oppress colonised people were very striking and really well handled. Female friendship and matriarchal power is celebrated, but there are strong and sympathetic male characters, too. Now I see that Liar's Test is book one of a proposed series, so perhaps I'll get some of the breathing space I'm looking for later down the track, because there is almost too much material here for just one book!

Go Set a Watchman

Is it really ten years since the controversial posthumous publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman? Not a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, as it was marketed at the time, even though it is set years after Mockingbird and with largely the same cast of characters -- if anything it's an early draft of that well-beloved book. I remember when Watchman was released and there was an outcry that this story had ruined the other, particularly by destroying the nobility of Atticus Finch.

So. What did I make of Go Set a Watchman? As a novel, it's ... not great. To Kill a Mockingbird is a deeper, better structured, more thoughtful, better developed story in every way. Go Set a Watchman revolves around twenty-something Jean Louise (Scout) becoming disillusioned with her father when she sees him being complicit with racism. It's all about growing up, standing by your own opinions. Atticus doesn't try to argue Jean Louise out of her New York liberal attitudes; instead he patronisingly explains why they won't work in Maycomb. Worse, her kindly uncle gives her a smack round the chops -- for her own good, you understand.

It's hard to read, and I can understand why so many people felt that wise, just Atticus had been besmirched. To Kill a Mockingbird has been a white saviour fantasy for so long, it's very hard to let it go, or at least to see it in a different context. It's a book of its time, and even though the attitudes it expresses would have been progressive for that time, they now seem timorous and wrong-headed. I winced more than once, and perhaps it would have been better to have left it in that bottom drawer, but reading Go Set a Watchman was an interesting exercise.
 

Ghost Wall

I saw Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss recommended by Penni Russon, who teaches it at uni, and instantly grabbed it from the library. Penni assured me I would love it, and I did. For such a short novel (less than 150 pages), it's incredibly powerful, weaving together questions of class and privilege, power, gendered violence, history and politics, into a seemingly simple but deeply charged situation.

Seventeen year old Sylvie is camping with her family, a handful of students and a professor, attempting to re-enact Iron Age lives -- fishing, foraging, hunting rabbits. Somehow the adult men end up doing the more exciting activities: hunting, drumming, constructing a 'ghost wall' hung with skulls to frighten the Romans away. Meanwhile, Sylvie and her mother, and the single female student, Molly, are stuck with washing the dishes, cooking, and searching for berries. But Sylvie's father, a bus driver with an unsavoury passion for what he imagines to be a more 'pure' British past, is simmering with frustration and the need to impress the professor, and violence is not far away.

Ghost Wall is a masterclass in tension -- even the first couple of pages are brimming with horror -- which builds like summer heat. References to the recently fallen Berlin Wall locate it in the early 1990s, perhaps a less informed time, when concepts like consent were not at the forefront of consciousness. Sylvie's dad is horrible, but he's also a fully rounded character, denied the privilege of a 'proper education' by entrenched class prejudice, trapped in a job that prevents him from spending time outside. I felt for her mum, too, walking on eggshells and longing for a 'sit down' (something Sylvie doesn't appreciate!)

Above all, Ghost Wall is shot through with the eerie presence of those former inhabitants whose lives the re-enactors are trying to imitate. This is a political and domestic novel, but it's also very creepy. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
 

Attention All Shipping

Attention All Shipping is a book I found in my father's collection, though I don't know if he ever actually read it. Published in 2004, it's a cute idea -- Charlie Connelly decided to travel around all the thirty-odd areas of the shipping forecast and report back on what he found, in a Bill Bryson-esque whimsical style. The shipping forecast is such an institution in Britain (I think it's only recently been removed from the main national radio broadcast) that even I was aware of it, though I was very hazy on the details. Some people fall asleep to the enigmatic near-poetry of the forecast, which follows a strict word limit and formula. An example might be: 'Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.' This refers to the areas Tyne and Dogger off the east coast of England; wind direction and strength on the Beaufort Scale; precipitation; and visibility. The forecast follows a strict anti-clockwise order, and Connelly sticks to this order for his expeditions.

Because (der) the areas are all bits of sea, this means Connelly mostly visiting various islands, though sometimes he ticks off an area by crossing it on a boat or even flying over it. His adventures are gently entertaining, interspersed with pieces of history and geography, so the whole book is quite educational as well as amusing. It was a big hit in the UK, and it appears that Connelly has also turned it into a one man live show. I'm really glad he seems to have made a success out of the concept, it's so sweet and funny, but also occasionally poignant and even tragic. I enjoyed Attention All Shipping even more than I expected to.
 

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret by Amy Doak is another from the CBCA Notables list, and one I really enjoyed. It's a sequel to Eleanor Jones Is Not a Murderer (great title!) and there is a third volume due soon, Eleanor Jones Is On Fire. It's a classic small town mystery, with Eleanor digging into a possible long-ago murder uncovered when a resident at the local aged care facility seems to be remembering something traumatic from her childhood.

I loved the way that Eleanor uses the library for her research, and also that she is such an avid reader, frequently referring to her latest book. Doak also skilfully interweaves an historic abusive relationship with Eleanor's uneasy interactions with a new acquaintance and shows how tempting it can be to slide into a potentially dangerous situation out of politeness. There's a strong message of friendship and accepting help from others -- something I gather carried over from the first book. There's a satisfying twist to the conclusion of the mystery, a nicely tense climax, and a gentle hint of (proper) romance. I would have been happy to see Eleanor Jones on the shortlist, it's a very accomplished and engaging novel.
 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

I've read and enjoyed many Anne Tyler novels over the years, but somehow Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, long time staple of high school readings lists, had passed me by. My husband was astonished when I said I'd never read it; it's one of the few books he'd read and I hadn't (not anymore, ha ha). This copy, which I found in a street library, was clearly a high school text -- it was almost destroyed with highlights, underlinings and graffiti in the margins, not to mention chewed and folded corners. I have to say this is by far the least attractive cover for this novel I've seen, too -- presumably this character is supposed to be scrappy tomboy Ruth, but this Ruth has a far too knowing smirk, when really she's a kind of innocent.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is essentially a story of intergenerational trauma. It opens with Pearl Tull on her deathbed, reflecting on the amazing job she's done raising her three children alone after her husband Beck walked out on them. But we soon see, in flashbacks of the family history, that Pearl is a pretty terrible mother -- violent, abusive, volatile, prickly. Each of her three children carries the legacy of their childhood in a different way, but all are scarred to some degree, and we see that damage passed on in turn to their own children. I can see why it was such a popular set text -- mind you, my husband couldn't recall anything from his Year 11 study, so it didn'tmake that much of an impression.

In many ways, Dinner at the HS is the quintessential Tyler novel -- family dynamics, set in Baltimore, the passage of time, misunderstandings and wilful contradictions, but at the end of the day, the ties of family and shared history (even when it's experienced very differently between the players) create some kind of wavering, uncertain bond.
 

James

James is an utterly remarkable novel. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Pulitzer, it is both a deep literary conversation with an American classic (Huckleberry Finn) and an engaging, powerful story in its own right. In preparation for reading James (I had to wait months for it at the library), I read Huckleberry Finn -- well, most of it -- for the first time. While I appreciate that Mark Twain was trying to accomplish something new with this novel, and I acknowledge its place in the American canon, I didn't love the book. I found the dialect difficult to read, and much of the incident was frankly boring. I'm glad I didn't persist to the very end, after hearing the Secret Life of Books podcast describe the ending as really tedious!

James retells the events of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck's companion for much of his adventure, the escaped slave 'Jim'. The first and cleverest thing Everett does is have James and the other enslaved characters speak two languages: a slave patois when there are white people listening, and an articulate English when enslaved people are alone. This immediately recasts 'Jim' as highly intelligent. We also come to appreciate the intense, life-threatening danger of James' situation as an escapee. It's like a dark mirror image of the Huck Finn story, showing us everything that the first novel leaves out or only hints at.

There is a lot going on in James, but it's completely readable, fast-paced and totally engaging. I'm glad I read Huckleberry Finn first -- even the contrast in the first scene is stark, but telling. I also highly recommend the Secret Life of Books episodes on both Huck Finn and James, which were fascinating and enlightening. Coincidentally, I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message at the same time as James, another thoughtful and ferocious Black author wrestling with America's racial past. Well worth the wait.

The Message

  

I can't remember where I heard about Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message, but I assume it was in the context of thinking about Gaza. It's a short book, and it's a series of reflections rather than a tightly argued essay, but it is compelling and thoughtful reading. I wasn't aware of Coates notorious article, The Case for Reparations, in which he used the example of German reparations paid to Israel to bolster an argument for reparation payments to the descendants of enslaved people, a case study he later came to regret. This article hangs over the final section of The Message, a refreshing example of an author reconsidering and admitting he might have got something wrong.

The Message is divided into three parts. In the first, Coates visits Dakar for the first time, the fabled embarkation point for many slave ships travelling from Africa to America, and tries to make sense of his own sense of a mythic African past and his own cultural connection to the home of his ancestors. In the middle section, he attends a small town meeting where a white librarian leads a protest against the proposed banning of one of Coates' books, in the name of protecting white students from uncomfortable 'critical race theory,' and is heartened by the presence of so many white allies. It's so disturbing that this rewriting of history has only gathered pace. 

In the final, longest section, Coates visits Gaza and witnesses first hand the daily oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, and tries to understand how the victims of the Holocaust can revisit a similar fate on another group of people. The Message was published in 2024, but written before the current war/genocide in Gaza, and it was very unsettling to read in this context. Coates paints a vivid picture of pre-war life in Gaza, which was bad enough; what has happened since is utterly horrific. He makes a number of comparisons between the treatment of Palestinians and the Jim Crow era oppression of Black people in the US. I felt I did gain a deeper understanding by reading The Message; highly recommended.

Unapologetic

Years ago I fell in love with Francis Spufford's memoir about childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, and I also loved his 2021 novel, Light Perpetual. But I was surprised to hear him talking about being a Christian on an ABC religion program on the radio, where they also mentioned a non-fiction book he'd written: Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. The title appealed to me and I ordered it immediately (yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be buying books this year).

Weirdly, just as I'm writing this, there is another scientist on the radio talking about a possible gene for religiosity, or at least spirituality... I wouldn't be surprised. I've never felt comfortable with the Richard Dawkins school of militant atheism; it's not that I have any strong belief in God myself, but it's never sat right with me that anyone could so contemptuously dismiss a whole region of human experience. Whether or not there is anything there, clearly the feelings of faith and connection to something bigger are genuine, and need to be accounted for. This is more or less the position that Spufford takes -- he says quite plainly that he has the beliefs because he feels the emotions, not the other way around. Which seems to me a sensible position to take.

Spufford caused a bit of a stir with this book, partly because of the free use of swear words. Instead of 'sin,' he talks about humans' HPtFtU (High Propensity to F*** Things Up), which apparently offended a lot of Americans. Unapologetic is a fierce counter-argument to the Dawkins camp, retelling the story of Jesus in a fresh, unvarnished way, stripping it of the familiar, stale imagery and assumptions that inevitably cloud the reception of someone like me who went to a lot of Sunday School and attended a church school. Spufford is lively and punchy and fiesty, and he almost persuaded me. I still can't quite bring myself to make the leap all the way, but if I'm going to be sucked in, it will be through the emotions (looking at you, Elizabeth Goudge). But given how much Spufford loved the Narnia books as a child, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at where he's ended up.
 

Raymie Nightingale & Louisiana's Way Home

 I found both these Kate DiCamillo books in a street library -- what a score! Unfortunately, the third volume of the trilogy, Beverly, Right Here wasn't with them, and I can't get it from the library either. It's only available on eBook, which is no good to me. However, Raymie Nightingale and Louisiana's Way Home were so good, I desperately want to read Beverly now, and I'm hoping I know someone who can lend it to me (hint, hint...)

These books are gorgeous, so poetic and easy to read, with very short chapters, sad and sweet and funny. Raymie is sensible and anxious, a rescuer; Louisiana is fey and scatty; Beverly is emphatic and bold. The three girls meet, improbably enough, at baton-twirling class at the age of ten, where Raymie is struggling with the abrupt departure of her father. Louisiana's story picks up two years later when her erratic grandmother whisks her into another state and then abandons her. I gather that Beverly's novel is set two years after that again, when the friends are 14, and this time it's Beverly herself who runs away? But perhaps I'll never know for sure.

The books are structured beautifully, with the stories twisting full circle and ending in optimism, despite the sometimes dark material they deal with. Highly recommended (love the cover art of these editions, too, it's so gentle and appealing). 

We Solve Murders

Predictably, given the popularity of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, there was a massive queue at the library for this new one. In We Solve Murders, Amy is a tough-as-guts bodyguard, looking out for Rosie D'Antonio, a best-selling celebrity author (think Joan Collins) and Steve is a retired policeman who happens to be Amy's father-in-law. The body count is very high, and so is the cast of colourful supporting characters, one of whom is trying to frame Amy for their murders. Cue a rollicking plot that involves a lot of cocktails, travel in private jets and international criminal intrigue -- perhaps this time Osman already has half an eye on the Netflix rights, and is planning to visit the sets?

The Thursday Murder Club has been an incredibly popular franchise. Even my friend who famously only reads one book a year raced through the whole lot without stopping (yes, I have friends who don't read). At first I did miss Ibrahim, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ron (I suspect Pierce Brosnan might be miscast, but we shall see), but I soon warmed to Steve and Amy and even Rosie, who might be a bit much in real life. Richard Osman has a knack for creating highly coloured, entertaining characters with a few words.

I think the Thursday Murder crew will remain my favourites, but I'm happy to meet some new friends and spend more time in their company. Roll on the sequels!

Sociopath

I heard Patric Gagne speaking on the radio one night and was intrigued by the sound of her memoir, Sociopath -- there was a very long wait on the library reserve list before I finally got my hands on it.

Honestly, Sociopath was a strange and unsettling read. At times it comes across almost like a novel, with reconstructed scenes and dialogues. Gagne makes the excellent point that there is a lot of grey around the diagnosis and even the definition of sociopathy. Is it the same as psychopathy, just further down the spectrum? The same test is used for assessment, but there is apparently a vast gulf between psychopathy and 'normal,' which is presumably where sociopathy sits. Gagne likes to define sociopathy as a kind of learning disability, but for emotions -- empathy, jealousy, compassion can be learned, but with difficulty (anger and happiness come more easily, at least for Gagne). 

Gane talks al lot about 'apathy,' which I found quite confusing -- sometimes it's good, sometimes unbearable. I must admit I became a bit lost at times as Gagne described her strategies for relieving the weight of apathy, though her descriptions of the rising tension, which could only be relieved by 'bad' actions (stealing a car, stabbing a classmate with a pencil), reminded me a lot of Gabor Matè's account of the unbearable tension of distress experienced by the drug users he works with. Whatever the origin of these impulses, it seems clear that the brain uses a similar mechanism to try to relieve its pain.

By the end of Sociopath, I can't claim that I understand sociopathy much better than I did, but I do have more sympathy for this maligned minority.
 

Ramona and Her Father

I was very happy to add Ramona and Her Father to my Beverly Cleary collection. I just love the Ramona stories, they have never lost their charm, and they are so much fun to read aloud. (My younger daughter has just reminded me that she loved Ramona and Beezus because they were sisters like her and her big sister, and that Ramona, Harry Potter and 101 Dalmatians were the only books they really shared.)

Cleary's stories are set firmly in the real world, and she doesn't shy away from real life problems. In Ramona and Her Father, Ramona's dad has lost his job and he's moping round the house, getting depressed because his job hunt is unsuccessful, and being quite grumpy. Ramona's mum has to start working full time to make up for the loss in income, and money is tight. None of this is Ramona's problem to solve, but it's always there in the background. I loved the sisters' campaign to stop their father smoking, and Ramona's humiliatingly half-hearted sheep costume for the end of year Nativity play (because Mum doesn't have time to sew a full suit -- hm...)

One thing that reliably makes Ramona feel better is making a ruckus, and there is a wonderful chapter where she and her friend Howie clomp around on tin can stilts, singing at the tops of their lungs. Unbearable for everyone else, but fantastic for Ramona. 

I am fully confident that if/when I have grandchildren, they will love Ramona as much as we all do.

Amy Amaryllis

The silver lining to being felled by this terrible lurgy that's going around is that it's opened up hours of guilt-free reading time, and I have been racing through my Too Be Read pile. I spotted Amy Amaryllis on Brotherhood Books and couldn't resist its cute premise. Amy, an ordinary suburban Australian girl, begins to write a story in her green book, a story about Amaryllis from magical Ankoor, who lives in a castle amid the crags where reinbeast roam... Meanwhile, Amaryllis, in her own world, begins to write the story of Amy, a girl with freedom to explore and few duties to perform. Inevitably, the girls swap places and have to deal with each other's problems in very different realities, as well as figure out how to return home.

Apparently Amy Amaryllis is the first in a 'loosely linked' series, which from the titles, seems to be set in Ankoor. I think I might have come across Candle Iron in the past, but haven't read it; I might have to remedy that. I did enjoy Amy Amaryllis a lot, but it's weird how a book written in the 1990s has dated more obviously in some ways than some written in earlier decades. They always warn you that nothing dates a book more quickly than slang, and Amy and her brother's exclamations of 'Grossisimo!' and 'Blastissimo!' (not sure that was ever genuine slang, actually) did grate slightly after a while. But despite that quibble, this was a very enjoyable world-swap story and one I would have adored as a kid. It's like Charlotte Sometimes, but with more action and humour, rather than Charlotte's eerie solemnity.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo

Ruth Park's two volume autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, has been on my radar for a while -- as with any very popular books, they keep popping up on Brotherhood Books. Is Ruth Park an under-rated author? Unusually, she was extremely successful in three strands of fiction. Her children's books about The Muddleheaded Wombat were huge favourites of my kids (though I never read them myself as a child); her young adult book, Playing Beatie Bow, was possibly the seminal Australian time slip story; and I studied at least one of her adult novels, Poor Man's Orange, in Year 9 at high school (I wonder why they didn't choose the first book about the Darcy family, A Harp in the South? The prequel, Missus, wasn't published until after I'd left school.)

Anyway, to those achievements we can add autobiography, because A Fence Around the Cuckoo is a tremendous piece of writing. It covers Park's childhood in the New Zealand bush, her family's struggles during the Great Depression, and her first jobs in journalism before she emigrated to Australia in 1942. From Park's account, the Depression hit New Zealand slightly less hard than it hit Australia, but it hit hard all the same. It was sobering to read about the same era as Weevils in the Flour from the perspective of one family. The Depression must have left psychological wounds just as deep as the two wars, at least on the poor, and yet it's rarely discussed -- I guess it was less dramatic.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo ends with Park's arrival in Australia, greeted by her pen friend D'arcy Niland, who was to become her husband. I gather Fishing in the Styx picks up where this volume leaves off, and I cannot wait to read it.

The Explorer

I found Katherine Rundell's 2017 The Explorer in a street library -- prize winning and acclaimed, it's a classic, timeless adventure story of four children whose plane crashes in the middle of the Amazon. The first part of the book is like Alone, as the kids find ways to survive in the jungle, but for me the story took off about halfway through, when they encounter another person who arrived in the wilderness long before they did.

The Explorer is packed with action, but it's also thoughtful about what 'exploring' means -- not just the thrill of discovery, but also dispossession, exploitation and destruction, and the battle between those competing interests. It's also a story about friendship and family. I liked the way that Fred's motivation to explore was nuanced: he is genuinely excited about uncovering 'new' places, but he's also desperate for his father's approval and love, and he would kind of like to be famous, too...

Coincidentally, this is the second children's book in short order that I've read set in the Amazon. When the children in The Explorer finally head for home, they are instructed to navigate using the Opera House in Manaus which was such a huge part of the story in A Company of Swans (which I had to google to check if it was real, it sounded so unlikely). The Explorer is hugely enjoyable and I'm not surprised it was such a hit with young readers.
 

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

Not a full length novel this time; Benjamin Stevenson himself calls this a Christmas special, a nice slim stocking filler which still hits all those fun, knowing Ernest Cunningham marks. This time Ern is called to assist his ex-wife Erin, who has woken up covered in blood and with the murdered corpse of her partner downstairs. She doesn't think she did it, Ern doesn't think she did it, but can he prove it? 

Stevenson structures Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret like an advent calendar, with each 'door' comprising one short chapter, each containing a clue to the solution -- he even helpfully tells us what the clues are, though not exactly what their significance might be. I raced through Christmas and was proud of myself for figuring out one element of the mystery before I was told (I'm not very good at solving mysteries). It was a nice change to read a Christmas story set in an Australian (ie sweltering) Christmas; this time the setting is the Blue Mountains.

Weirdly I finished Christmas exactly a year to the day after finishing Stevenson's last novel; I hope he's working on something new because these books are so much fun.
 

The Morning Gift

Wow, I have certainly done a massive binge on Eva Ibbotson -- I reserved all the available titles from the local library and I've been reading them as they come in. The Morning Gift was the last one, though I have also bought a couple of books and added them to my pile. I might take a rest for a while. The good thing about Eva Ibbotson is that you know exactly what you're going to get. Our sweet, funny heroine this time is Ruth, a refugee from Vienna at the beginning of the Second World War. Our reserved, masterful older man is Quin Somerville, professor and paleontologist. This time, the plot starter is that Quin secretly marries Ruth in order to extract her safely from Austria. There are, as usual, complications galore, mostly in the shape of classical pianist Heini, to whom Ruth is officially devoted, and ruthless student (ha ha) Verena Plackett, who has set her marital sights on Quin.

One thing I love about Ibbotson novels, apart from their comforting reliability, is the large cast of eccentric characters that she manages to so deftly create and move around the chess board of the story. Though our hero and heroine tend to be very similar characters from novel to novel, our minor characters are delightfully varied and vividly sketched in such an endearing way that we can't help becoming invested in their fates. In The Morning Gift, we meet passionate gardener Uncle Mishak, horrible snob Lady Plackett, free spirit Janet, floundering biology student Pilly, and many others.

I seem to be declaring each Ibbotson my favourite as I make my way through them, but I really think  The Morning Gift (named for the symbolic gift that defines a morganatic marriage, freeing the husband from any future marital obligations -- I always wondered where that came from) might be my actual favourite!

Naarm/Melbourne Neighbourhoods

Naarm/Melbourne Neighbourhoods was a Mother's Day present from my elder child: probably not something I would have bought for myself, but it's a fun and useful book. The cover is very misleading, because the suburbs labelled there are definitely not in the correct geographical positions! But inside it's divided into City, East, South, North etc, with bite sized paragraphs about historical anecdotes, interesting buildings, urban myths, significant persons, landmarks and festivals. I've lived in Naarm almost all my life but I still learned some weird and wonderful facts, like Prahran probably being a corruption of Birrarung (the Yarra's proper name), and that Bertie Beetles were first invented to use up broken bits of Violet Crumble.

Each section includes a suggested walk around the chosen area, which look like a lot of fun, and something I'd really like to do one day. This book would be an excellent present (or loan) to a visitor to the city, but it's also got lots to offer even to long-time residents.
 

The Leopard

I don't know what happened to my original copy of The Leopard, which I studied in HSC a looong time ago, but I replaced it some time ago with the one pictured above. I was prompted to re-read Guiseppe di Lampedusa's 1958 classic novel partly by Susan Green, and partly by watching the sumptuous Netflix series based on the book.

Watching the series, I marvelled that I'd forgotten so much of the story -- well, it's not that surprising, because the script writer fleshed out some episodes with invented scenes. But in fact there was quite a bit that I'd genuinely forgotten. I remember how much I adored The Leopard, but what I mostly retained was the atmosphere of languid, lush sensuality, mingled violence and torpor that gave me my first impression of Sicily. My most vivid recollection, skimmed over in the adaptation, was of young lovers Tancredi and Angelica exploring the long-neglected corners of the family's immense villa, trembling on the dangerous edge of desire but never quite giving in -- it was the sexiest thing I'd ever read!

Now I'm old and grey, it's Prince Fabrizio's musings on aging and regret that speak to me most powerfully. There really isn't much plot in The Leopard, but it's still amazingly atmospheric, and the Netflix version succeeded in bringing that atmosphere to life; also, Kim Rossi Stuart is superb as the Prince. At seventeen, I had a huge crush on Tancredi, but now I find him merely irritating. The Leopard was well worth a re-visit.
 

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Going back over some familiar ground here -- this is the third of Gabor Maté's books I've read, and I've come to greatly respect his insights. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts deals specifically with addiction. Maté has worked for many years among drug addicts in one of Canada's most deprived urban areas; he also (somewhat controversially) counts himself as an addict, though his personal addiction is not to a legal or illegal drug, but rather to overwork and to the compulsive purchase of classical music CDs.

There is some overlap between this book and Maté's previous work on ADHD -- many addicts are trying to soothe their restless minds with the help of illicit substances (as well as traditional drugs like alcohol and nicotine) -- but his central point is that all addicts are fundamentally seeking to calm minds disordered by trauma. Sometimes this trauma might be inter-generational oppression, or childhood sexual abuse, but it might be a deep inner disconnection caused by loving but distracted parenting -- anything that prevented the parent from closely bonding with their infant. Maté admits that he himself has often been a less than perfect parent, and that though his own parents were loving, he was born into the profound misery and dislocation of war, and was fostered out as a baby for his own safety.

The most moving sections of this long and scholarly book are the personal stories of the addicts with whom Maté has worked. Often difficult to deal with, unreliable, violent and bitter, Maté brings us close to their pain and their longing for connection. Maté's work makes a mockery of the simplistic solutions often proposed for dealing with drug addiction, or indeed for troubled youth or dispossessed minorities, or any number of 'problem' populations. Maté's compassion and reflection should be essential reading.
 

An Expert in Murder

Regular readers will know that I'm cautious about novels using real people as characters -- it can be quite poorly done. But I was intrigued by the idea of using a mystery writer as a protagonist, so I thought I'd at least check out the first volume of Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey series, and I'm relieved to say that I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Set in 1934, An Expert in Murder centres on Tey's hugely successful play, Richard of Bordeaux, which catapulted John Gielgud to stardom. The novel features a young super-fan of the play (some patrons returned thirty or forty times), and many participants in the theatrical world, some of whom are based on real people (like stage designers, the 'Motley' sisters), and theatre manager Bernard Aubrey (based on Bronson Albery). I had no idea that Josephine Tey (real name Elizabeth Mackintosh, though she wrote her plays under the name Gordon Daviot) had even written for the stage, let alone had a massive hit -- plays don't seem to have the longevity of even half-forgotten novels.

Upson said that after discovering Tey's novels for herself and deciding they were criminally overlooked (not by all of us!), she became fascinated with the theatre and literature of her times. It was a strange experience to find myself half-recognising people and places from Dodie Smith's theatrical career at much the same time, like the New and Wyndham theatres, and the leading lady based on Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who also starred in some of Smith's plays. I wasn't expecting to be plunged back into this semi-familiar world, but it was a pleasant surprise, and I suspect I'll be back for more of Upson's work.

The Invocations

I'm not a fan of horror. I can't watch horror movies and I steer clear of horror in my reading, too. But I make an exception for Krystal Sutherland. To my own astonishment, I really enjoyed her House of Hollow a couple of years ago, and now comes The Invocations, which made the CBCA Notables list, but not the shortlist. In my view, it belongs on the shortlist, just because it's so well written. It might be filled with demons and gore (so much gore! Such a high body count! Such disgusting decomposing undead gloop!) but Sutherland keeps the plot galloping along so fast that there's no time to dwell on the revolting detail.

Meanwhile, there is lots of other stuff to enjoy. A strong friendship between three very different young women, an unflinching stare at male violence against women, a celebration of female power ('of course I do spells for trans women,' says Emer the witch at one point, 'magic doesn't care about bodies, it cares about souls.' Beautifully put...), a sprinkle of dark humour and a cracking plot all add up to a hugely enjoyable read, despite the horror elements. And if you do like horror, you will be in heaven.
 

Unsettled

Kate Grenville's non-fiction meditation, Unsettled, is one of the best books I've read this year. Grenville is well-known for her novels based on her family's history: The Secret River, Sarah Thornhill, Restless Dolly Maunder. She's also written Searching for the Secret River, which is an account of the research process she went through while writing the first of those novels. Unsettled is a different kind of journey, though she often refers to that research and ancestral history. But this time, she's looking at the bigger picture -- not just the individuals of her family and the choices they made, but how those choices fitted into a broader colonial narrative.

Grenville takes a simple but effective structure, retracing various ancestors' movements, from that first settlement on the Hawkesbury, further and further out from Sydney, finishing with the farm where her own mother was brought up. Along the way, she reflects on the way 'settlement,' or more bluntly, stealing land from First Nations people, must have felt for both the colonists and the dispossessed. She brilliantly examines the way our language serves to obscure the reality of what happened -- how we speak of settlers 'taking up land', when we really mean 'taking land.' Squatters 'got' land, women 'were never left without a gun.' What horrors are those bland words hiding?

There are plenty of challenging ideas here, but Grenville leads us through the landscape and her own thoughts gently but firmly, never allowing us to turn away completely, while acknowledging the strong urge to hide from the truth that has gripped our nation from its beginnings. She ends on a hopeful note, visiting the memorial to the Myall Creek massacre, the only occasion when white men were hanged for the murder of Aboriginal people -- a memorial that was constructed after local inhabitants, Black and white, sat down together to commemorate their shared, painful history.

Unsettled would be a perfect book to give to someone just learning about Australian history, or someone who grew up when we weren't taught the truth. It is confronting, but it's not sanctimonious or preachy, and it's engagingly easy to read; we travel beside Grenville as she works through her own feelings and thoughts. Yes, it's written from a white person's point of view, but as a first hand struggle with accepting and sitting with our shameful past, it's intimate, valuable and powerful.
 

American Wife

I'm such a dill, I borrowed Curtis Sittenfeld's most acclaimed novel, American Wife, from the Ath, completely forgetting that I'd ordered a copy from Brotherhood Books. So I read half of it in the library's copy and half in the one that eventually arrived (it took ages, it went via Brisbane for some reason, no wonder I lost track). But I'm very happy to own a copy.

There is definitely a recurring theme in Sittenfeld's work, where a quiet, bookish woman is taken up by a charismatic, out-going man. Sometimes this leads to a fairytale romance, as in Romantic Comedy; sometimes it's a disaster, as in Rodham or Prep. In American Wife, the outcome is more ambiguous and for that reason, all the more interesting. Modelled on the life of Laura Bush, wife of President George, American Wife follows Alice Blackwell from rural high school to the White House. After a tragic event in adolescence, Alice marries rich, happy-go-lucky Charlie, who makes her life more fun and carries her into a milieu of immense wealth and privilege. But Alice retains her watchful introspection. She sees both Charlie's charm and his shallowness clearly, but perhaps less clearly than she thinks she does.

American Wife is over 600 pages long and I was riveted all the way through. How much do I love Curtis Sittenfeld? At some point I will have read everything that she's written and that will be a very sad day in my life. There's something about the granular detail of her writing that I find completely absorbing. It might not be for everyone but I love it.

The Dragonfly Pool

One of Eva Ibbotson's children's books -- yes, I am on an Ibbotson splurge -- The Dragonfly Pool came from the local library and has obviously been well-read, which I'm happy about. It's not unlike her adult books in flavour, but the two main protagonists are twelve years old: a thoughtful girl, Tally, and an oppressed prince, Karil. The libertarian school of A Song for Summer reappears, this time in the Devon countryside, but again we are in the years just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and again Hitler and his henchmen are causing havoc in the lives of our characters.

The Dragonfly Pool is definitely for younger readers, because there is no sex; however, there is an assassination and real danger even for the most vulnerable of child characters. And there is real cruelty, too, albeit meted out by cartoonishly wicked adults.

There is a very European sensibility to Ibbotson's novels, even when they are set in South America or England. There is often some kind of pivotal performance, whether it be opera, a religious procession, a ballet or a play. There will be idyllic countryside. There will be an enigmatic, accomplished man. There will be artists and teachers and aristocrats. There will be misunderstandings and selfless sacrifice, but things will work out all right in the end. This is Ibbotson's universe, and it's one I'm happy to spend time in.

Weevils in the Flour

The Great Depression was almost a hundred years ago. My mother was born during it, and I remember my grandmother saying that their family managed all right because her parents had helped them buy their house. My grandfather worked as a clerk at Dunlop during the war, and I assume he might have had the same job while the depression was on. So my family was pretty lucky, though I'm sure that living in the lower-middle class and working suburbs of Preston and Thornbury, they saw plenty of poverty and suffering.

Wendy Lowenstein's oral history of the 1930s, Weevils in the Flour, is a confronting read. It's not a short book, and I admit I skimmed through some of the chapters, especially the ones about long-ago politicians and strike actions, but I was riveted by the stories of how families coped (or didn't) -- evicted onto the streets, making clothes out of flour sacks, the men waiting for hours on the off chance of some casual labour, toiling on road works for sustenance relief (and expected to perform hard physical labour despite being badly malnourished), children not attending school because they didn't have shoes, people living on wild-caught rabbits and home-grown vegetables. 

There were stirring stories of how the left wing organisations, particularly the unions, fought for fairness: when a family was evicted for not paying the rent, a group might rush to the house and start to tear it apart -- after a few such occasions, the landlords stopped evicting their tenants! There were unions for unemployed workers who agitated for greater support. The most frightening aspect of the times is that no one seemed to really understand what was happening or how to deal with it -- politicians just kept bleating that 'there was plenty of work.' It's hard to imagine how cruel this must have sounded to the people who knew damn well that it wasn't true. And then the war came along and fixed it all...

Lowenstein admits there are omissions in these accounts -- not enough women, not enough from the self-employed. I would add that there is not a single First Nations voice in this book, and not many non-Anglo stories either.

A knowledge of this history helps to put our current economic woes into perspective. Our current standard of living is so insanely high -- everyone seems to expect multiple yearly overseas holidays, regularly renovated bathrooms, new cars every couple of years, constant new clothes and furniture as a matter of right. And this high consumption lifestyle is burning our planet out from under us. It's sobering but weirdly reassuring to read about a time when expectations were so low and that people (mostly) managed to survive.
 

I Heard the Owl Call My Name

I know I read Margaret Craven's 1967 novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, for school, though I can't remember what year it was. My current copy was a present from a new friend (at the time) in 1985 and he was very disappointed, though also vindicated, to learn that I already had it and had loved it. But I don't think I've re-read it for forty years.

This book was my first introduction to Native American culture (the people of the remote village are referred to as 'Indians' throughout) and it made a deep impression -- perhaps deeper than I realised at the time. I think I Heard The Owl Call My Name paved the way for my reading of The Songlines a few years later, which made an even more indelible impression (I wonder if I should re-read Bruce Chatwin's book and see if it stands up -- or maybe not!). This slim novel recounts in clear, calm prose, the couple of years that a young vicar spends in this small community, giving of his own labour and wordly knowledge, and receiving in turn their wisdom and love.

There is a clear parallel between the experience of Mark, the vicar, who is dying, and the culture of the tribe, which is also slowly being lost. In both cases, the process is presented as sad but inevitable, to be accepted with grace, not resisted, as part of the natural cycle of the world. I don't think this novel would, could or should be written in the same way today. But I Heard the Owl Call My Name remains a beautiful and moving story of connection between two very different worlds.
 

Into the Mouth of the Wolf

 

Erin Gough's third YA adult made it from the CBCA Notables list onto the shortlist, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it took out the big prize in the end. Gough is an assured writer with a capable grasp of her material. Into the Mouth of the Wolf begins at full speed and keeps up a brisk pace throughout. However, this is not just a spec-fic thriller (though it is that), it's also a queer romance and a story about friends and friendship, loyalty and betrayal. The device of the parallel worlds works neatly to ramp up the tension as well as to raise the stakes.

Iris and her mother are on the run; Lena, living on the other side of the portal, might be able to provide sanctuary, but who can she trust? The world of Glassy Bay seems most closely related to our own, beset by fires and floods, while Iris's world of Vardo is rocked by terrible earthquakes which are connected to a new and dangerous technology. Most readers will be able to draw their own analogies.

I really enjoyed Into the Mouth of the Wolf, with its exciting adventure plot, quieter heartfelt scenes and moments of humour. The only part I found hard to believe was that Iris's mother would act as she did, but that's a minor quibble in  a very strong novel.

Woman of Substances

I read Jenny Valentish's Woman of Substances as research for my current work in progress (very much in the early stages). Part memoir, part non-fiction study of women and addiction, this was a fascinating and sometimes terrifying excursion into a part of life I know very little about. As someone who was too wussy to dip more than a toetip into the world of illicit substances, it made me feel queasy to read about Valentish's many brushes with physical danger, social humiliation and bitter regret. However, Valentish is deeply compassionate toward herself and others who turn to drugs, alcohol or other addictions for escape, comefort or self-medication, and it's clear that some kind of trauma is usually at the bottom of these choices.

Valentish examines the particular social and biological difficulties faced by women and the specific hurdles that can make it especially hard for them to access treatment. Hardly any rehab facilities accept children; there is confusion about whether it's preferable to treat pyschological trauma or substance abuse first, when the two are frequently intertwined; women are more vulnerable to food disorders because of the social pressure to be judged on looks.

Valentish's candid use of her own experience makes Woman of Substances a vivid and wrenching examination of vulnerability and strength, and while it's often raw and painful, it does offer realistic hope and encouragement for others in the same boat.