Theresa Smith's Blog, page 62

The Week That Was…

More Christmas spirit! Living once again in a city, with shops (!) is brilliant, particularly at Christmas time, and as such, I now have a Nutcracker collection.

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The little ones were in a fantastic six pack, fantastic because any previous packs I’ve ever seen have been all identical, for hanging on the tree. I love how these were all individual designs.

And following on from the chair caper last week, I have at last put all six chairs together, without incident! By chair four, I was pretty much a pro. If this current day job doesn’t work out, perhaps I have a future working at Amart Furniture assembling flat packed furniture for display.

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Speaking of work, the Christmas spirit is hanging heavy in the air there and we were encouraged (ahem…ordered) to wear Christmas themed clothes on Friday. I bought earrings especially for the occasion and wore a red top with a green skirt and red shoes, resembling an extra for the movie Elf, but fortunately, I wasn’t the only one!

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What I’ve been watching:

Season two of Virgin River…

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And Christmas movies, which are a great background when you’re assembling dining chairs. I’ve rewatched Elf and Love Actually, and watched this one, The Holiday, for the first time. Loved it!

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Joke of the week:

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My TBR got a boost this week with this lovely influx from publishers:

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What I’m reading right now:

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Until next week…

#6degrees of separation: from Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret to The Angel of Waterloo

It’s the first Saturday of the month so that means it’s #6degrees of separation time! This month’s starting book is: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume.

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You can find the details and rules of the #6degrees meme at booksaremyfavouriteandbest, but in a nutshell, on the first Saturday of every month, everyone has the same starting book and from there, you connect in a variety of ways to other books. Some of the connections made are so impressive, it’s a lot of fun to follow.

I read Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret some time in upper primary school. A friend of mine, a fellow reading addict, loved Judy Blume and she was the one to get me onto her books. I’ve also enjoyed Judy Blume’s fiction for adults, the first of which I read was Summer Sisters, released in 1998. More recently, she released in 2015 (for adults) In the Unlikely Event. I know that many readers enjoy reading children’s and young adult fiction as adults, but I’m not one of them, so it does appeal to me when favourite authors from childhood also write books for adults. It feels like you’re almost taking that reading journey with them in a life-long way. Eliza Henry-Jones is another author I admire who walks confidently between young adult fiction and adult fiction. Her debut novel, In the Quiet, was adult fiction (which I loved) but her latest two releases have been for young adults, P is for Pearl the only one of which I’ve read, but again, really enjoyed. Within the Australian literary scene, you can’t go past Jackie French for the scope of her writing. Perhaps she can be considered our very own Judy Blume? I have read, over the years, many times, her Diary of a Wombat to each of my children, recommended her young adult fiction to teenagers when I was working based in school libraries, and enjoyed her adult fiction myself. Her most recent release, out just this week, is called The Angel of Waterloo and I’m really looking forward to reading it soon.

See you in 2021 for a whole new year of six degrees!

The Sunshine Blogger Award

Thank you to The Chocolate Lady’s Book Reviews (TCL) who nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award!

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The Rules:

Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their page so others can see how amazing they are, too!

List the rules in the post and the badge somewhere on your website.

Answer the 11 questions you got asked.

Nominate 11 new bloggers for this award and let them know.

Ask the nominees 11 new questions!

My Answers:

1. If you had to pick one author as your #1 favourite, who would it be; and what book of theirs would you recommend others read first?

What a hard question! Like all avid readers, there is no one favourite author. However, let’s go with Isabel Allende and her most recent release, A Long Petal of the Sea.

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2. What genre do you refuse to read, and why?

Romance. I can’t stand it. No matter what the plot and what happens in between, I’m just not interested in reading books where the ultimate goal in life still remains being paired up to ‘live happily ever after’.

3. Do you think you spend too much time blogging or not enough time blogging?

This changes all the time. Sometimes too much, of late, nowhere near enough!

4. When you’re reading a book and you suddenly realize you don’t like it, what makes you decide you can’t read further, if at all?

I’ve only recently just started not finishing a book. In the past, I’d just keep on skimming through. I think the stopping point is how distracted I allow myself to be while reading. If I’m not liking a book, I’ll just keep finding other things to give my attention to. That’s usually a sign to give it up.

5. Is there a nickname, persona or “handle” that you use online, and if so, what’s the story behind it?

Over on Twitter, I am ‘Tess Smith Writes’. The Theresa was too long for Twitter, so I went with Tess, which was the childhood name I went by with my immediate family on my father’s side. In fact, they all still call me that! A lot of people in the book universe now call me either Tess or Theresa. I’m happy with both.

6. What is the one food could you could eat every single day and never tire of eating it?

Chocolate covered liquorice.

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7. If you could build your dream home in your dream type of location, where would it be (meaning by the sea, in the middle of a bustling city, high up in the mountains, or where ever)?

No idea. I like being close to cities, not far from the ocean, with mountains in the background. I also like old houses more than new! Although, I have always wanted to live in Italy, just for a little while, so maybe in an old Italian villa somewhere in southern Italy.

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8. What makes you angrier than anything else, and what do you do to express or repress your anger?

Goodness, there’s not just one thing that lights my fuse – I wish! In the book universe, one thing that makes me a bit cross is people who jump on book bashing bandwagons when they haven’t even read the book they’re bashing. I just find that quite ignorant and ill informed. Read the book first, then express an opinion. I try not to weigh into discussions I see online like this. You never change people’s mind, better to just keep on scrolling past!

9. When you were 10, what did you want to be when you grew up (did you succeed, and if not, are you happy or unhappy about that)?

I had no career aspirations at 10. In fact, I enrolled in a double degree at university straight from high school because I wanted to have the flexibility of three majors – because I had no idea what I wanted to do even then! I wish I had been more decided. Given my time again, I would have just studied Speech Therapy.

10. If you could choose any destination to visit anywhere in the world when this virus ends, where would you decide to go, and why?

There’s lots of places I want to go, but top of the list is London. I went there when I was 10, and while I remember it well, I want to go back as an adult.

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11. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like answering these types of questions?

I don’t mind answering questions like these, let’s say 8 for answering, but making up a new set for others? Not so much! So, on that note, I’m going to ‘break’ the rules and only do half the meme, stopping short of nominating 11 bloggers and asking 11 new questions. Although, if you’d like to answer these, just link back to this post as well as The Chocolate Lady’s Book Reviews, because she created this list!

Book Review: Vanishing Falls by Poppy Gee

Vanishing Falls…
About the Book:

Celia Lily is rich, beautiful, and admired. She’s also missing. And the search for the glamorous socialite is about to expose all the dark, dirty secrets of Vanishing Falls…

Deep within the lush Tasmanian rainforest is the remote town of Vanishing Falls, a place with a storied past. The town’s showpiece, built in the 1800s, is its Calendar House-currently occupied by Jack Lily, a prominent art collector and landowner; his wife, Celia; and their four daughters. The elaborate, eccentrically designed mansion houses one masterpiece and 52 rooms-and Celia Lily isn’t in any of them. She has vanished without a trace….

Joelle Smithton knows that a few folks in Vanishing Falls believe that she’s simple-minded. It’s true that Joelle’s brain works a little differently-a legacy of shocking childhood trauma. But Joelle sees far more than most people realize, and remembers details that others cast away. For instance, she knows that Celia’s husband, Jack, has connections to unsavoury local characters whom he’s desperate to keep hidden. He’s not the only one in town with something to conceal. Even Joelle’s own husband, Brian, a butcher, is acting suspiciously. While the police flounder, unable to find Celia, Joelle is gradually parsing the truth from the gossip she hears and from the simple gestures and statements that can unwittingly reveal so much. Just as the water from the falls disappears into the ground, gushing away through subterranean creeks, the secrets in Vanishing Falls are pulsing through the town, about to converge. And when they do, Joelle must summon the courage to reveal what really happened to Celia, even if it means exposing her own past…

My Thoughts:

Set in contemporary rural Tasmania, Vanishing Falls is a compelling crime fiction that at once intrigues and repels in equal measure. In terms of the type of crime fiction, it’s a bit of a hybrid really. Sometimes cosy mystery, at other times police procedural, with a fair bit of domestic and rural noir thrown into the mix. Some might say that it’s a novel that couldn’t settle on a genre; I think it’s more a sign of the writer adapting her story specifically to each character and the lens they themselves are viewing events through at any given time.

There aren’t a lot of nice characters within this novel. Indeed, the more I got to know Celia, the missing woman, the less I cared about what had happened to her. The story is told in alternating view points, shifting between Joele, Cliff, and Jack. If I have any complaint about this novel it would be this: the rapid way in which the viewpoints shifted between the characters. It was a little too frequent, within chapters, not just at the start of each one. Despite the sections being named with whoever’s viewpoint we were currently in, there was a choppy feel to the story overall, akin to watching table tennis, your gaze needing to shift all too often.

Despite this, Vanishing Falls is a compelling read. Through the disappearance of Celia, the author has skilfully exposed a seedy underbelly that exists in many pockets of rural Australia. Communities held fast within the grips of methamphetamines, along with some other even more repellent means of generating an income by way of abusing the power within relationships. As I mentioned above, there are quite a few unsavoury and distasteful characters within this story, lending it a real world edge that leaves a sour after-taste. I didn’t like either Jack or Cliff, unable to muster even a shred of sympathy for them, which made their respective endings a bitter pill to swallow. Everything was tidied up quite efficiently, in the manner of the traditional cosy mystery, but I felt these two men got off lightly given their questionable morality.

Joelle was a different story all together. Her back story was tragic and unsettling. It took awhile for me to reach a place of acceptance regarding Joelle and the events of her past, the author drip feeding the details along the way, giving an impression of culpability initially. It wasn’t until near the very end that Joelle gave us the full story through her memories. Joelle was a different heroine to what you normally might encounter within a crime novel. Her vulnerability and the way in which people manipulated her with such obvious intent was at times frustrating, at others distressing. Her childlike way of looking at some things was offset by a sharply observational nature, something most people overlooked when regarding her. It was slightly far fetched to have Joelle solve a mystery that the police seemed intent on not solving, but again, threads of the cosy mystery were being woven together here, so within that setting and genre, it worked.

Vanishing Falls is a good read, atmospheric to its setting and climate; you could feel the cold, smell the constant rain, and feel your boots sinking into the mud. Fans of novels set in Tasmania should definitely add this to their reading lists.

Thanks is extended to the author, Poppy Gee, for providing me with a copy of Vanishing Falls for review.

About the Author:

Poppy Gee is the author of psychological mystery novels Bay of Fires and Vanishing Falls. Both novels are set in Tasmania, Australia, where Poppy grew up.

Poppy lives in Brisbane, Queensland, with her husband, three children and three cats. She has worked as a journalist, editor, book reviewer and journalism/creative writing teacher, as well as a ski guide in Zermatt, yacht stewardess on the French Riviera, and a B&B manager in Edinburgh.

She holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. When she is not writing, Poppy loves reading across all genres, hiking alone in the forest, taking her kids to the beach, and snow skiing any chance she gets.

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Vanishing Falls

Published by Booktopia Editions

Released 17th November 2020

A Month of Reading: November

Well there you go! I knew it had been a month where the books were few and far between, but goodness, this is the lowest amount of books I’ve read in a month in years! Two of these were read in the last week of the month, the other two in the first week.

Onwards and upwards!

Until next month…

The Week That Was…

It’s been really lovely to do some Christmas decorating this week. Nothing makes a room more homey than decorating for an occasion. My Nutcracker family is expanding as well with the addition of a tall silver Nutcracker.

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Joke of the week:

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Second joke of the week:

My excitement at having my new dining table and chairs delivered quickly turned to despair when I saw the chairs coming into my house in boxes…flat boxes. The instructions are so sketchy and while the furniture looks nice, it’s not exactly made all that well. Some of the bolts are hard to screw in because the threads aren’t right and on some occasions, the hole I’m screwing a bolt into seems almost too small for the bolt. I have only two chairs together out of six because doing more than one at a time is out of the question. The entire experience is extremely frustrating.

So, I hear you ask, I thought this was meant to be a joke. Oh, it is. A bad joke.

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And I can’t do anything about it because once the chair pad is nailed onto the the frame, the chair can no longer be pulled apart and put back together again…not that I was a fan of that option anyway!

To be honest, pushed under the table, I can’t even notice. But it bothers me, a lot! Just on principle.

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What I’ve read this week:

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What I’ve been watching:

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This is the second season with the ‘new’ actors and they all felt familiar this time around. More’s the pity, because the next season is seeing a change of cast again for the purposes of representing further ageing. The Queen is still my favourite. I think I enjoyed this season the most since the very first one. My favourite episode was Fagan, episode 5. There was so much in that one about the push for economy at the expense of welfare and community well-being. I felt it showed the Queen at her best and Thatcher at her worst.

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What I’m reading right now:

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Until next week…

Book Review: We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin

We Are All the Same in the Dark…
About the Book:

Ten years ago, Trumanell Branson disappeared.

Her brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah, cleared of any involvement but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion.

So, when he finds a lost girl he believes she is a sign, someone to lead him to his sister and finally clear his name. Instead she leads him to young police officer Odette Tucker. She knows they must tread carefully – the town, still waiting for its missing girl to come home, is a tinderbox and this new arrival might just set it alight.

My Thoughts:

This is the third novel I’ve read by Julia Heaberlin, all of them set in Texas, all of them a hybrid of crime/police procedural/suspense, and all of them absolutely excellent. She has quietly become one of my favourite authors, the atmosphere she infuses into her novels combined with the unique characterisation and pitch perfect plotting all ensuring that I know I’m going to get a guaranteed good read without even needing to know anything about the story prior to cracking that spine.

‘Texas is a beautiful poison you drink from your mother’s breast; the older you get and the farther you run, the more it pounds in your blood.’

I have to say straight up, Texas worries me. The number of guns in purses, cars, pockets, all over people’s houses; seriously, I don’t know the murder stats but they can’t be low. And it’s this gun violence within the domestic setting that forms the bones of this story. A cold case that leads to another crime that turns into a cold case, like a web of violence stretching far and wide, catching people up in it without prejudice or warning.

‘The record playing right now outside this jail cell is “Amazing Grace.” The crowd has rolled into a rousing version that is leaking through every crack in the walls. My uncle told me that a slave trader wrote that hymn in the 1700s. The man was an obscene human being most of his life, maybe all of it. But it doesn’t matter. We worship that song. Our souls are saved with it. We sing it to bury our dead. It’s like everything else: The whole dark truth is drowned out by a catchy melody.’

This novel is sad, in a heartbreakingly deep-seated way that only comes from knowing the truth that underpins the plot and the way in which such social welfare problems persist without any outlook to them changing. There were so many avoidable tragedies within this story, just as there are in real life, so many abuses of power and so many times that children and young people were let down, not just by the system but by the communities that are meant to be there for them, and also, most tragically of all, by their families which often times were the most harmful to them.

‘We’re members of the Bad Childhood Club. We don’t push. We don’t need details or proof. I don’t know how Emmaline lost her teeth, but I would have laid down my life for her. I don’t know how Mary got the scar on her cheek, and she doesn’t know how I lost my eye, but I still feel like we crawled inside and lived in the shell of each other, that our blood, our DNA, runs together.’

This story is told from three perspectives, initially Wyatt, then Odette, and finishing up with Angel. All three perspectives were gripping and unexpected in the directions they headed, particularly Odette’s. I felt bonded to each of these characters and marvelled at Julia Heaberlin’s constant ability to colour her characters all shades of grey, igniting both suspicion and empathy in equal measure within as I read. The supporting characters had much to offer too, Rusty in particular was a standout for me and I liked him a lot. You just don’t quite know where you are with each of the characters within this novel, not able to fully put your finger on the pulse of who is good, who is evil, and who is bit of both, such is the cleverness of Julia Heaberlin’s character crafting.

‘This photo unlocked a place on my head where their beloved faces are no longer human and everything is meaningless, meaningless decay.’

The story kept me guessing right the way through, and the moment of reveal, who did what, astonished me and reconfirmed just how much of a wolf in sheep’s clothing some people can be. It also reminded me again the terrible lengths that people will go to in order to avenge their own outrage, take justice into their own hands, and then act accordingly in order to forever cover their trail. This novel explores many issues of child welfare, family violence, community abuse, and the consequences of prolific gun use within a society. Julia Heaberlin’s latest release is as on point as her previous ones, and utterly gripping right the way through.

About the Author:

Julia Heaberlin grew up in Decatur, Texas, a small town that sits under a big sky. It provided a dreamy girl with a great library, a character behind every door, and as many secrets as she’d find anyplace else. An award-winning journalist, she has worked as an editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News and the Detroit News. She lives near Dallas/Fort Worth with her husband and has a son who attends the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently at work on her next novel of suspense.

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We Are All the Same in the Dark

Published by Penguin Random House Australia

Released 9th July 2020

The Week That Was…

In the space of a week I am now feeling reasonably settled in. Everything I brought with me is unpacked – there’s still plenty to come but I’ll worry about that later – and I have furniture! I’m loving my living room right now.

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And the #tbr is set up. These are the books I brought with me, all of the others are in boxes to come. These ones are the books that have arrived from publishers or been purchased (only about 5 are purchases) since September, in case you were wondering about the selection process.

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What I’ve been watching:

I’ve been a little bit brain dead with starting a new job and thinking about what I need and when I need it, so I was chasing some easy watching and this hit the spot nicely.

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Joke of the week…

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What I’m reading right now…

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Until next week…

The winner of the 2020 Booker Prize

Congratulations to Douglas Stuart for his debut novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize!

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Shuggie Bain

Winner of the 2020 Booker Prize

By Douglas Stuart

1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.

Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.

About the Author

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain is his first novel.

#BookBingo2020 – Round 11: Prize Winning Book

The Spill by Imbi Neeme

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The Spill is the winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize and it is a worthy recipient. A story of two sisters; on the surface, it may not seem all that spectacular. But the characterisation is so finely tuned, not just with Samantha and Nicole, but with all of the characters, even those that only pop up in memories. Where this novel really shines though is in the structure. Set in the present day, the perspective is shared between Samantha and Nicole, but as this is largely a novel about memory, the pieces of the past are scattered throughout. At first, the flashbacks seem random; there is no chronological order to them and sometimes it is Nicole’s flashback, while at others it is Samantha’s. However, all of these memory pieces are not at all as random as they first appear and as the novel moves towards its conclusion, we see it all fall into place, perspectives brought forward where we had previously only seen one sister’s view of that particular incident or occasion.

Visit my full review of this book here

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I’ve teamed up once again with Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse. It’s going to be a little different for 2020, the card has less squares, allowing us to run bingo on the second Saturday of each month. Also, for the first time since beginning bingo, I haven’t specified genre, type, or even fiction or non-fiction for the categories. 2020 is all about themes, and from there, the choice is wide open.

Hope to see you joining in! If you want to play along, just tag us on social media with your bingo posts each month. You can also join the Page by Page Book Club with Theresa Smith Writes over on Facebook, where we all post in the same place on the same date and chat over each other’s entries. Alternatively, drop a link each month into the comments of my Saturday bingo post so I can follow your progress blog to blog.

#BookBingo2020