Interview with Myke Bartlett: Part 1!

Oh! Just need to catch my breath. WOW. Btw, those are 10 stars, not five.

A book has to work very hard to counteract my ADHD. I know, I should make more of an effort to stop being a serial book-adulterer but that is...like asking me to stop breathing.

I stopped for this book.

What happened that a relatively unknown Melbourne-based Aussie writer of a young adult (it's suitable for upper middle grade, too) fantasy realism novel that's good enough to keep an (old) adult enthralled into the wee morning hours attracted my attention in the first place?

At the behest of every known person and what passes for their pet, I finally decided to broach the twitterverse. And amazingly enough, I like the chatty one-liners and the light-speed back-and-forth (yeah, you don't have to tell me, it's probably my ADHD!). Even more astonishing is the fact that people besides you-must-read-my-latest-incredible-outpouring-of-words-authors follow me.

Being a twitter neophyte also meant that I've learned some lessons the hard way. Such as if you follow someone it pays to at least check who they are first, because DUH! when you follow them back they can DM (I thought it was some new kind of kinky sex term at first - you know, shorthand for BDSM!) you with one of those you-must-read-me-NOW missives.

When Myke Bartlett followed me my first thought was 'Oh no, not again.' But being a stickler for my own rules, I read his tweet tagline and bingo. The man won THE TEXT PRIZE last year. In case that has no significance for you it is a MAJOR Australian publishing prize open to any Aussie/NZ resident, any age, published or unpublished, with a Children's or Young Adult manuscript.

Fast as a tweet I was on his webpage and looking up his book. And the man is a tease, I tell you. A total tease!

Three figures shot up from the harbour depths. They rose ten metres in the air, trailing saltwater, and then dropped onto the wharf. Their hair was knotted and foul and their faces warped and discoloured. They wore tight-fitting, tarnished armour: chain-mail vests stained with verdigris and heavy bracelets on bony wrists. Helmets masked their eyes and exaggerated their brows into curled horns. One carried a double-bladed axe, one had a sword strung from his rotting leather belt, and the last gripped a trident.

That was it. THAT WAS GODDAMN IT. And he used the word verdigris. Swoon.

Now let's just stop here for a minute and read that paragraph again. What a picture. What a pace. What lean-and-hungry prose.

That is why I DMed him (not the other way round) begging for a review copy. His publishers kindly obliged and within half an hour of never having heard of Mr Bartlett and his book, I was glued to my laptop and nothing short of nuclear war would have stopped me from reading.

The comparison of Sadie, the lead heroine, to that other famously-wooden-I-will-be-the-last-fashionably-dressed-mancontestant-standing aren't justified (and yes, Victorian State Library's blog says Fire in the Sea is what would happen if Suzanne Collins and John Marsden co-wrote a fantasy novel) because Myke Bartlett just does it better.

Sadie is you or me, or your next-door-neighbour's daughter, who's lost her parents in a car crash and is living with her averagely nice grandparents, just trying to be a not-too-typical-and-not-too-different teenager in Perth. All Sadie really wants is to escape the need to 'soldier on', to leave Perth's middle-class suburbia behind her, and find a life somewhere else, much to the dismay of her best friend Tom, who's just at that awkward age where he wants Sadie to be more than best friend, but has no real clue as to how to change the status quo.

Enter old man Jacob who dies and leaves Sadie his house with the proviso she live in it for a year and guard its contents. Before she has a chance to commit, someone's already broken into the house, claiming to be the old man returned.

Now if that happened to you or me, what would you do? Yup, that's right. Roll your eyes and look at hot, young Jake and say "You're like, seriously hallucinating, dude." Which naturally Sadie does.

But then Jacob/Jake's lawyer is murdered right in front of Sadie's eyes, and she can't keep ignoring what's going on. Tom is gored by a wild bull - except it's the Minotaur made into somebody's pet. And that somebody has some very nasty plans for Jake, and now Sadie and Tom.

If I go on any further, I'm going to be entering spoiler territory and this book is SOOOOO GOOD I'm going to stop right here.

If you love nicely drawn characters and finely hewn prose, if you like twisty turns of plot and beautifully rendered depictions of setting, read this book. NOW. YESTERDAY!

Disclaimer - I approached the author for a review copy, kindly provided by the publishing house Text Publishing. I received no remuneration or payment in kind for this review. And even if I had, I wouldn't stop telling you to READ THIS BOOK.