Theresa Smith's Blog, page 46
November 4, 2021
Book Review: Wild Place by Christian White
In the summer of 1989, a local teen goes missing from the idyllic Australian suburb of Camp Hill. As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. When the police won’t listen, he takes matters into his own hands with the help of the missing girl’s father and a local neighbourhood watch group.
But as dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced, Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it. Wild Place peels back the layers of suburbia, exposing what’s hidden underneath – guilt, desperation, violence – and attempts to answer the question: why do good people do bad things?
Released 26th October 2021
My Thoughts:This novel just confirms what I have maintained all throughout my life: don’t get involved with your neighbours. Wild Place is the first novel of Christian White’s that I have read although it is his third release. I can see now why everyone loves his books! He writes in a casual manner that makes for deceptively light reading, but beneath the surface is a darkly simmering cesspool of domestic drama that erupts into violence with remarkable ease.
I loved the way Christian demonstrated the rapid way in which people fall in with each other. You put a bunch of nosy people together, threaten their orderly existence, throw in a few comments about the virtue of their children being at risk and viola: the witch hunt is on! The consequences of this were far reaching and I was horrified by the eventual outcome and deeply saddened by how judgemental people can be about someone who has chosen to be different.
Wild Place is a twisting and compulsive read. I’m keen now to read his previous two releases as I enjoyed his style and techniques of misdirection. Although, I have to say, I had an inkling that a particular character wasn’t all that they seemed and was glad to see my suspicions realised – sometimes I can be a little judgemental on characters, so it was good to see that I was on the mark this time and not just hating on someone for the sake of it. I enjoyed revisiting the late 1980s and felt that Christian did a fantastic job on inserting pop culture references into the narrative to give it an authentic sense of the era. This novel cast my mind back to my teenage years in the early 1990s and the hype around Satanism that was prevalent at the time. I remember the fear this generated back then, and I think he really nailed that in terms of recreating the mood and feel of what was going on at that time.
Highly recommended. I challenge you to put it down once you’ve started!
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
November 2, 2021
Book Review: Devotion by Hannah Kent
Prussia, 1836
Hanne Nussbaum is a child of nature – she would rather run wild in the forest than conform to the limitations of womanhood. In her village of Kay, Hanne is friendless and considered an oddity . . . until she meets Thea.
Ocean, 1838
The Nussbaums are Old Lutherans, bound by God’s law and at odds with their King’s order for reform. Forced to flee religious persecution the families of Kay board a crowded, disease-riddled ship bound for the new colony of South Australia. In the face of brutal hardship, the beauty of whale song enters Hanne’s heart, along with the miracle of her love for Thea. Theirs is a bond that nothing can break.
The whale passed. The music faded.
South Australia, 1838
A new start in an old land. God, society and nature itself decree Hanne and Thea cannot be together. But within the impossible . . . is devotion.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia – Picador Australia
Released 26th October 2021
My Thoughts:It was such a long-awaited joy to return to the writing of Hannah Kent, whose previous two novels, Burial Rights and The Good People, are both firm favourites of mine. I love the way she writes, the way she plays with language, the way she conjures such visual imagery with her words. And there is some truly beautiful writing within her latest release, Devotion. Once again, she returns to the genre of historical fiction, and I was lost within the passages of time inside the world she has created, following a large group of Old Lutherans journey from one side of the world to the other. The journey on the ship was such an immersion into history, I really enjoyed that part of the novel, the hardships endured, all in the name of a new life free from religious persecution.
There is a supernatural element to this novel that marks it as different to her others. I am not opposed to supernatural threads woven into a story and at times I didn’t mind this one, but at others, I felt it pulling me out of the story. There were times when I just couldn’t envisage what the author was describing and others where I felt it was all just wandering too far from the bones of the story – or at least, what I felt were the bones, which I acknowledge may be different to the author’s intent.
One thing that is very much evident though is that this story just pulses with love. I feel like it has been written by someone who has experienced the sort of devotion that the novel is based upon, and that is a very grand thing to be able to express. At its heart, this novel represents love in its highest form, pure and transcending. It’s very raw and at times, heartbreaking, but also illuminating. I’ll be honest, this is not my favourite by Hannah Kent, but any fan of hers will be glad to revisit her writing in this latest offering and I think that each reader’s response will be an entirely individualised one.
‘If others are here, as I am, we are as unseen to one another as the living. The lonely dead, wishing for ghosts of our own.’
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
October 31, 2021
Book Review: Believe in Me by Lucy Neave
As a teenager in the 1970s, Sarah is forced to leave her home in upstate New York to accompany a missionary to Idaho. When she falls pregnant, she is dispatched to relatives in Sydney, who place her in a home for unmarried mothers. Years later her daughter, Bet, pieces together her mother’s life story, hoping to understand her better. As she learns more about Sarah’s past, Bet struggles to come to terms with her own history and identity, yet is determined to make peace with Sarah’s choices before it’s too late.
Lucy Neave’s moving and deeply personal second novel, Believe in Me, explores the relationships between mothers and their children across three generations of one family. The book questions what we can ever truly know of our parents’ early lives, even as their experiences weave ineffably into our identities and destinies.
Published by UQP
Released 31st August 2021
My Thoughts:Despite its bleakness, I quite enjoyed this novel. The writing is exquisite, and it was narrated in an impressionable way, a first-person narration that had an omniscient feel to it, particularly throughout part one where Bet is telling her mother’s story from before her own birth through to after. The story comes off as deeply personal, almost like a memoir in style. There is an element of unreliability to the narration too: Bet is telling her mother’s story, which she has learned second hand from a few diverse sources, as well as, in later years, relying on her own childhood memories and subjective impressions of her mother. Coupled with this is Sarah herself, and her scrapbooks, which she shares later with Bet as a roadmap of her own history. But how dependable is Sarah in this telling? Not very, I imagine. She has the ability to interpret her scrapbooks for Bet in anyway she chooses, and I did find Sarah to be a curious mix of naïve and manipulative as an adult.
‘As she told me about her life it felt as if it was drowning out my own.’
Neither of these characters, Sarah or Bet, were particularly likeable to me and yet I was able to admire them both, in pieces, and remain wholly invested in the story. I empathised with their trials and experiences, but I often found Sarah tiresome and Bet’s disconnection from everything and everyone disturbing. I do think the author has done an excellent job at demonstrating the way trauma can manifest itself throughout a person’s life, along with the way in which this trauma can be passed onto the next generation, almost like a genetic imprint. This story is complex with deep themes explored at both a personal and social level. It offers a glance at history through a political lens as well, which I enjoyed. And while it isn’t something that impacts the story as such, I do really love the cover, its styling as a sample of a page out of Sarah’s scrapbook so in tune with the story. Well done to the cover designers on this one.
Believe in Me is an intimate, complex, and affecting story of mother-daughter relations against a background of trauma and uncertainty. It’s beautifully written and will draw you in with its mesmerising narration and raw emotion. Highly recommended.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
October 30, 2021
A Month of Reading: October
Happy Halloween!
Books read this month totalled 9, one up from last month. Given how busy this last month has been, I’m quite happy with that.
Until next month…happy reading!
October 27, 2021
Book Review: The Survivors by Alex Schulman
A suspenseful, haunting novel about three brothers and their reckoning with the events of one disputed, disastrous summer.
Benjamin sees the shape of his two brothers trying to kill each other. It’s no worthy finale, but perhaps it’s also no surprise. How else had they expected this to end?
Three brothers return to the family cottage by the lake where, more than two decades earlier, a catastrophe changed the course of their lives. Now, they are here to scatter their mother’s ashes.
Benjamin, the middle son, drives the three of them down the old gravel road to the house, through a familiar landscape but also through time. Here they are as boys, tanned legs and hungry eyes, children left to themselves by remote parents; here they are as young men, estranged but bound together by the history that defines them, their lives spent competing for their father’s favour and their mother’s love in a household more like a minefield than a home.
In the intervening years, Benjamin has grown increasingly untethered from reality, frozen in place as life carries on around him. And between the three brothers hums a dangerous current. What really happened that summer day when everything was blown to pieces?
The Survivors is the tale of a family falling apart and a chronicle of a mind unravelling in the wake of a tragedy, both a coming-of-age novel and a reckoning with a deeply buried past. Written with singular elegance and the drive of a suspense novel, its ending will leave you marvelling at what the best fiction can achieve.
Published by Hachette Australia – Fleet
Released 12th October 2021
My Thoughts:The Survivors is a Swedish translated novel written by author and journalist Alex Schulman, who has written four bestselling autobiographical books, one of which was named Book of the Year in Sweden in 2017. The Survivors is a dual debut: his first novel and his first international release. It’s skilfully written and impactful in a subtle way that draws you in and keeps you hooked with its past and present back and forth narrative, swinging almost like a pendulum as you progress through the novel to the point where with one simple sentence, everything changes shape, altering your perspective and feelings on all that has come before that moment. It was a stunning reveal, that both shocked and yet made perfect sense in equal measure.
‘The weight of what’s taking place right now is enormous, but, of course, most of it has already happened. What’s playing out here on these stone steps, the tears of three brothers, their swollen faces and all the blood, is only the last ripple on the water, the one furthest out, the one with the most distance from the point of impact.’
The novel is narrated by Benjamin, the middle child. Everything we learn about this family is from his perspective. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Benjamin is not so much of the reliable narrator we are initially given the impression of. This is conveyed through looks he observes between his brothers and contradictions they make regarding Benjamin’s recall of childhood events. The clever writing allows the reader to intuit that the collective trauma these three brothers have experienced have marked each of them differently, so that even their shared childhood experiences are altered within each one’s memory. I have long been fascinated by the impact of trauma on childhood memories and the variations between the memories of siblings who have shared traumatic upbringings and this novel offered a particularly intimate study of it.
‘Sometimes, when you experience trauma, your mind will alter your memories. Benjamin had asked why, and the therapist replied, “So you can bear it.”’
Abuse within families is a complex thing, particularly if there is more than one abuser and more than one form of abuse taking place. The parents within this novel were both alcoholics who abused each other, as well as their children, physically, mentally, and through gross neglect. When this neglect became the direct cause of a tragedy, the parents did not use this as a basis for change, rather, as an excuse to become worse. And yet, as we see throughout the recollections of Benjamin, in spite of everything, it can be hard to untangle the messy complex feelings between parent and child; sometimes, walking away and switching off is not as easy as it might seem, even if it is the healthier option. For a novel with incredibly deep themes, it is written with a very readable touch, if that makes sense. Perhaps that is the author’s skill base as a journalist coming through. The novel is not weighted down with descriptions or meanderings. It instead skims along, conveying a lot through a little, almost minimalist with a classy edge. I really enjoyed the style.
‘And Benjamin looked at his father, and it was then, on his deathbed, that he recalled what had happened just that very morning when his dad had promised him a ski trip, and with the memory he suddenly realised why he had such a deep love for his father in spite of everything. The chance to be alone with Dad. It was those moments that had sustained him through the years, that had always made him stay on the right side of life.’
‘The brothers had received an upper-class upbringing that somehow occurred below the poverty line. Raised like nobility, taught always to hold their heads high, always to say grace before a meal and shake hands with Mom and Dad before leaving the table. But there had been no money, or: very little of the money had been invested in the children. And the academic upbringing had been undertaken half-heartedly; it began with great to-do but was never completed.’
As far as debuts go, The Survivors is an excellent one. I hope that future novels written by Alex Schulman are translated into English as I would certainly be keen to read more of his fiction. Highly recommended, particularly to those who have an interest in psychology and memory.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
October 25, 2021
Book Review: The Fossil Hunter by Tea Cooper
A fossil discovered at London’s Natural History Museum leads one woman back in time to nineteenth century Australia and a world of scientific discovery and dark secrets in this compelling historical mystery.
The Hunter Valley 1847
The last thing Mellie Vale remembers before the fever takes her is running through the bush as a monster chases her – but no one believes her story. In a bid to curb Mellie’s overactive imagination, her benefactors send her to visit a family friend, Anthea Winstanley. Anthea is an amateur palaeontologist with a dream. She is convinced she will one day find proof the great sea dragons – the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur – swam in the vast inland sea that millions of years ago covered her property at Bow Wow Gorge. Soon, Mellie shares that dream for she loves fossil hunting too…
1919
When Penelope Jane Martindale arrives home from the battlefields of World War I with the intention of making her peace with her father and commemorating the death of her two younger brothers in the trenches, her reception is not as she had hoped. Looking for distraction, she finds a connection between a fossil at London’s Natural History museum and her brothers which leads her to Bow Wow Gorge. But the gorge has a sinister reputation – 70 years ago people disappeared. So when PJ uncovers some unexpected remains, it seems as if the past is reaching into the present and she becomes determined to discover what really happened all that time ago…
Published by HQ Fiction AU
Released 27th October 2021
My Thoughts:The Fossil Hunter is my first Tea Cooper novel, but it certainly won’t be my last. What a terrific novel of historical fiction this was. It contained so many of the story elements I like best: pioneering women, natural history, and an abandoned house tainted by mystery. What a talented writer Tea Cooper is, both with character creation and her story weaving.
There were some serious underlying themes explored within both timelines and the links between both eras were solid and plausible – something I always look for in dual narrative historical fiction. References to early female pioneers of palaeontology – fossil hunters – were sprinkled throughout, offering a springboard for further reading if you were so inclined. It was just by coincidence that I recently watched the film Ammonite, a story about Mary Anning, the 19th century English palaeontologist, who is mentioned as an associate of Anthea Winstanley in The Fossil Hunter. I love it when my reading and viewing crosses over like that.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Fossil Hunter and recommend it highly to fans of Australian historical fiction.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
October 23, 2021
The Week That Was…
Delighted and honoured to have a cover quote on the newly re-released copy of The Truth and Addy Loest by Kim Kelly.
The rest of the week was work, eat, read, sleep, repeat, with a splash of this thrown in yesterday while football trials were held at the coast.
I did buy a full conference pass for this weekend’s online HNSA conference, but as is usual for me, I have so far watched zero sessions. Fortunately, all sessions, excluding chat salons and workshops, will be made available to ticket holders for three months after the event. To be honest, this is the only reason I bought the ticket. I just don’t have enough time to sit all weekend watching, despite wanting to. At least this way, I can leisurely work my way through the program. I really hope digital conferences continue post Covid lockdowns.
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Joke of the week:
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What I’ve been reading:
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Until next week… 
October 20, 2021
Book Review: The Hush by Sara Foster
Lainey’s friend Ellis is missing. And she’s not the only one.
In the six months since the first case of a terrifying new epidemic – when a healthy baby wouldn’t take a breath at birth – the country has been thrown into turmoil. The government has passed sweeping new laws to monitor all citizens. And several young pregnant women have vanished without trace.
As a midwife, Lainey’s mum Emma is determined to be there for those who need her. But when seventeen-year-old Lainey finds herself in trouble, this dangerous new world becomes very real. The one person who might help is Emma’s estranged mother, but reaching out to her will put them all in jeopardy.
The Hush is a new breed of near-future thriller, an unflinching look at a society close to tipping point and a story for our times, highlighting the power of female friendship through a dynamic group of women determined to triumph against the odds.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Released on 27th October 2021
My Thoughts:The Hush is the first ‘post-pandemic’ fiction that I have read. I have no doubt there will be more novels like this to come, those that deal with our post-pandemic world against a backdrop of environmental destruction with ongoing health crises. The Hush is set in the near future, hard to pinpoint exactly when, but Covid is a thing of the not so distant past, its effects very much still informing the present. Everyone is required to wear a watch that monitors your health, reports on your well-being, location and activity, allows you to receive up to the minute government communications, whilst also telling the time and allowing you to pay for things – basically a tracking and listening device with a couple of thrown in for good measure benefits. The society we see in The Hush is what happens when measures implemented to keep people safe morph into an abuse of power at the highest level.
It’s bold to write a novel such as this right now, when many countries are still in and out of lockdown and we are rapidly converting to a society that checks in everywhere with our smartphones, where the vaccinated are bearers of a ‘Covid passport’, entitling them to more freedoms than those who aren’t vaccinated. Some might say that dystopian fiction such as The Hush has the potential to add fuel to the fire being stoked by those who don’t want to be so monitored, who are repeatedly protesting lockdowns, restrictions, vaccinations, and mandatory masks. Yet, conversely, what The Hush shows with such effectiveness is that it’s not the safety measures put in place that are the problem: it’s what those in charge of monitoring them are doing with them that is the real issue. Society in The Hush is in the grips of a mysterious medical phenomenon, healthy babies who are alive all through the birth process are still born. It appears random and is rapidly increasing in occurrence. Under the pall of this emerging crisis, society is once again plunged into panic and protest at the increasing restrictions being enforced.
I found this novel utterly gripping from start to finish. It was terrifying, to be honest, to see how rapidly a person could lose all their rights, to be so completely at the mercy of the authorities as soon as another crisis reared its head. The plot was layered with a complexity that was both clever and all too plausible. The focus on the control of women’s reproductive rights was also a timely issue to weave into this story and I also liked the sub-focus on the rights of teenagers being infringed. Not quite adults but no longer children, they were in a vulnerable place that the government was all too willing to exploit for their own gain. Sara Foster demonstrated the shocking ease with which a society can strip a woman of all her rights under the guise of ‘keeping her safe and well’. I am aware that there are many countries around the world where this scenario is not dystopian, nor fictious at all, but an all too real and present danger. There is a lot within this novel to unpack and contemplate. I thought it was excellent. A brave and bold narrative that packs a punch in all the right ways.
Thanks is extended to the publisher for the review copy.
October 18, 2021
Book Review: Wild Abandon by Emily Bitto
In the fall of 2011, a heartbroken young man flees Australia for the USA. Landing in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will makes a vow to say yes to everything that comes his way. By fate or random chance, Will’s journey takes him deep into the American heartland where he meets Wayne Gage, a fast-living, troubled Vietnam veteran, would-be spirit guide and collector of exotic animals. These two men in crisis form an unlikely friendship, but Will has no idea just how close to the edge Wayne truly is.
Wild Abandon is a headlong tumble through the falling world of end-days capitalism, a haunting, hyperreal snapshot of our own strange times. We read with increasing horror and denial as we approach the cataclysmic conclusion of Will’s American odyssey, dreading what is galloping towards us, but utterly unable to look away.
This lyrical and devastating new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays offers us startling and profound visions of the world and our place in it.
Published by Allen & Unwin
Released 28th September 2021
My Thoughts:I have a habit of reading the author notes at the end of a book first. More often than not, this will prove spoilerish, with the author referencing something to do with the story that is not disclosed in the blurb. I don’t mind that though, because on several occasions now, reading something in the author note and knowing that ‘this thing’ is still to come, has actually kept me from abandoning a book. That was very much the case here, with Wild Abandon. I really did not get along with this book at the start. In fact, I completely disliked the entire first section that plays out in New York. Will was entirely unimpressive as a character and the constant drug taking and drinking interspersed with intoxicated ramblings of introspection punctuated by random and regretful sexual encounters was slightly repulsive and indeed, a little bit boring. The ‘cocaine set’ that Will got caught up in were just a bunch of self-important tossers, calling themselves artists and personal stylists and getting paid an exorbitant amount to do so whilst demonstrating no measurable talent whatsoever. The truth of these people existing within this microcosm of New York is the truly sad part as their representation of it as a place to be is not doing New York any favours. I’d prefer the sanitised version of New York I get from Friends. If I hadn’t read the author note, I most likely would have abandoned the book before the end of that section and missed out on a quite incredible story.
“He wondered whether Wayne’s act of hospitality was frequent and habitual and indiscriminate or long held in store for just such a figure of young and desperate searching as himself, a fertile anonymous outline on which to project the image of the younger self or son or double still able to receive and act upon the future man’s impassioned impotent and soon-to-be-familiar advice. But hadn’t he vowed, after all, to say yes to everything? To the world? Well, this was what the world was offering: wild animals; the depths and secrets of small-town America; housing and employment with a random, quite likely troubled and possibly even dangerous ageing veteran, creator of his own rogue Midwestern Xanadu and dispenser of philosophy, of what utility to his own vague cause Will was not yet sure.”
It wasn’t until recently that I became aware that American’s can still own exotic animals. I honestly thought (hoped) this was a thing of the past. From the moment that Wayne enters this story, I had a feeling, deep down, that everything I despise about people owning wild animals as pets was going to be realised. It came as no surprise to me that Will and Wayne bonded on some level. Both were incredibly self-absorbed men, both disillusioned about their own grandiosity and unwilling to recognise themselves as masters of their own fate. That Will learned nothing, gained nothing, and achieved nothing on his quest to find himself on an American road trip also came as no surprise. He was utterly paralysed by low self-esteem to the point where it had blinded him and manifested itself into some sort of judgment upon others, as though they were the reason he felt the way he did in any given situation. Wayne’s situation put me in mind of David Koresh (the Waco siege), a man full of his own grand plans, the Messiah of his own kingdom, the anti-government vibe he gave off along with being on the FBI’s radar for his weapons cache – all very much the same. The utter devastation of what played out was horrendous and deeply affecting. The wrongness of it all was so very apparent and I found myself angry at Wayne, angry at those who knew him but didn’t see him for the ticking time bomb he really was, angry at the police for acting in such a cataclysmic and poorly thought out way, and angry at the human collateral damage that comes from war, the people left with PTSD for decades until something finally gives and we all feign shock over it and claim that we never saw it coming because he was ‘such a good guy’.
“For now, he chiefly felt an overwhelming sense of all that he had failed to learn and do on this short aborted quest. At helping Wayne, he had failed. At staying ninety days, he had failed. At forgetting Laura, he had failed. At the gaining of self-knowledge of the kind to make a man of him, he had miserably failed.”
Wild Abandon is a complex novel that generated complex feelings within me whilst reading. It is written in a flamboyantly literary style that occasionally bordered on being overwritten, but for the most part was also beautifully poetic and deeply meaningful. It is narrated by a third person omniscient narrator that occasionally breaks through the fourth wall and gives an indication to the reader of what lies ahead for our protagonist, not just within the story itself, but also much further down the track beyond the narrative, almost like a crystal ball giving us a glimpse into the future. I’ve always loved this sort of narration and Emily Bitto is definitely an expert at it. Once I’d finished the novel, I could see the entirety of it and the place within Will’s journey that the New York section accomplished. For me, Wild Abandon was about something momentous happening, yet in the end, it being all for nothing. I feel that’s what Emily has achieved for both Will and Wayne. Will’s journey was a failure, Wayne’s Wild Kingdom, likewise, was a failure. In this, Wild Abandon resists the cliched narrative arc where our protagonist(s) journeys through adversity to arrive on the other side triumphant in redemption. Instead, we have two men, one at the end of his adult life, and one at the beginning, but both connected by a propensity for lying and an inability to accept their own fallibility. Wild Abandon was a compulsive read for me. Once Will hit Ohio, I couldn’t put it down. Deeply moving, tragic, and affecting.
“And then at once he was alone, in the wreck of an extravagant and hopeful ruined dream, standing in the doorway of a dead man’s house, somewhere in America.”
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
October 16, 2021
The Week That Was…
It’s been a busy two weeks, hence my not checking in last Sunday. I’m settling into my new job well and am pleased that I made the change. We’re on the countdown to the end of Year 12, four days of classes, a couple of assignments, and two exams to go. What a whirlwind. Zeus is so exhausted by it all that he’s found a nice little out of the way mum won’t notice me here spot behind the couch to relax in and recover from his spectating of all the human activity going on around him.
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What I’ve been watching:
I used to watch Chicago Med on free to air TV a few years ago but they were never consistent with airing all the episodes. I’ve started watching it from the beginning and am enjoying it all the more this time around for being able to watch each episode in order. I’ve always been a bit of a medical drama junkie.
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Joke of the week:
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What I’ve been reading:
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Until next week…
