Dancer in the Wings

I bought Dancer in the Wings (1958) at the same time as Principal Rôle, which was a bit of a self-indulgent impulse -- I've now acquired five of these Lorna Hill ballet books in hard cover, purely from childhood nostalgia. 

Dancer in the Wings is definitely a second tier Lorna Hill (unless all the Lorna Hill titles are less good than I've remembered??). It centres on Annette Dancy (is that a bit lazy, Lorna?) who is a member of the Cosmopolitan Ballet company, but finds herself in a precarious position when her mentor teacher dies. I always enjoy stories about intra-company politics and rivalries, but quite soon we escape this scenario when Annette takes off for Scotland, shaken by the news of her mother's unexpected second marriage, which turns Angus MacCrimmon from a vague love interest into her stepbrother -- no, wait, he's still a love interest. I guess that is okay, though I'm pretty sure my daughters would say 'ick.'

In some ways Dancer in the Wings resembles Principal Rôle, with Isle of Skye taking the place of the Slavonian Alps in providing the scenic backdrop. There's actually a shout-out to the Slavonian setting of the previous book in this novel. There is however quite a bit of actual dancing in this book, as Annette pays her passage to Skye by performing on board ship. I think Dancer in the Wings was right at the tail end of the heyday of ballet books, as the swinging sixties was about to hijack the glamour of ballet with pop and fashion. No, I see that Hill kept writing ballet books until the mid-1960s, though she did switch tack after that to The Vicarage Children series, though I would have thought that vicarage children might be on their way out by then, too!
 

Mr & Mrs Gould

Grantlee Kieza is a prolific author of Australian history and biographies. My younger daughter gave me Mr & Mrs Gould for Christmas, because she figured the combination of Australian history and birds would be a winner, and she was mostly right. It's a shame that Mr Gould himself wasn't a more attractive character, which took the shine off his story a little bit.

John and Elizabeth Gould arrived in Australia in 1838, already established as pre-eminent naturalists and producers of wildlife books; The Birds of Australia would make Gould more famous and very rich. John organised and carried out the collection of specimens, while Elizabeth, who at the time of their Australian trip was into her seventh pregnancy (at 34 -- when I was just getting started! Gulp), was responsible for the extraordinary illustrations, many of which are reproduced in this book. Kieza has done his research thoroughly, and provides all kinds of social and scientific background; it appears that it was humble John Gould who first suggested to Charles Darwin the possibility of natural evolution.

John Gould was a hard taskmaster and a relentless worker who didn't treat his subordinates very well, and he was a bit rough round the edges in a world people largely by gentlemen amateurs. However, he does seem to have been genuinely loving to his wife and grieved her deeply when she died, though Elizabeth never received her full credit for his commercial success. Mr & Mrs Gould is a readable and engaging popular history which taught me a lot about early colonial Australia and its abundant ornithological wonders. And the pictures are gorgeous.
 

Notes to John

I felt quite conflicted about reading this book -- Notes to John is not even really a book, it's a collection of notes that Didion made after sessions with her psychiatrist, ostensibly addressed to her husband, John Dunne. Mostly Didion and Dr MacKinnon discuss Dunne and Didion's daughter Quintana, who was struggling with alcoholism, but they also talk about Didion's childhood and her own psychological battles. The material is extremely intimate and personal; was it ever intended to be read, let alone published? The papers were found in Didion's desk after her death.

However, Didion, Dunne, Quintana and Dr MacKinnon are all dead now; there's no one left to be hurt by any revelations. It's impossible to believe that Didion didn't discuss these sessions with Dunne as they were happening, in fact she says as much. So perhaps these papers were not really intended as letters or private communications, but functioned more as memory aids or journal entries. Does that make them fair game? I'm still not sure.

Ethical dilemmas aside, I found Notes to John absolutely gripping and very moving. I'm a sucker for anything about psychology or psychiatry sessions, though most of the books I've read have been fictionalised -- but I'm also thinking about Couples Therapy on SBS, which I am addicted to. There is so much here about love and family, dependence and independence, parenting and separating from parents, addiction and alcoholism. My elder daughter also found it irresistible, and terribly sad.
 

Catch

  

What a fantastic start to my traditional (since last year) read-through of the CBCA Young Adult Notables list! I knew as soon as I began Sarah Brill's Catch that I was going to like it. It has a quite bizarre premise: over the summer holidays, sixteen year old Beth has grown tall and hot, and she's also developed an unexpected gift -- she can anticipate when someone is going to fall, and she can catch them. At first her strange ability is a secret. She can tell when a catch is coming because she starts to feel nauseous, then she's compelled to run to the location where she positions herself, and confidently, competently, no matter how heavy or awkward the person or how far they're falling, she catches them. 

Some falls are deliberate, and Brill doesn't sugar coat this reality; some (most) are accidental -- kids falling out of trees, a collapsing scaffold. But Beth has other problems to deal with, like her crush on neighbour Etienne, who for the first time seems to like her back, and her slightly older sister Meg, who is pregnant (for ages I thought the book would end with Beth 'catching' Meg's baby, but it doesn't). As more and more people find out about Beth, her life becomes more complicated.

Brill gives us a first person narrator in Beth, but she also deploys a technique of reporting a lot of conversations indirectly, rather than in direct dialogue, which gave the story an interesting, slightly flattening feeling which I enjoyed. I suppose Catch is magic realism? Brill definitely thinks through all the real world implications of Beth's unlikely gift (for one thing, she becomes amazing at basketball). Her mysterious ability is never explained; it just is. My only quibble is that the novel didn't really resolve, it just kind of... finished. Perhaps there is a sequel on the way, and Brill has left it deliberately open-ended? Despite this niggle, I loved Catch and I hope it makes the shortlist.

Stone and Sky

Since the first Rivers of London novel appeared in 2011, the universe of Peter Grant has expanded to include ten full length books, graphic novels and several novellas. I must admit I've pretty much stuck to the novels, though I'm tempted to sample some of the other products (if I can find them). I've been waiting for months for Stone and Sky to arrive on my reserve shelf at the library, and though I confess I have lost track of some of the characters and events, I'm always eager to plunge into a new Ben Aaronovitch. He can't seem to resist the temptation to invent new characters and fresh phenomena with every Rivers of London story; some of them can be successfully woven into the new material, some inevitably get left by the wayside (there wasn't nearly enough Nightingale in Stone and Sky for my liking, but I was happy to spend lots of time with Abigail, Peter's feisty younger cousin).

In Stone and Sky, we relocate from London to Aberdeen, an area of Scotland that I'm not hugely familiar with, to deal with murdered selkies, sexy mermaids, other dimensional panthers and homicidal gulls, as well as talking foxes, river goddesses and gigantic magical horses. Even if I no longer have a firm grasp on the outer reaches of Peter Grant's universe, I'm always along for the ride. Aaronovitch produces a perfect (for me) marriage of magic and the supernatural with police procedural, two of my favourite genres, and it's always hugely good fun.
 

Sweet Danger

I was prompted to read Margery Allingham's Sweet Danger by Susan Green, and also the Secret Life of Books podcast on the Golden Age Queens of Crime; Allingham was the only one I hadn't yet sampled. Sue was right; Sweet Danger is an absolute romp, with lots of action, a preposterous plot and attractively eccentric (and also sinister) side characters, including the smart and lively seventeen year old Amanda, who is destined to become Campion's wife in a few books' time.

I knew that in the early 1990s, the BBC had made a couple of seasons of Campion, starring Peter Davison, and I found one story, Mystery Mile, (two episodes) on YouTube, which I watched to get the flavour of it. This might have been a mistake, because the two stories were quite similar in feel, and some of the characters from Mystery Mile were even referenced in Sweet Danger, and I might have confused myself about some of the plot details. In Davison's autobiography, he regrets that the BBC didn't make more Campion, but points out that they were quite difficult to adapt for television because the plots were so complicated! Apparently the BBC splurged 25,000 pounds on buying the ancient red Lagonda that Campion and offsider Lugg drive -- it worked out cheaper than hiring it for the duration and they were able to resell it at the end of the production and it cost them virtually nothing.

I enjoyed Sweet Danger a lot, and I think I might check out Tiger in the Smoke, which was the novel discussed on SLOB and is considered Allingham's post-war masterpiece.
 

Ruptured

I expected that I would find Ruptured difficult to read; and I did. I've been increasingly aware that, despite always being fascinated by and sympathetic to Judaism, at the moment I exist inside a decided pro-Palestinian bubble. One of my daughters is determinedly pro-Palestinian, to the point where, to me, she's become uncomfortably anti-Israel. I can't defend the actions of the state of Israel in Gaza, but I wanted a clearer understanding of why Israel has been behaving that way.

Australia is a small world. I didn't expect to find essays in here from an ex-housemate and from my former school captain. I also had to remind myself that this book was published before the Bondi shooting of December 2025; I can only imagine how much the deep anguish and fear expressed in these essays has intensified since then. One thing that became immediately obvious that that although I myself find it simple to separate the nation state of Israel and its actions from the Jewish people, these Australian Jewish women experienced no such easy distance. For them, Israel and being Jewish are inextricably intertwined, so that criticisms of Israel's action are felt directly as anti-Semitism. It's much more personal than I'd realised. Any critique of Israel is felt as a denial of Israel's right to existence. Also, the events of October 7, when Hamas attacked and murdered Jewish citizens, was such a violation, so painful, that no amount of bloodshed in Gaza seemed to touch it; there was no comparison, no equivalence. (I'm aware that my words are clumsy and indeed I'm struggling to clearly express the emotions that rose so painfully from these pages.)

I'm not sure that I really found the clearer understanding that I was seeking from Ruptured, but I'm much more aware of the genuine suffering that these women have endured and are still enduring, and the mutual incomprehension that seems to lie between the Jewish community and the pro-Palestinian protesters (I'm talking about peaceful marchers like my daughter, obviously not the terrorists who have firebombed schools and synagogues, and definitely not the Bondi shooters.) It's all such a horrible, agonising tangle, and I don't know how it can ever be smoothed out so everyone can live in peace together. Here and now, it seems impossible, even in my city here on the other side of the world.
 

Principal Rôle

Principal Rôle was an impulse buy -- I have a weakness for Lorna Hill's Sadler's Wells ballet series, and this one, along with Dancer in the Wings, were a couple of titles I hadn't come across before, and I couldn't resist. This one is from 1957, and honestly, it barely qualifies as a ballet book! The ballet element is quite tangential. The story centres on fifteen year old (not eighteen, as the cover blurb claims) Princess Fazia of the imaginary kingdom of Slavonia, capital Drobnik, which all sounds quite Yugoslavian, except that it's vaguely nestled in the Alps somewhere. Anyway, it's been overthrown by Communists and her brother Leo is king in exile. So far, so Eva Ibbotson, and this novel shows that fascination with the Alps which was current in the early 20th century.

In fact, it's King Leo who is really keen on ballet, particularly one ballerina. We're told that though Fazia is an incredible dancer, she's not really that interested; and her young governess Elizabeth Lister, whose viewpoint we share in the first part of the book, did ballet at school but is far from professional standard. The story veers around quite wildly and comes to a screaming climax with one character catching on fire, a hospital bedside proposal, an assassination (off screen) and (spoiler) Princess Fazia assuming her Principal Rôle as... Queen of Slavonia (weirdly no one seems particularly worried that she might be assassinated).

I don't regret this purchase and it has a very pretty cover, but it's a very slight piece of work! My expectations for Dancer in the Wings are now quite low.
 

My Sister the Serial Killer

My Sister, the Serial Killer probably isn't the kind of book I would normally pick up, but my interest was piqued after reading a recommendation on a book thread where someone was looking for novels from different countries (I think they were aiming to read a book from every country in the world). I'm very conscious that my reading pool of nationalities is tiny, so I made a note of Oyinkan Braithwaite's novel and found it at the Athenaeum.

My Sister, the Serial Killer is no mystery story -- the very title gives it away, and the first page begins with a murder, clearly not the first. The tension in the story comes from wondering if the narrator Korede will keep covering up for her homocidal sister, or betray her to the police; and from the imminent danger to Korede's crush, kind and hunky doctor Tade, who has the hots for Ayoola. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer is a very easy and engaging read; I flew through half of it while giving blood. The chapters are short and punchy, the action is swift. In some ways it reminded me of Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman, in that it does provide some plausible excuses for Ayoola's behaviour, and I really enjoyed the glimpse into Nigerian culture (albeit an upper class, 'nice' family). I wouldn't exactly call it a fun read, but it's effortless and very enjoyable, so far as a novel about a serial killer can be, and it does actually have some serious observations to make about intergenerational violence and co-dependent relationships.
 

Taboo

West Australian Noongar author Kim Scott has been on my radar for a while, but somehow I've shied away from his novels, fearing they might be too harrowing for me. But I was persuaded to pick up his 2017 book, Taboo, by my book group friend Cathy, and I'm so glad I did.

Tilly is a schoolgirl who's recently discovered the truth about her Aboriginal parentage; she finds herself caught up in a kind of cultural camp for Noongar people, returning to their Country after a long exile and horrific history which has rendered that place forbidden until now. The narrative about the adults exploring their heritage, tentatively recovering language, making traditional tools and painting, singing old songs, enveloping young Tilly in a family she's never known, is extremely moving. But there is deep darkness in the story too, not just in the form of past massacres, murder and rape, but in the present, between vulnerable Tilly and sinister Doug, who is also connected to the community.

Taboo contains both horror and humour, and a touch of magic realism that weaves First Nations spirituality through a gothic, haunted story. The book ends with the hint that eventually Tilly will make peace with both sides of her inheritance, despite all the pain that has come before.
 

My Brother the Orangutan

Disclaimer: Heather Gallagher is an old friend of mine. We met at ante-natal classes before our first babies were born, and quickly discovered that we had a lot in common -- not just living in adjacent suburbs, but Heather and I were both aspiring children's authors. It's hard to believe that was nearly twenty five years ago.

My Brother the Orangutan is a lively, fun body swap story in the best tradition of Paul Jennings. Esther and her brother Rex have newly arrived from the country to the city, where their dad has a new job working at the nearby zoo (every kid's dream, surely). But the family are also grappling with the recent death of Esther's beloved grandfather, and moving in with their eccentric grandmother, whose cooking tends to produce dishes like salmon and lychee souffle, or tuna and pineapple muffins. But the trouble really starts when Rex swaps bodies with Harta the orangutan and Esther finds herself sharing a bedroom with an ape in a boy's body, while her little brother is stuck in the zoo.

Resourceful Esther's hero is Sherlock Holmes and it doesn't take her long to start putting the vital clues together. But there's only so much an eleven year old can do to persuade adults that something truly bizarre is going on.

My Brother the Orangutan mixes a warm family story with a twisty magical mystery and plenty of laughs. It would make a fabulous read-aloud and I can see it appealing to reluctant readers, too. Lots of fun.
 

Clock Dance

Anne Tyler is one of those reliable authors where you always have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get, and you can relax in the knowledge that you're in safe hands while you get there. (I'd put Noel Streatfeild, Agatha Christie and Eva Ibbotson into the same category.) In one respect, Clock Dance departs from Tyler's usual MO -- instead of revolving around a nuclear family, or a couple of generations, this one consists of a few mostly unrelated individuals who end up forming a kind of chosen family.

Willa has two grown up sons, with whom she has little contact -- not because of conflict, they've just drifted apart. Widowed young, she's on her second husband, an honourable but pedantic and unbending man. Peter is most put out when Willa is unexpectedly called to the rescue of her son's former girlfriend and her young daughter, but he heroically accompanies her from Arizona to Baltimore so that Willa can step in. However, his willingness to be a hero is strictly limited and soon Willa finds herself torn between competing duties.

Clock Dance is a really sweet read. Willa is quite a passive character, but I recognised a fellow Phlegmatic type -- averse to conflict, resisting through inaction, a calming presence. It's lovely to see her gradually being appreciated by this bunch of neighbourhood strangers, even as her supposed nearest and dearest dismiss and overlook her. At the end I almost stood up and cheered.
 

This Way Up

This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman (otherwise known as the Map Men) was a Christmas request from my younger daughter which I've since borrowed, and a very entertaining and educational read it was, too. The Map Men have a popular YouTube channel and have produced loads of short, entertaining and educational videos all about maps, which are quite addictive if you fancy getting lost down a cartographic rabbit hole.

This Way Up focuses on some truly bizarre map issues, like the weird history of regional television stations in the UK and why the areas they serviced bore almost no relationship to actual, you know, geography. (This chapter led to me and younger daughter watching nearly an hour of YouTube footage of ITV logos through the years.) There's a chapter about maps that omit New Zealand altogether (there's also a Reddit group that catalogues these -- I'm telling you, this book has sent me down many internet black holes). There's the story of how some completely non-existent mountains came to feature on maps of Africa for decades until someone worked out that they weren't actually real. And there's a chapter about Polynesian navigation by 'reading' the feel of waves, believe it or not -- incredible stuff.

The Map Men go to some lengths, probably not strictly necessary, to mix up their formats; one chapter is in the form of a (fictional) podcast script, one is a long poem. But honestly the subject matter is so fascinating that these flourishes and the liberal sprinkling of bad jokes really isn't needed. This Way Up is a total hoot, and I learned a lot.

The Middle of Nowhere

I like Geraldine McCaughrean's books. I loved The White Darkness, and she's written 170 books and won numerous awards, so she's clearly doing a lot right. The Middle of Nowhere is a pacy, often frightening, high stakes drama set in the Australian Outback in the late nineteenth century. Comity's father is a telegraph operator on a remote repeater station; her mother has just died from snakebite. Comity is comforted by her friend Fred, an Aboriginal boy. But when the new assistant, Quartz Hogg arrives, he has brutal schemes up his sleeve...

As an historical adventure story, I enjoyed The Middle of Nowhere. But I did have a few problems, starting with the cover of my edition, which unlike the one shown here, features a silhouette of an Aboriginal figure in a stereotypical pose, standing on one leg and braced by a spear. I appreciated Fred's use of language throughout the book, but his ostracism from his mob didn't quite ring true -- I just couldn't believe it when Comity told her father, 'Fred has no people.' (This shunning was sort of explained in the text, but I didn't buy it.) There were other small weird moments, like when Comity's father gives her dollar coins, or when Horse suddenly changes gender for part of a chapter. I'm sure McCaughrean took pains to achieve historical and cultural accuracy, but small slips kept pulling me out of the story. Would I have noticed or cared if the novel had been set in, say, Venezuela? Absolutely not, and I'm sure I've brushed past the same kinds of errors in Eva Ibbotson's books that would have driven me crazy if I were actually Venezuelan.

On the other hand, McCaughrean doesn't flinch from showing the racism and cruelty of settler society (though Comity's family are almost too progressive to be true). So a mixed review from me. 

These Precious Days

Thank you to Susan Green for alerting me to the existence of this second volume of Ann Patchett's essays, These Precious Days. The longest and most moving of these pieces is the title work, which tells the story of how Tom Hanks' personal assistant, Sooki, ended up living with Ann and her husband during her cancer treatment -- a supposedly temporary stay that became long term when Covid restrictions descended. What began as a favour to a near stranger became a deep and cherished friendship.

The other piece that made me cry was about the death of Patchett's father after a long and debilitating struggle with pain and increasing disability:

I felt sad about my father all the time. When I closed my eyes at night I saw him lashed to a raft in a storm-tossed sea: dark rain, dark waves, my father crashing down again and again as he waited to drown. 

When her father, after years of this, eventually dies, she doesn't feel 'terrible.' What she feels is joy.

This essay struck particularly close for me, though my father is still aboard his own storm-battered raft. I don't know yet how I'll feel when he goes under, but Patchett has given me a glimpse of a few possibilities.