Theresa Smith's Blog, page 5
June 14, 2025
Book Review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
When Graham Cavanaugh divorced his first wife it was to marry his girlfriend, Audra, a woman as irrepressible as she is spontaneous and fun. But, Graham learns, life with Audra can also be exhausting, constantly interrupted by chatty phone calls, picky-eater houseguests, and invitations to weddings of people he’s never met. Audra firmly believes that through the sheer force of her personality she can overcome the most socially challenging interactions, shepherding her son through awkward playdates and origami club, and even deciding to establish a friendship with Graham’s first wife, Elspeth.
Graham isn’t sure he understands why Audra longs to be friends with the woman he divorced. After all, former spouses are hard to categorize—are they enemies, old flames, or just people you know really, really well? And as Graham and Audra share dinners, holidays, and late glasses of wine with his first wife he starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did I make the right choice? Is there a right choice?
A hilarious and rueful debut novel of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami, Standard Deviation never deviates from the superb.
Published by Penguin Random House
Released April 2018
My Thoughts:There’s something quite deflating about reading a book by an author and absolutely loving it only to end up hating the next one you read by them. Standard Deviation is Kathryn Heiny’s debut, and I am really thankful I discovered her with her latest (Early Morning Riser) because if this had been the first of hers I’d read, I wouldn’t have read her again.
It starts strong with her unique strand of humour, and I did have quite a few moments of laughing out loud. It hit a major wall for me, though, when it waded into infidelity waters. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and I wasn’t convinced of it in terms of character arc. From this point on, the main character Graham lost his zest for me as more about his history of infidelity within his previous marriage came to the fore. Audra became less quirky and more absurd, and when the story left the infidelity thread and abruptly jumped to another topic, and then to another after that, and so on, I began to wonder what this story was even about.
I can see, though, with having read Katherine’s debut and her latest, a clear path in terms of her literary talent. She has honed it over the years, clearly, so I’m definitely not abandoning her over this, but I certainly don’t recommend it, either.
Book Review: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent
In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter.
That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The novel will go on to launch the author’s stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe.
Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent’s exquisite love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the transcendent power of creativity, and her invitation to us all to join her in the realms of mystery, spirit and wonder.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia
Released April 2025
My Thoughts:Always Home, Always Homesick is not your usual memoir. It’s an ode to Iceland, a memoir of place and people, of history and story. This is the story behind the story of Burial Rites. From the inspiration, the first tug of an idea, to its tenth anniversary since publication passing amidst the revelry of an Icelandic literary festival ball. Burial Rites is unpacked and shaken out, the threads of it all woven so tightly with Hannah’s life from the age of seventeen. She lived and breathed it, and as indicated through this memoir, it appears she still does.
While I would never discourage someone from picking up this brilliant book, I do think it would make for a richer reading experience if you have read Burial Rites. Not necessarily recently, I read it over a decade ago, but without the context of that novel humming in the backgound of my mind whilst reading this, I wouldn’t have had so many illuminating moments of connection throughout.
‘I feel like a trespasser. I am an outsider, writing about a time I did not live in, a country that is not my own.’
The audiobook is read by Hannah Kent herself, and the effect was truly sublime, as though you are wrapped up in a booth together with steaming cups of tea, listening to her passion spill forth. It was a joy to listen to, and so inspiring, on so many different levels.
I am not a fan of memoirs, I even passed this by initially, but a friend was listening to it and urged me on. I’m so grateful to her for doing so. All the stars and then some.
May 24, 2025
Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp
It is 1987, and in the aftermath of a great storm, Cora sets out with her nine-year-old daughter to register the birth of her son. Her husband intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and call the baby after him. But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates. Going against his wishes is a risk that will have consequences, but is it right for her child to inherit his name from generations of domineering men? The choice she makes in this moment will shape the course of their lives.
Seven years later, her son is Bear, a name chosen by his sister, and one that will prove as cataclysmic as the storm from which it emerged. Or he is Julian, the name his mother set her heart on, believing it will enable him to become his own person. Or he is Gordon, named after his father and raised in his cruel image – but is there still a chance to break the mould?
Powerfully moving and full of hope, this is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. It is the story of one family, and love’s endless capacity to endure, no matter what fate has in store.
Released May 2025
My Thoughts:Now, this one here, The Names by Florence Knapp. This one nearly broke me. The rawness, the humanity within it. Debuts are getting finer and finer, I can’t even credit this as a first novel. It was so good.
The structure is unique. Think of it as a sliding doors kind of style. From 1987 to 2022, each section of the novel is split into three chapters, each chapter following a different path for the family, and each section is set seven years apart. Different, right?!
Now, this novel is heavy on the domestic violence. I’m not going to lie. It’s brutal at times, horrifying at others. It wasn’t easy. But you know what else it’s heavy on? Beautiful writing, deep human connection, love. It’s a masterpiece.
‘They are already absorbed in a conversation that will continue to slowly unspool across all the years they have left.’
and
‘He is love, and fury, and sorrow, and euphoria, and all the things that will make their story continue together.’
Just a couple of my favourite lines. I needed this. A balm for the soul and life affirming in every way.
Thanks so much to @hachetteaus for the review copy.
Book Review: When She Was Gone by Sara Foster
Former London police officer Rose Campbell has been estranged from her daughter, Lou, for almost a decade. But when Lou disappears from a remote Western Australian beach, and the police suspect her of kidnapping the two young children in her care, Rose is asked to help bring Lou home. The police think Rose’s insights will lead them to Lou, but they don’t realise that Rose hardly knows her daughter anymore.
This is the final case in DSS Mal Blackwood’s illustrious career, and there’s a lot riding on it. The missing children are heirs to the Fisher property empire, and as their multimillionaire grandfather breathes down Blackwood’s neck for results, the media storm is intensifying. Faced with a deluge of evidence and accusations, Blackwood doesn’t know who he can trust.
Rose arrives in Australia intent on proving her daughter’s innocence, but how can she be sure of that when she’s no longer part of Lou’s life? Meanwhile, as Blackwood begins to expose the Fishers’ secrets, the investigation takes a much darker turn. Shadows of the past gather around the Fishers and Rose, and soon it’s clear that every hour is critical. What has happened to Lou and the children? And can Rose and Blackwood find them in time?
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Released April 2025
My Thoughts:When She Was Gone is the latest from Sara Foster. I really enjoyed Hush, and I suppose it has set the bar for me now with this author. While I didn’t mind this one, it was by no means inhabiting the same orbit as Hush.
This story was a classic crime fiction. Nanny goes missing with her two charges. Did she abscond with them, or were they kidnapped? Is the family she worked for above board or as shonky as they come?
Underneath the narrative was a theme of domestic violence, not woven into the plot as such, but almost as an instructional manual on recognising the signs, statistics and facts, all delivered via Rose’s perspective, who had made it her life’s work. I found this a bit of a barrier to connecting with Rose, to be honest, as though she was not a real character, but merely a vessel by which to convey an important message about a crisis within our society.
The story was well paced throughout, but nearing the end, everything seemed to happen so fast, all loose threads being tied neatly, issues resolved, baddies disposed of, in the blink of an eye.
Crime fiction fans will no doubt love this. I listened to it on audiobook, and it was an entertaining read, but ultimately, not a memorable one.
Thanks to @harpercollinsaustralia for initially providing a review copy via #netgalley.
May 16, 2025
Book Review: Dusk by Robbie Arnott
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they’re forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia
Released October 2024
My Thoughts:I want to preface this review with the disclaimer that I read it for book club, and it was selected based on a couple of other book clubbers having loved Limberlost. I haven’t read Limberlost either, but going by several reviews of both books, I believe it is superior to this one.
I did not enjoy this novel. I felt no connection to the characters, felt the story was both plodding and rushed – a contradiction, yes, I know, but that’s what it was like. I felt like key information about the characters was held back for too long, impacting my ability to connect with them, and when key factors were revealed, they were blurted out in the manner of an info dump.
The narration of the audio book was problematic. Narrated by Australian actress Zoe Carides, I don’t feel she is suited to audio books. She had a habit of long pauses with breathy sighs throughout that gave the impression she was constantly losing her place. Or perhaps she just didn’t think it was a very good book and got sick of reading it. I can relate.
Robbie Arnott can write, I have no doubt about that. Setting the scene, passages about the character and how she felt in terms of a connection to landscape, the scenes that focused on describing Dusk – all beautifully written. But it wasn’t enough for me. As expected with a novel set in Colonial Australia, it was often brutal and crass. But when was it set? And where? Your guess is as good as mine, and without this firm sense of time and place, I was left unmoored, and once again, unconnected to the story.
I will acknowledge I am not the right reader for this book, but I did have high hopes going in based on its recent ABIA win for literary fiction. I love literary fiction, but this felt less like literary fiction and more like a genre mashup of crime, psychological thriller, horror, and a wild western.
Will I read Robbie Arnott again? Perhaps one day I’ll pick up Limberlost, but it will be a long way off.
Book Review: Air by John Boyne
Being in limbo, 30,000 feet in the air, offers time to reflect and take stock. For Aaron Umber, it’s an opportunity to connect with his 14-year-old son as they travel halfway across the world to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them.
Unsettled by his past, and anxious for his future, Aaron is at a crossroads in life. The damage inflicted upon him during his youth has made him the man he is, but now threatens to widen the growing fissures between him and his only child. This trip could bind them closer together, or tear them further apart.
In this penetrating examination of action and consequence, fault and attribution, acceptance and resolution, John Boyne gives us a redemptive story of a father and a son on a moving journey to mend their troubled lives.
Published by Penguin Books Australia
Released May 2025
My Thoughts:Air by John Boyne brings his ‘Elements Quartet’ to a fine and fitting conclusion. It will sit firmly alongside Water as my favourite, the bookends, so to speak.
I highlighted so many passages throughout this one, all the moments where each of the novellas revealed their connection. It was in doing this that I came to appreciate the immense skill John Boyne has as a writer and the impact this set of novellas has when taken as a complete single story. The four of them provide a masterclass for writers and a transformative experience for readers.
Air is told from the perspective of Aaron, a man we met a much younger version of in Fire. He was, in the third book, both a colleague and a victim of Freya. In Air, he has just turned forty and is flying from Sydney to Dublin with his fourteen year old son, reflecting upon the past and the way in which it informs the present, whilst grappling with the journey they are both on. This novella is a beautiful meditation on trauma, love, and forgiveness – particularly of one’s self. It was sublime.
I’ll leave you here with the last line of the book, the last line of the series:
‘I’m not there yet, but one day I will be. At one with myself, at one with the universe, and – finally – at one with the elements.’
May 10, 2025
Life Update
For those of you who are only connected with my reviews here and not over on Instagram and Facebook, I thought I’d just pop up a quick announcement. We welcomed a beautiful female four-year-old Welsh Cardigan Corgi into our family just before Easter. She comes already named as Squiggles, but we have taken to calling her Squigz or Squiggy-Girl. She has settled in beautifully, is an absolute joy, and we are all well and truly smitten with her.
Quick Shots Book Review: Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny
Duncan is charming, handsome – and Jane falls in love with him easily.
But he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City. Jane sees Duncan’s old girlfriends everywhere – at restaurants, at the grocery store and his ex-wife, Aggie, still has him mow her lawn.
But everything changes with one tragic accident. Now her life is permanently intertwined with them all and she knows she will never have Duncan to herself.
But is it possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of her eyes?
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
Released September 2022
My Thoughts:Novels about everyday life are my absolute favourite, and there are a handful of novelists that do these quite well – think Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout, Catherine Newman, Ann Patchett, that kind of vibe. Enter Katherine Heiny, what a force! This novel! All. The. Feels.
Early Morning Riser is a big-hearted, laugh out loud, bitter-sweet story about unconventional families, friendship, love, and small town living. It’s an absolutely gorgeous read that had me quite choked up by the end.
This was the perfect long weekend read. But now I have a cracking book hangover, and the only cure might be more Katherine Heiny.
Book Review: Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
From the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake comes a stunningly beautiful tale about love, family and seeking a new life in the aftermath of tragedy
Ebby Freeman’s life has always been marked with tragedy. First, the death of her brother Baz, killed in an anonymous armed robbery when they were teenagers. Then her perfect fiancé Henry deserting her on the day of their wedding, without an explanation.
When Ebby arrives in a sleepy French village, she believes she’s found an opportunity for healing and anonymity. Until Henry appears, staying at the neighbouring property with his beautiful new girlfriend in tow.
It’s the worst situation that Ebby can imagine. But might it give her a chance to piece together the fragments of her past – and finally embrace her future?
Published by Penguin Books Australia
Released February 2025
My Thoughts:Sometimes, my audiobook selections are quite random, usually when I’m looking for a new listen in a hurry, and I’ll scroll through Spotify’s ‘because you listened to that you might like this’ recommendations. Good Dirt was suggested because I’d listened to The Mighty Red. I clicked download and absolutely have no regrets that I did. What a story!
The first thing you need to know about Good Dirt is that the blurb in no way does this story justice. This story is so much bigger than what the blurb infers with its romcom/seachange vibe. This is not a romcom. It’s literary fiction, a winding, deeply affecting family saga orbiting around themes of trauma, legacy, racism, history, and slavery. I was totally taken by surprise with it, and yes, comparisons to The Mighty Red were bang on with the vibe, Spotify.
‘The mind cannot be chained.’
Good Dirt moves through time and character perspectives with ease, and one of the things I loved most about this story was that everyone and everything is interconnected and has its finish. Nothing is left unknown or undealt with. All mysteries are fully solved. It is incredibly well researched and was an immensely satisfying read with a beautifully hopeful ending.
Book Review: Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley
‘Lonely mouth … It’s a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don’t know what it is. You’re looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don’t need anything at all.’
Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris – for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful. Matilda’s life, in contrast, is solitary, contained, ordered. She works in one of Sydney’s buzziest restaurants, Bocca, with an unrequited crush on her boss, celebrity chef Colson. If she’s careful – and she always is – she can keep everything in its proper place. Hold the balance between hunger and satiation.
But when Lara’s father, the long-absent, erratic Angus Dante, comes back into the sisters’ lives to amke amends for his past misdeeds, Matilda’s compartmentalised life goes seriously awry. As everything blows apart, Matilda is forced to come to a reckoning with who she is, and how to satisfy the hunger she wants to deny.
From bestselling author Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth is a tender, vivid and fiercely relatable novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world, about the loneliness of girls and women, and the way we believe ourselves to be worthy – or not – of love.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Released April 2025
My Thoughts:Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley is a considered and deep exploration of the long-term effects that being abandoned as a child has on a person. There are other aspects of trauma explored, and it probes into mental illness, specifically eating disorders, but at the beginning of all this, the catalyst so to speak, is a mother leaving her children at a service station and both of these girls subsequently being raised in care.
‘What was it like, my childhood? I can answer that this way: it is exhausting to be grateful. It is exhausting to want, and then to get, but find the getting is not pure. It is bound up in obligation, and guilt, and a feeling of illegitimacy that shadows all your moves. The feeling may by vague, but it never leaves.’
Matilda and Lara are half sisters aged ten years apart. The novel is told, with the exception of the prologue, from the perspective of Matilda, however her closeness with Lara, and the use of texts and emails between the sisters throughout the narrative, give the reader a solid grasp of the adult Lara has become. She is a lot more settled in life than Matilda, who struggles with bulimia and has dependent control issues. She is, to me, also suffering from being the eldest, shouldering the burden of checking on their mother, and feeling responsible for the happiness of her younger sister. She excels within her job, but the environment in which she works is exacerbating her mental illness and is holding her back.
‘I wondered how I could possibly manage the competing hungers in my life – the need to purge, which upon me now with great urgency, and my need for Bocca, my need to be needed there, and the situation with Colson and Lara and the fact that all the carefully separated parts of my life had collapsed onto each other, causing a psychic landslide that was what the French called insupportable.’
Maley’s writing is exquisite, a glorious blend of humour, deep introspection, and philosophising between characters, as well as blunt force where required. I really ached for Matilda, I was so concerned at her downward spiral, desperate for her to stop, just stop, and change direction. Lonely Mouth novel is realistic and hopeful, an ode to the love of literature and the power of books as a comfort and balm for the soul. It’s a terrific read. I had a little listen to the audiobook partway through for a couple of hours and recommend that also. Another five-star read.
Thanks to HarperCollins Australia for the review copy.
