The Unsought Farm

The Unsought Farm, Monica Edwards' 1954 memoir about her life on Punch Bowl Farm, was a little birthday treat for myself. I've never read the series of young adult fiction she wrote about Punchbowl Farm, but apparently, like her previous Romney Marsh books (which I love), they have one foot in fact and the other in fiction, drawing on real experiences and her own children to create the adventures of the Thornton family.

Almost without intending to, Edwards successfully bid for the property at auction and then had to face the reality of herself and her husband Bill becoming farmers. After the war (I'm not sure if this is still the case), it was not legal to own arable land without actually farming it, so they gradually built up to owning a Jersey herd and sowing crops, as well as improving the ancient farmhouse. Bill seems to have worked miracles, uncovering inglenook fireplaces, creating bathrooms out of thin air, punching windows into dark rooms, demolishing dangerous chimneys and more. Edwards writes about their trials and tribulations, especially the activities of their many animals (including four Siamese cats), with her trademark warmth and understated humour.

The Unsought Farm is a lovely book. The Edwards stayed at the farm until 1968, when they retired to a nearby cottage, and Punch Bowl Farm was still an active farm well into the 1990s. It's a glimpse into a way of agricultural small-holding life that has become vanishing rare, so its triumphs are tinged with melancholy for a modern reader. In its own way, it's as much of a fantasy story now as any of Edwards' beloved novels.
 

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin

First, my only niggle -- where is the apostrophe in the title of this book? It seems to have been shaken loose and lost in the tumult of events. But that quibble aside, it was an absolute delight to rejoin the company of adventurous Regency sisters, Augusta and Julia, and their rogue love interests, Lord Evan (sometime highwayman) and Mr Kent (proto-police officer). The sisters are sheltering the noble lady they rescued from a madhouse in the first book, but her brother is hot on her trail, and they are also desperate to get to the bottom of the duel that cost Lord Evan his freedom and his reputation.

The pace of The Ladies['] Guide to Utter Ruin never slackens for an instant as Augusta dons disguises, penetrates a hellish private gentleman's club, tears about on horseback and in racing carriages, tells outrageous lies and begs favours from Beau Brummell, no less. There are sobering reminders of just how much power men hold over women at this time (hint: it's total), but also a cute moment where Gus finds time to read a recent novel starring another pair of sisters (one with sense and one with sensibility).

Thrillingly, Utter Ruin ends with Augusta and companions about to embark on their most challenging quest yet, some kind of Scarlet Pimpernel-ish rescue mission into revolutionary France. I can hardly wait.
 

How to Survive 1985

As you know, I'm a sucker for a time slip story and How to Survive 1985 is right up my alley. Shannon goes into a Sydney cinema in 2025 and emerges into 1985. This is not her first supernatural experience, so she's not as phased as you might expect. She quickly comes up with a plan: she'll track down her mum, who is sixteen years old in this world. This idea works surprisingly well, and her mum becomes an ally in Shannon's quest to find her other friends (who were all part of her previous adventure).

Shannon explains in some detail what happened to her and her friends in the book before this one, Royals, where they were all trapped in a time loop inside a shopping centre. That time, the earth seemed to be trying to teach them something about the perils of consumerism, but this time round the lesson is a little more vague -- something about climate change, something about plastic, something about caring for the planet? There are plenty of reflections about how much the world has changed (or not) in the last forty years, but How To Survive 1985 keeps a light, pacy touch which makes it a hugely enjoyable adventure.

I ended up really loving this novel. It's not long, and it never flags, and it's made me hungry to track down the gang's prior magical adventure, which annoyingly is not available at my local library. I hope Shannon, James, Akira and the others have more strange experiences in store.
 

The Deadly Dispute

We are now up to number three in Amanda Hampson's Tea Ladies mysteries. The Deadly Dispute takes us up to 1967 and modernity is definitely encroaching on the tea ladies' world. Replaced by a coffee machine, Hazel has been unemployed for eighteen months when she's offered a job with a trade union; Irene has given up serving tea altogether and is now a cleaner at a brothel. Naive Betty is exposed to free love, drugs and feminism when she makes friends with a young woman at her clothing factory. Fourth member of the gang, Merl, is somewhat sidelined in this story after she takes offence at the decisions of the Tea Lady association.

But the real action is down at the docks, where Hazel soon finds herself up to her neck in trouble and smuggled Krugerrands. I was reminded that these novels take place in the same locale as Ruth Park's Harp in the South books, albeit somewhat later. Hampson does an excellent job of evoking 1960s Sydney and the social and political currents of the time, as well as an engaging crime story which proves that middle aged ladies can be effective action heroines -- Betty has no need to mourn for her wasted youth.

I'm really enjoying this series and while I'm not sure if there are further adventures in store for the intrepid tea ladies, I certainly hope that they don't hang up their pinnies any time soon.
 

My Year Without Matches

I found Australian Claire Dunn's memoir, My Year Without Matches, on the shelves of the Athenaeum and the subtitle intrigued me: Escaping the city in search of the wild. 'The wild' is something I find powerfully attractive on the page -- in real life, not so much. Dunn herself was a burned-out wilderness and conservation activist when she committed to spend twelve months on a kind of wilderness retreat, a bit like Alone but with more supports in place, and a group of five others taking their own journeys alongside.

As any viewer of Alone will already know, living in the bush invariably becomes as much an inner quest as a physical adventure. At first Dunn struggles with the basics of building a shelter and especially wrestles with trying to make fire without matches (hence the title), to the point where she had blood blisters on both palms from rubbing futilely at the hand drill. She's also driven by mental demons, a constant fear of not 'doing it properly,' self-doubt and existential angst. It's these more spiritual struggles that dominate toward the end of the book, when Dunn has relaxed into the company of insects and snakes, not washing her hair, and sleeping on the ground. More problematic are her fluctuating relationships with the other participants on the course.

My Year Without Matches is a highly readable, relatable account of a spiritual quest that ultimately comes to rest in a realisation that simply being is enough. Fittingly, Dunn now runs nature reconnection retreats of her own. I love the idea of living so close to nature (Dunn vows to only eat meat she's caught and killed herself, and sticks to it) but I know the reality would defeat me, probably on the first night. The next best thing is reading about it.
 

Pureheart

Disclaimer: Cassandra Golds and I are Facebook friends, and we share very similar tastes in reading. Pureheart is a beautiful, poetic fable about love, power and grief, a tight struggle between a girl, her grandmother, and the boy who loves her (and whom she loves).

The main character is called Deirdre, the same name as the supernaturally sensitive little sister in Nicholas Stuart Gray's classic Down in the Cellar, and Pureheart shares the same eerie atmosphere as Gray's book (Golds specifically refers to Gray in her acknowledgements, so I know I'm not drawing a long bow here). 

Pureheart is not a realist story; Deirdre and Gal wander the rooms and hallways of Corbenic, part block of flats, part fairytale castle, part internal world of Deirdre's grandmother. This is a novel that takes place in several different realms, and while it might confuse some young readers, there will be a subset of children who will respond eagerly to its haunting, other-worldly spirit.

I loved it. 

The Royal Butler

Grant Harrold's new book, The Royal Butler, was a birthday present from my daughter, riding on the coat-tails of The Residence which we both enjoyed so much. Not surprisingly, Harrold is a big fan of the monarchy, and his obsession with queens and castles began when he was a small child. Living with dyslexia, Harrold didn't do well at school, but that didn't deter him from writing to lots of people (aristocrats) and asking for work. Before long he'd landed a job in a grand house, one thing led to another, and he ended up working for many years as butler to Princes Charles (now the King) at his country estate at Highgrove. He was made redundant in the lead up to Charles taking the throne, but has successfully parlayed his experience into an etiquette school and a career in media commentary.

There is quite a bit of royal gossip here, a peek into the private lives of princes and monarchs (they're just like us! Only -- special) and fascinating detail about how these grand households operate. The sheer number of staff required to wait on a small family, or even just a couple, is mind-boggling. Harrold keeps pinching himself. Am I really sitting on the stairs of an ancient palace? Am I really dancing with the Queen herself at a workplace party? Did Prince Philip really just nod in my direction? Harrold freely admits this was his dream job, and he is thrilled for just about every minute of it.

There is an uneasy tightrope being walked here, between marvelling at how ordinary and friendly and approachable the royals can be, and the feeling of breathless reverence that Harrold still cherishes toward them. Harrold himself has a sweet, naive-seeming charm, but if the amounts of money spent on royalty make you feel queasy, maybe don't read this book.

 

The Westing Game

Ellen Raskin's 1978 middle grade mystery The Westing Game is one of those books that completely slipped under my radar -- as it was published just before I finished primary school, I think I just missed falling into the right demographic at the time, and remained blissfully ignorant of it thereafter. But with over 200,000 ratings on Goodreads, it's clear that other people did manage to find it!

The Westing Game reminded me of how much I adored Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew as a young reader, and I'm sure I would have lapped this up. Sixteen strangers are drawn together to solve the mystery in Sam Westing's will; how are the heirs connected to Sam, and how do the clues fit together to expose his murderer? The heirs are paired together in seemingly unlikely duos, but it turns out that each has something to offer the other. For me, there was more satisfaction in seeing the heirs help each other than in the eventual solution of the mystery.

The Westing Game is a slim novel (another one borrowed from my book group friend, Sian) and I raced through it. It's supremely entertaining, the diverse characters each has an unexpected side, although they're sketched broadly, and the mystery is just complicated enough to be intriguing. And shin-kicking Turtle Wexler is a heroine to love.
 

Some Tame Gazelle; Excellent Women; Jane and Prudence

I've saved the three novels in this Barbara Pym omnibus to talk about together, because in some ways they are very similar. Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence were all published in the early 1950s, all centring on the lives of English middle class women who are alike in background, if not temperament: they are all highly educated, conversant with poetry and literature, intelligent and observant. However, most of them don't really work (if they're married), or if they do, their jobs are menial and unfulfilling (Prudence works in a vague capacity for a professor, who apparently needs a staff of SIX to function; Mildred volunteers in a charity for distressed gentlewomen). In fact, almost all Pym's characters could be described as distressed gentlewomen in one way or another. They might be disappointed in love, or relatively calmly nursing a hopeless passion for some unattainable man; they might be busy with the local church (the church looms hugely in all their lives), or berate themselves for being useless at such practical duties, like Jane, a vicar's wife. Their lives unfold at a gentle pace. A great event might be going to an anthropology lecture, or a mild misunderstanding at a parish meeting.

This is the milieu of Miss Marple and St Mary Mead, but without the intrusion of violent crime, and most of these women seem destined for a Miss Marple-ish fate -- overlooked, underappreciated, seen as irrelevant, their talents wasted, even their capacity for love under-utilised. It all sounds very depressing and dull -- and yet Barbara Pym's novels are anything but. This omnibus is nearly 700 pages long and whenever I put it down, I couldn't wait to get back to it.

Somehow these women's lives are so absorbing, so slyly funny and subtly poignant, I quickly became addicted. I also enjoyed the cameos or passing references to characters from different books, and I see that Miss Doggett and Jessie Morrow from Jane and Prudence also star in Crampton Hodnet, which is still on my TBR pile. There is also penetrating social commentary here, disguised as flippant dialogue or inner musings. I am so thrilled to have discovered a new author, and one with a full backlist to explore. Thank you, Susan Green, for the recommendation.

Bookish

I knew that Lucy Mangan and I were going to get along as soon as she professed her love for Antonia Forest, and so it proved. I wolfed down her memoir of childhood reading, Bookworm (now, alas, interred inside my deceased Kindle), ticking off all the books that we had in common.

There were not quite so many mutual ticks in this sequel, Bookish, which sweeps across Mangan's reading through high school, university, first job, falling in love, early motherhood, and produces books suitable to each stage of life. I'm not sure which is more satisfying, realising that we both adore the same books (I Capture the Castle, The Long Winter (with caveats), Jane Austen) or grabbing a notebook to write down the books and authors that she loves that I haven't discovered yet (Norah Lofts? The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?) or even bookshops that I hope to visit one day (The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge is a whole shop devoted to second hand children's books!!!)

We don't agree about absolutely everything (eg she liked The Da Vinci Code, but can't read any history escept medieval and Tudors, and is bored by WWII) but it would be so boring if we were in total concord. Mangan writes with such joy and verve about the love of books and the delights of acquisition -- she is especially eloquent about the pleasures of second hand book browsing -- and she is happily candid about being an introvert and preferring books to people. I could relate to her complaint about pandemic lockdowns, not that she was too isolated from other people, but that she wasn't isolated enough. Bookish is a delicious delight, and I'm sure Lucy Mangan and I would be friends, if we could tear ourselves away from reading long enough to have a conversation.
 

The Doll Twin

Borrowed from my book group friend, Sian, Janine Beacham's The Doll Twin is Gothic horror for middle grade readers. It begins with an orphan, Una, who seems never likely to be adopted from the chilly orphanage. When a pair of prospective parents arrive, warm and welcoming, she is overjoyed. However, her new home proves to be a spooky mansion, filled with strange mechanical contrivances left behind by the former owner, a mysterious doll maker. And then the creepiest discovery of all: a life sized doll, an Animated Curiosity, who looks exactly like Una herself.

The Doll Twin is deliciously creepy and has some important things to say about not judging by appearances, but it was sadly marred by some lapses in editing, such as when the doll, Ani, expresses her love for the Iron-Hearted Sea on one page, then a couple of pages later exclaims, 'The Iron-Hearted Sea? Is that its name?' I'm noticing more and more sloppiness creeping into recently published books like this, and I understand that publishers and editors are increasingly under-resourced and over-worked, and that mistakes are going to happen. But it really does spoil the reading experience, for me at least, and The Doll Twin deserved better, because it is a lot of fun.

 

Tilda Is Visible

Jane Tara's novel Tilda is Visible has a cracking premise. Middle aged and older women often complain about feeling invisible; what if invisibility was a real, physical condition?

'I'm disappearing?'

'We don't use that term anymore. Invisibility advocates are very much against it. Women who suffer from invisibility don't literally disappear. You may be invisible, but you're certainly not disappearing. There's a difference.'

Tilda is fifty two, her unsatisfactory marriage has ended and she's feeling unfulfilled in her business life. To her horror, she finds that bits of her are vanishing -- first a finger, then an ear, a nose. She joins a support group where she meets women who have become completely invisible. And everyone tells her there is no cure. What to do?

Well, spoiler alert, Tilda does find ways to fight back and restore her visibility, which involve unpacking past trauma, lots of supportive female friendships, hefty doses of meditation, rewriting her mental scripts, and photography, as well as meeting a lovely guy (who happens to be blind). However, this is very much a story of self-rescue, and while there are lots of funny moments early on, the mood shifts to a more earnest exploration of female sense of self, domestic abuse and the social irrelevance of older women.

Tilda Is Visible would be a great choice for book clubs, and there's even a handy list of questions at the back to make the discussion easier.
 

The Residence

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower was such a fun, fascinating read! I bought this book for my younger daughter after we both watched the Netflix murder mystery, The Residence, partly based on Brower's book (the Netflix show was also a fun, fascinating experience: recommended, with a particular shout-out to the bonus Australian content!)

No murder mysteries here, unless you count the Kennedy assassination (which of course was not fun at all). But The Residence offers a glimpse inside the institution of the heart of the White House, the second and third floors where the President and his family live, and the hidden warren of workrooms, kitchens, stores and offices where the staff mostly invisibly carry out their duties. Presidential families come and go, but the staff stay on, often for decades, more loyal to the job than to the current incumbent.

There are loads of juicy anecdotes here, some of which made their way (suitably disguised) into the Netflix series (like LBJ's weird obsession with his shower). Some Presidents and their spouses come out of the staff accounts better than others. The senior Bushes were beloved for their relaxed, friendly attitude; LBJ was, frankly, a psycho; the Clintons, not surprisingly, had a tense, paranoid relationship, though Chelsea was unfailingly sweet. Nancy Reagan is not reported on well. One shudders to think what the Trumps would be like to live with... (The Residence stops near the end of the Obamas' tenure.)

One aspect of The Residence that left me slightly uneasy is the racial element of the staff hierarchy. The maids and butlers are overwhelmingly people of colour; but the top chefs, ushers, housekeepers etc tend to be white. I don't know if anything's changed since 2015, and Brower is open about discussing the history of the staff hiring policy, but it still left me with a faint unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I don't know why I'm so interested in stories about servants, but The Residence was a great addition to my collection, with an intriguing American twist.

England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I bit off more than I could chew with this book! I couldn't resist the title, but when it arrived from Brotherhood Books, I realised that it was a very scholarly collection of essays from three La Trobe University History and English academics: Ann Blake, Leela Gandhi and Sue Thomas. I did my best to keep up, but some of the chapters defeated me.

Part 1 consisted of some general essays, and Part 2 looked at several individual authors of colonial origins who had 'returned' to England and explored the 'mother country' in their fiction. I was familiar with Katherine Mansfield (NZ) and Christina Stead (Australia), less so with Jean Rhys (the Caribbean). I have read a bit of Doris Lessing, but I think I was too young for The Golden Notebook; The Good Terrorist did leave a deep impression on me. I have to confess that I've never had much more than a dutiful interest in VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and I struggled with their chapters. I've never heard of Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta, but I'm definitely intrigued now, and likewise David Dabydeen is a new author to me.

I'm still interested in the subject of authors bringing their various colonial and post-colonial perspectives to the colonising country -- most of them are at best ambivalent, some downright scathing -- but perhaps reading their novels might be a better place for me to start.

More Than We Can Tell

 

I borrowed Brigid Kemmerer's More Than We Can Tell because it includes a teenager who makes her own online game, but unlike Slay, the online world plays only a relatively minor role in this story. This novel is a kind of sequel to Letters to the Lost, and the characters of Juliet and Declan reappear here. However, the novel centres on a different pair: reclusive, damaged Rev (aka the Grim Reaper, because he's always shrouded in a hoodie) and Emma, torn between her distracted computer geek father and her critical, driven doctor mother.

Emma's game features because she's being harassed by a player called Nightmare; she's also befriended by a supportive player called Ethan (we never discover if they are, in fact, the same person). Her parents' marriage is dissolving, and in the midst of all this, she strikes up a tentative friendship with 'weirdo' Rev. We learn that Rev has many reasons to be weird, mostly connected with his estranged, abusive father. These two defensive characters have to overcome their inner demons to help each other.

I quickly became hooked by More Than We Can Tell. It's a very YA novel; especially early in the book, I felt like shaking both Rev and Emma and urging them to just tell their parents how they were feeling -- it would have saved a lot of drama! But I can imagine adolescent readers gobbling up this tortured romance with a spoon. 

I think I was most horrified to learn about Lucky Charms, allegedly a breakfast cereal, eaten by Rev and his foster brother, which consists of MARSHMALLOWS and 'frosted oats.' It sounds horrific, and definitely not something anyone should eat for breakfast.