Theresa Smith's Blog, page 31
December 27, 2022
Book Review: Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff
New York City. June, 1982. When eighteen-year-old Beth arrives in Manhattan for a prestigious journalism internship, everything feels brand new – and not always in a good way. A cockroach-infested sublet and a disaffected roommate are the least of her worries, and she soon finds herself caught up with her fellow interns – preppy Oliver, ruthless Dan and ridiculously cool, beautiful, wild Edie.
Soon, Beth and Edie are best friends – the sort of heady, all-consuming best-friendship that’s impossible to resist. But with the mercury rising and deceit mounting up, betrayal lies just around the corner. Who needs enemies … when you have friends like these?
From bestselling, award-winning author Meg Rosoff comes a gritty, intoxicating novel about a summer of unforgettable firsts: of independence, lies, love and the inevitable loss of innocence.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Released August 2022
My Thoughts:I didn’t realise when I bought this one that it was a YA release. Honestly, I didn’t even pick up on that while reading it. To me, it read as a really decent coming of age story and it wasn’t until preparing the review and reading about it on the publisher’s website that I noted the YA audience. This is probably a good thing because I don’t read YA as a habit anymore. It’s rare that they don’t feel like a YA novel. In terms of this one, I would say it’s more older YA, than younger, perhaps more like a new adult audience as that’s the age of the characters and there’s a fair bit of sex and drug taking going on.
‘Most of this information she had gleaned from overheard conversations. Her parents rarely spoke of loss. Beth often wondered if they spoke to each other on the subject. She sometimes felt as if she had inherited the gross accumulation of her parents’ silence, the weight of an immeasurable, unacknowledged horror planted within her like the seed of some hungry vine.’
There are some great themes to unpack from this one and it clips along at a good pace too. Beth is a child of Holocaust survivors, spreading her wings in New York for the summer working as an intern at a paper between finishing high school and beginning college. She’s from a small town, so the learning curve is a steep one and she arrives in NY all wide-eyed and impressionable – ripe for taking advantage of.
‘She thought about herself, how even when he was forcing himself on her, she was mostly worried about waking Edie, as if being polite were somehow more important than – whatever.’
New York in the early 1980s comes to life with the issues that would have been prevalent in the day taking centre stage: the high crime rates, the emergence of Aids and the terror of the unknown that accompanied the initial waves, sexism in the workplace, rape culture. A New York summer and the way the city exists within those long roasting months; the abovementioned issues; the characters and their newly adult lives playing out within this micro-universe – all of this combined into a highly charged read that was literally dripping with atmosphere.
‘She knew what would happen now. Edie would hang off her arm, seduce her with compliments and kisses and jokes, and she’d feel churlish about being angry. Maybe she was too sensitive to brush off Edie’s flashes of cheerful aggression. It probably meant nothing, but they annoyed her.’
Above all though, this is a story about friendship, the good ones and the toxic ones. It’s a uniquely female story in that it depicts the sort of friendship many women can look back on and recognise. The toxic ones characterised by a specific sort of gaslighting that builds one person up whilst keeping the other one firmly in their place. The author demonstrated the lifespan of Beth and Edie’s friendship so perfectly, from the first giddy meeting right through to the toxic end. I finished up really admiring Beth and feeling a sense of satisfaction in her choices and where she was headed. I’m keen now to read more by this author.
Highly recommended – and not just for YA audiences!
Book 19 in my 22 in 2022 challenge.
December 26, 2022
Book Review: Psalms for the End of the World by Cole Haddon
It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.
Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.
Spanning continents, centuries, and dimensions, this exquisitely crafted and madly inventive novel – a triple-disk, concept-album of a book – is a profound yet propulsive enquiry into the nature of reality.
Published by Hachette Australia
Released August 2022
My Thoughts:‘He believed he could build a world, a perfect world, and that ridiculous arrogance, born of a need to overturn the sense of inadequacy and unimportance, of crippling fear that he was nothing and would never be more than nothing, was his undoing. The Company didn’t ruin Jones. Jones ruined Jones. And here he was again, take two, trying to remake the world yet again, and very likely about to mess it up as badly as he did the first time around. Fear is still driving his every decision. In the end, the world he was first born into isn’t much different from this one. He’s never felt such kinship with humans before. Life is life, as it turns out, however it begins, and fear is the high price of living.’
For such a complex novel, I found this incredibly easy to get swept up into. I can’t say that I always knew what was going on and why a particular character had been introduced, but by the end, everything made sense. In that vein, this is very much a story where you just need to almost exist within the moment and trust that the author is taking you somewhere magnificent.
It’s an impossible story to explain. There are many characters, so many, all existing across time and place. The story has time travel, inter-dimensional worlds, science fiction elements and a dystopian lens, and yet, it’s also historical fiction, contemporary fiction, futuristic, poetic, and uses a variety of formats to tell the overall story. This is an impressively unique and ambitious novel; it really is quite remarkable. And in the end, it all came down to love. A very different sort of love story, but a love story, nonetheless.
Highly recommended for readers who like complex, intelligent, and visionary stories that challenge the usual genre conventions.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
December 17, 2022
The Week That Was…
Zeus:
They’re definitely a type, huskies! Merry Christmas from Zeus who is wishing you good times and big plates full of ham.
What I’ve been reading:
With only one week left until Christmas, I’m signing off for the week and will be back between Christmas and New Year with my best books of the year post and hopefully a couple of reviews. Until then, wishing you all a Merry Christmas and all my thanks for your ongoing book and Zeus chat throughout the year.
December 11, 2022
Book Review: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
From the multi-million copy bestselling author of Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible comes this heart-rending instant classic.
Demon Copperhead: a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon befriends us on this, his journey through the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Inspired by the unflinching truth-telling of David Copperfield, Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead gives voice to a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
Published by Faber
Released October 2022
My Thoughts:The thing with Barbara Kingsolver is that you know, if you’ve read her before, that you’re going to get a very good story no matter what she’s writing about. My adoration of her began a long time ago when I was in my early 20’s and I picked up a bargain of a book for only a couple of dollars because I liked the cover and it had an Oprah’s Book Club badge on it. That book was The Poisonwood Bible, and it turned out to be the most incredible novel I had read in my life up to that point. I’ve read others now by Barbara Kingsolver and this is where I get to the abovementioned thing that I was driving towards: no matter how high my expectations are and how much I already know I’m in for a good read, she still manages to floor me. Storytelling, in her hands, is like a whole different entity altogether. No other author does that for me. She is utterly brilliant.
So, Demon Copperhead. Where do I start? I’ll start at the end with the author notes where Barbara Kingsolver pays homage to another incredible author (also a favourite of mine) and the novel of his that she has drawn on and adapted Demon Copperhead from:
‘I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.’
Demon Copperhead is a novel fuelled by rage. It simmers and boils and is incredibly political throughout. Set in the Appalachia region of North America, specifically in rural Kentucky, and although contemporary, this novel explores the way in which this region has been exploited, over and over, down through North American history, and the crushing effects of this on modern day society and the people who call this place home.
‘This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.’
There were a lot of things within this story that I didn’t know about, truly horrifying things that made my heart ache. Children cutting tobacco and getting tobacco poisoning if they didn’t wear gloves. Everything Oxy and the horror of that ripple effect. The American foster care system. Shame. Poverty. An inadequate education system. An even more inadequate health care system. It’s a roll call of the worst of the worst, and yet, despite the gravity and the crushing reality of this story, Demon is an incredible narrator and his story has so many shining moments that were uplifting and life affirming on account of his resilience.
‘She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive.’
A huge part of this novel is about drug use, not just Oxy, which was introduced into rural Kentucky as a wonder drug, but also other drugs: meth, heroin, fentanyl – the addiction and deaths are shocking. There are some extraordinary characters within this novel, in addition to Demon, but June Peggart stands out as the superhero of the story. A nurse practioner, the shining jewel of her rural family because she not only got out, but she went to college and became a professional. She returns to her home county and wages war on the pharmaceutical reps who methodically introduced Oxy into an already economically and socially repressed rural region with the specific purpose of making money through addiction. She works tirelessly with addicted patients, is surrounded by addiction within her own family, and makes it her mission to hold someone accountable for the growing number of deaths and destroyed lives she’s seeing on a daily basis. She truly was an extraordinary character. There is a scene in the novel where she is sitting in the backseat of a car with her arms around two teenagers from her extended family, both addicted to drugs, one almost destroyed and on death’s door, and I felt that pain, so much, reaching out from the page, what it would be like to be that person, trying desperately to save people you love from a certain death. The horror of that.
“They did this to us. You understand that, right?”
I don’t want to spoil this novel for potential readers but there’s also so much I’d love to share about it. It’s a delicate balance. One of the more confronting things to happen within it, for me, was when Demon suffered a knee injury playing high school football, the exact same knee injury my own son suffered four months ago, also playing high school football. Whereas my son was immediately recommended for surgery and was operated on within the month with ongoing rehab and a firm recommendation for no playing football for six to nine months, Demon was given a prescription for Oxy and was back on the field within a fortnight, with a promise to look at the knee again in the offseason. By then though, well, you know where this is headed. He was fifteen years old. I cannot tell you how reading that affected me. And that’s just one thing out of so, so many, that broke my heart and shocked me in equal measure.
It’s coming in as a late entry, but Demon Copperhead is definitely going to be on my list of best books for 2022, quite possibly in first place.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
December 8, 2022
The Week That Was…
There is only 16 days until Christmas! How on earth did that happen? I’m sure it was only September last week.
Joke of the week:
What Zeus has been up to:
Almost four weeks since he had his surgery to remove the tumours from his eye and head and he’s grown most of his fur back. Both wounds have healed beautifully and he’s beginning to look like his old self. Still seems to have developed a whole lot more attitude of late though, not sure what that’s about!
What I’ve been watching:
If you have an opportunity to go and see The Menu, I highly recommend it. Utterly unexpected in every way!
Like millions of others, I also enjoyed this new take on The Addams Family. Wednesday herself was an absolute treat of a character.
I’m currently watching Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I’ve been too tired to watch it all in one sitting so I’m just segmenting it up and pretending it’s a TV show. I am enjoying it though. Netflix might do Christmas movies badly, but they do book adaptations very well.
What I’ve been reading:
Until next week…
2022 Gifting Guide
I love receiving books as a gift and I also love giving book gifts. I’ve looked back at my reading year so far and put together a collection of various books that would all make ideal Christmas gifts. Each of these were rated four or five stars by myself, so they are all books I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.
Non-fiction reads:
Historical fiction:
Contemporary reads:
Classic fiction:
Merry Christmas and good reading!
December 6, 2022
Book Review: Blue Hour by Sarah Schmidt
1936: At nineteen, Kitty was ready to leave behind the stifling control of her parents and all those constantly telling her how to live her life. Work at the Wintonvale Repatriation Hospital was her escape and a chance to be someone else.
Then she met soldier George Turner – and she heard her mother’s voice in her ear, warning of danger, of being that girl. Kitty told herself if she ever had her own daughter she’d never control her. She’d make sure her voice never left a mark behind.
1973: Growing up, Eleanor’s home was strained by sorrow and the echoes of war that silenced her parents. And always her mother, Kitty’s, bitterness, twisting and poisoning everything she touched. She thought she knew what made her parents this way … but Eleanor would never know all her mother’s secrets.
The demands of marriage, motherhood and looking after her daughter while her husband, Leon, is in Vietnam lay claim to Eleanor’s days. Nature, embracing curiosity and not being like her mother are Eleanor’s solace. But they are not enough when Leon’s darkness overwhelms. Both he and her mother leave their mark and use her child for their own ends. Afraid, unsure and alone, Eleanor will be driven to erase her mother’s voice in her head. But the question remains: can she bear the burden of her own secrets?
Vivid, deeply affecting and confronting, Blue Hour explores the beauty and violence in the world. Powerfully magnifying the fractures between a mother and a daughter, it reveals the brutal cost when we allow grief and trauma to reach down generations.
Published by Hachette Australia
Released June 2022
My Thoughts:Wow. This novel left me speechless with its quiet power to unsettle and ignite reflection. It’s like a combined case study within the one family of the effects of PTSD, grief, inter-generational trauma, domestic violence, and depression. Loaded? Yes. Too much? Perhaps for some. There are certainly a wealth of triggers within this novel. However, I found it compelling, confronting, unsettling, thought provoking, and utterly heart-breaking. Schmidt is an incredible writer, just sensational. I remember feeling the same after reading her debut, See What I Have Done. She just has this immersive way of writing where all of your senses are tapped into. You can smell, taste, hear and feel so much, all from her words and the way in which she strings them together.
‘To see her mother like this: this woman who was incapable of respecting boundaries, incapable of holding back primal wants. When Eleanor had been vulnerable with Kitty, told her that she was struggling to find her footing as a new mother, that she was scared of not being enough for Amy, scared of being too much, that she wasn’t happy in her relationship with Leon, that she fantasised about him never coming home from war, that she wanted something bigger than just being a mother, that she was sorry that she couldn’t be more for her and George, that she wished Badger was around, that she wished, she wished, she wished…’
One thing that struck me as I was reading this novel: that there would have been a whole generation of women born to fathers who were suffering with PTSD from the second world war, who were the right age to marry men who would have then fought in Vietnam, bringing their own trauma home from that war. Until reading this novel and being inside Eleanor’s skin for the duration, I had never given that a single thought. A multi-pronged intergenerational trauma.
This one is recommended for fans of literary fiction who also are not triggered by stories heavy with themes of grief and mental illness. The ending was something I never saw coming, a turn in the story that was both shocking and brilliantly executed. Such a remarkable novel.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
November 29, 2022
A Month of Reading: November
November has finished with eight books read. I’ve changed it up a bit this month too, with a cookbook, a short story collection, and a non-fiction/essay collection, definitely a change from my usual fiction only focus. I felt like I was really getting back into my reading routine in this last week of November too, juggling everything just enough in order to find time to escape into a book each day. I hope to continue this way into December, as it’s honestly been a great stress reducer for me, as reading always has been in the past.
22 in 2022:
Three for this challenge in November. I might even surprise myself and actually make the target of 22 books by end of December. I’ve read 18 so far, so I’d really have to magic some extra time each day just for reading, but you never know!
Review Books:
The remaining five were all review books (snap on last month where I read five review books also). There’s Been a Little Incident by Alice Ryan was the absolute highlight out of these ones.
Until next month, good reading…
Book Review: Hooked: A Never After Novel by Emily McIntire
Once Upon A Time, there was a little boy. His belly full of laughter, his life full of joy. Until one day, something changed; stripped his innocence away.
The hole inside making space for the devil to come and play. His dreams gone forever, he grew up way too fast.
An endless night of crocodiles, and watches made of glass. He grew into a villain, the taste of vengeance on his tongue. Craving to make his enemies pay for the misdeeds they had done.
Instead he found a darling girl, and refused to let her go. For what better way to make the man pay, than to steal his little shadow.
*Hooked is a full-length, complete standalone and the first in The Never After Series: A collection of fractured fairy tales where the villains get the happy ever after. This is a DARK Contemporary romance (not fantasy) featuring mature themes and content that may not be suitable for all audiences. Reader discretion is advised.
Published by NewSouth Books – Bloom Books
Released September 2022
My Thoughts:I know, I know, not the sort of book you’re used to seeing pop up here. Let me explain…
I’m a Peter Pan fan. I like the darker undercurrent of Peter Pan, the original novel by J.M. Barrie, not the Disney version. So, I’m drawn to anything that even hints at a retelling, which is how I ended up with this one. Also, I like the cover. I probably should have looked into the book description a bit more, or even jumped onto Goodreads and read a few reviews, but I didn’t, I just requested the series and here we are. So, Hooked is not a retelling of Peter Pan, rather, it’s a dark romance/underworld crime novel that draws inspiration from the darkness of the original Peter Pan. It was enough for me to get sucked in.
We have our main character, James Barrie, aka Hook, who is basically a psychopathic criminal thug. Then we have Wendy Michaels, daughter of shady billionaire Peter Michaels, sister to Jon Michaels. Wendy gets called ‘Wendy darling’ by James (Hook) and Peter Michael’s girlfriend/assistant is named Tina-Belle. Hook calls his core gang of thugs The Lost Boys and the drugs they sell pixie-dust. Hook’s uncle, who he brutally slayed in the first page of the novel, was nicknamed Croc, and he was a fan of those ticking fob watches, which are a huge trauma trigger for Hook. You can no doubt see what I mean, with all of these familiar threads and characters. So, while the author has said specifically in the front of the novel that it isn’t a retelling, it does lean heavily on the folklore of Peter Pan. It’s actually not badly done at all. It thought it was quite clever, to be honest, in the way she’s taken the characters and themes from J.M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan and reworked it into this contemporary criminal underworld story.
I’m going to be upfront here, the romance in this did nothing for me. Hook and Wendy form this kind of toxic sexual relationship/trauma bond that made me really uncomfortable, and I don’t mean this in a prudish way because of all the sex scenes. I mean it in the sense that I just don’t like reading about unhealthy relationships, they do nothing for me. I know it’s fiction, but even so, it’s just not my cup of tea. There was a strong Fifty Shades vibe running through this, minus the red room, although Hook did keep Wendy chained up to a wall in a basement for a little bit there…
I have the other two novels in this series, they were sent to me as a bundle to review. I intend on reading them, just not one after the other. These are the sort of books I need to pace myself with and dip into when I’m in the mood to do so. A bit like the way one feels when they want to watch a gangster film, I suppose. The whole criminal underworld side of this story appealed to me far more than the romance, and there was enough of that holding up the story to keep me committed until the end.
Recommended for fans of dark romance.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
November 27, 2022
Book Review: There’s Been a Little Incident by Alice Ryan
A witty and warm debut novel from a young Irish writer. A story of family, grief, and the ways we come together when all seems lost.
Molly Black has disappeared. She’s been flighty since her parents died, but this time – or so says her hastily written note – she’s gone for good.
That’s why the whole Black clan – from Granny perched on the printer to Killian on Zoom from Sydney – is huddled together in the Dublin suburbs, arguing over what to do.
Former model Lady V presumes Molly’s just off taking drugs and sleeping with strangers – which is fine by her. Cousin Anne, tired of living in Molly’s shadow, is keeping quiet, and cousin Bobby is distracted by his own issues.
But Molly’s disappearance is eerily familiar to Uncle John. He is determined never to lose anyone again. Especially not his niece, who is more like her mum than she realises.
Published by Head of Zeus
Released November 2022
My Thoughts:This was magnificent. There were very strong Maeve Binchy vibes coming through with this one for me. The combination of wit, warmth, and sincerity was all too reminiscent of Binchy’s earlier iconic works, such as Circle of Friends and The Glass Lake. Billed as a story about grief, it is incredibly uplifting and was like a much-needed balm to my soul. This was a story about family and how the ties of family can stretch and flex, feel as though they’re on the verge of snapping, yet still maintain their hold.
Ryan writes with such warmth and natural humour and the way in which she crafted her story, the many perspectives and story threads all weaving together, made for a compelling and immersive read. Molly Black is the orphan of the family, and as such, she is now the responsibility of all, despite being an adult. None take this responsibility more seriously than John, who not only oversees the lives of his nieces and nephews, but also his brothers, sister, and sister-in-law. John and his wife Helen are childless, so assume the unofficial roles of parents to all, but it is Molly they have truly focussed on since the death of her mother when she was only eighteen. And besides, John is now retired, and he has to fill his days with something, so when he isn’t waging war with his vegan recycling fanatic neighbour, he micromanages the family.
Anne is the overlooked cousin, who feels inferior to Molly’s bright light, whose brother escaped to Australia several years ago and is only ever seen via zoom now, whose mother has been a religious fanatic ever since Anne’s father left the family, and who draws comfort from Excel spreadsheets and routines. Bobby is the golden boy of the family, a former rugby player who is weighed down by a grief of his own that sees him keeping himself removed from everyone, particularly his own mother. V is John’s sister-in-law, a former model, now mother of nineteen-year-old twins, Blur and Oasis (nicknames, of course, think pop music from about twenty years ago), a gym junkie with a broken ankle and a barely suppressed midlife crisis in the making. B is Molly’s best friend, a food vlogger riding a rising star who thinks he’s met his perfect man, but how does Molly fit into his new relationship. And then there’s Danny, the youngest of John’s brothers, the youngest uncle, who is battling demons so heavy, and who is also John’s cross to bear, or so he thinks. Alongside these family members are other aunts, uncles, and cousins, each with their own stories, both independent from their family as well as linked in.
This type of novel is my favourite kind, with its big cast, with everyone and their stories stitched together seamlessly, no thread left untucked. There’s Been a Little Incident is a cracking debut, life affirming and uplifting, it was an absolute joy to read from the first page up until the last. I’ll be waiting eagerly for whatever Alice Ryan writes next.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
