Theresa Smith's Blog, page 94

The Week That Was…

It’s here! The last day of term 3. School holidays are just hours away, I can almost touch them.

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Joke of the week:

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Things I one day want to do:

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Just started watching:

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So far so good!

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Book of the Week:

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What I’m reading right now:

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What I’ll be reading next:

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Paris all pretty in pink:

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Words of wisdom:

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On a personal note:

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Mistress Diva turned 10 during this week. Still a puppy at heart despite looking a bit grey. She brings us so much joy and serenity.

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Until next week…

Spring Break Reading Goals

So close! Spring break is just around the corner. Two weeks of loafing about in weather that is neither too hot nor too cold. I always like to set myself some reading goals for this particular set of holidays, mostly because I begin, always about this time of the year, to feel the loom of another year over.

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This is where my reading thoughts are for these holidays:

Reading whatever I feel like with no regard for publication deadlines or publicist expectations. This may see me reading a good combination of review titles and my own purchases. For two weeks, I’m reading exclusively by whim. I’ll still review everything I read, but it might not be the latest releases. Or it might! We’ll just have to see which way the spring breeze blows!

Book Review: The Truants by Kate Weinberg

The Truants…
About the Book:

People disappear when they most want to be seen.

Jess Walker, middle child of a middle class family, has perfected the art of vanishing in plain sight. But when she arrives at a concrete university campus under flat, grey, East Anglian skies, her world flares with colour.

Drawn into a tightly-knit group of rule breakers – led by their maverick teacher, Lorna Clay – Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers and finally a tragedy. Soon Jess is thrown up against the question she fears most: what is the true cost of an extraordinary life?

My Thoughts:

‘But mainly we just talked, in a way I never really had with someone older than me, maybe not really with anyone before. And in that way that makes what you see, what you feel, so raw and right and fragile that you worry, if you shift too much in your seat or go to the bathroom, you’ll break it, whatever it is.’

If you look up this book online, you are going to see this tagline: The Secret History meets Agatha Christie. I haven’t read The Secret History, although I am a fan of Donna Tartt and it is on my digital TBR shelf. I’ve never actually read an Agatha Christie either, although I get the gist having spent a brief time addicted to watching Poirot some years ago. I wonder though, if my experience of this novel has been more crystallised because of not having these two comparisons weighing in. While comparisons serve an obvious purpose for marketing, I find them less useful when it comes to my own reading experience. I prefer to draw my own conclusions based on my own reading experience rather than being led to it. For me, The Truants is very reminiscent of The Talented Mr. Ripley. So many times, it just gave me that vibe and two characters in particular – Lorna and Alec – were like an amalgamation of Ripley in a contemporary setting. It gives me chills just thinking about those two.

‘Between five and six p.m. is what I think of as the Loafing Hour,’ Lorna said once as she put the key in her front door and stepped into the hallway, kicking away that day’s post. ‘When caffeine is no longer a good investment but alcohol not yet a wise one. When anything you’re going to achieve that day has probably already happened and the only sensible thing to do is to sit around, shooting the shit and eating cake.’ Then, dropping down on a kitchen chair, flicking off her shoes, hand through her hair, smiling up at me: ‘The important thing is who you choose to do that with.’

I really became quite addicted to reading this novel. The writing is so elegant and precise. The story is narrated by Jess Walker and delivered in hindsight six years on. Jess meets Georgie as soon as she arrives at University and the two hit it off immediately. Not long after starting classes, Georgie begins seeing Alec and Jess strikes up a relationship with Nick. The four become a unit rarely seen apart, but Alec is not who he seems. On the periphery of this foursome is Lorna Clay, writer and teacher; utterly idolised by Jess, who chose her university specifically so Lorna could teach her. Like Alec, Lorna is a kaleidoscope of secrets, and the combined force of the two affect the lives of Jess and Georgie in a profoundly tragic way. Poor Nick simply becomes collateral damage. There is a finite focus on disappearing within this novel and parallels are drawn to Agatha Christie’s own temporary disappearance. This is very much a novel for lovers of literature. Over the course of the novel, I became quite attached to Jess and found myself worrying about her and Georgie. I wanted to reach into the pages and physically break the hold Lorna had over her. It is sickening how manipulative some people can be. I could completely understand why Jess became so obsessed with understanding the truth behind what had been done to her by Alec, and then Lorna. I would have probably felt the same way myself.

‘It was so high, I thought, higher even than it had felt when I was up there. Just a few days ago, everything about the house had been part of the romance of Lorna: its remoteness, to which only the favoured few were granted access. Now I saw it as a symbol of her arrogance. Perched up there, seeming so natural with its earth-coloured walls. But it was just a different kind of ivory tower after all. One from which she looked down on the rest of us mortals, choosing and then discarding us at whim.’

I highly recommend The Truants. Human nature and the precarious balance between acceptance and uniqueness is examined with a close focus on the deceptions employed by people who are intent on reconfiguring themselves – collateral damage be damned. It was very much my kind of literary experience.

Thanks is extended to Bloomsbury Publishing for providing me with a copy of The Truants for review.

About the Author:

Kate Weinberg lives in London with her husband, her two children, and a tortoise called Agatha. The Truants is her first book.

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The Truants

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing

Released 3rd September 2019

AU $29.99

The Classics Eight: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

My daughter recently had to study Macbeth for year 12 senior English, as I had done twenty-five years ago. The assessment itself was essentially unchanged: a monologue presentation followed by an exam. Macbeth is my favourite of all Shakespeare’s works so I was more than happy to revisit the play as a means of helping my daughter out with this final piece of assessment for high school. Out of the two of us, I ended up being the only one to actually read Macbeth in its entirety. Seriously, the internet is a game changer for students today. It puts me in mind of this joke:

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My daughter didn’t read the play because she didn’t need to. She could simply Google ‘Macbeth’ and visit any number of useful sites dedicated to dissecting all of the elements in a clear and concise way. If she wanted to, she could have even read a translation of Macbeth – that is, Macbeth rewritten into ‘ordinary’ English. While I acknowledge that this is kind of fantastic, I wonder at the whole point of even studying Shakespeare anymore if students don’t have to even read it. In preparation for her exam, Google provided the quotes along with page numbers so that all my daughter needed to do was insert a bunch of sticky notes into her unread book and take it in with her to the open book exam. Does she know the play, really understand it, as I needed to for my Year 12 assessments? Definitely not. And consequently, she doesn’t like Shakespeare. Why would she when she’s never actually fully experienced it.

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When it comes to Macbeth, it’s a work of genius that ticks all of the boxes for me. Macbeth himself is your classic tragic hero. A grave error of judgement crashing with his own ambition sets him on a spiral into chaos, and ultimately, his own death. Macbeth’s belief that his ambition would not be checked by consequence led to delusions of grandeur that were furthered by Shakespeare’s use of supernatural elements: the witches and their prophesies. There is a fateful aspect that emerges from this theme via the implication that Macbeth is simply living out a fate that has already been determined for him. Shakespeare leaves the idea of Macbeth having been able to do anything to avoid his fate very open ended. Likewise, when dealing with the pressure that Macbeth is subjected to from his wife. Was Macbeth’s fate truly unavoidable? It’s all a bit classic Greek tragedy which relies heavily on fate and the will of the gods, and Macbeth has indeed been linked to Greek plays on account of his use of the supernatural element. I think that’s what really hooked me from the get go with Macbeth – this supernatural premise, included in a text at time when consorting with ‘witches’ earned you a beheading. And what of Lady Macbeth? In the beginning, she appears as single-minded in her lust for power, manipulating her husband with apparent ease. But she’s far from a two dimensional character and when you really read her closely, you get a sense that there is divide between who she says she is and who she is actually is. Her empathy sees her slowly begin to lose herself over the course of the play, until we reach the point where she appears to have been driven mad by guilt and remorse, having lost all agency over her own life.

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Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest and bloodiest tragedy. It’s not his most complex play, but it’s right up there in terms of emotional intensity and impact, tumbling madly from its opening to its conclusion. The key themes of the corrupting power of unchecked ambition, the relationship between cruelty and masculinity, and the difference between kingship and tyranny are all powerfully presented in what is a sharp, jagged sketch of theme and character that still, even more than 400 years after it was first penned, continues to shock and fascinate its audience. Or at least, the audience who immerses themselves into the original work. For those who take the Google road, the journey is most likely going to be less impacting and far less immersing. A tragedy unto itself. But I’m a Shakespeare purist, so my view is always going to lean towards the more traditional ways of experiencing Shakespeare, as in, actually picking it up and reading it.

Shakespeare and you: yay or nay?

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Book Review: Going Under by Sonia Henry

Going Under…
About the Book:

A darkly funny and sexy novel that blows the lid off the medical profession and life inside a hospital by a young doctor whose anonymous article about the pressures of trainee doctors went viral around the world.

Dr Katarina ‘Kitty’ Holliday thought once she finished medical school and found gainful employment at one of Sydney’s best teaching hospitals that her dream was just beginning. The hard years, she thought, were finally over.

But Kitty is in for a rude shock. Between trying to survive on the ward, in the operating theatre and in the emergency department without killing any of her patients or going under herself, Kitty finds herself facing situations that rock her very understanding of the vocation to which she intends to devote her life.

Going Under is a rare insight into the world of a trainee female medic that takes an unflinching look at the reality of being a doctor. It explores the big themes – life, death, power and love – through the eyes of Dr Holliday as she loses her identity and nearly her mind in the pressure-cooker world of the hospital. But it is also there that Kitty might find her own redemption and finally know herself for the first time. Darkly funny, sexy, moving and shocking, Going Under will grip you from the opening page and never let you go.

My Thoughts:

‘I think that the most important quality for a doctor to possess is kindness. Without kindness, I think, we’re all lost in this maze of impossible perfection and constant self-punishment. Without kindness, we’re doctors devoid of humanity. And without our humanity, we don’t really have anything.’

Going Under is a devastatingly important novel. The story is told with a sharp edge of dark humour that is precariously balanced with frank and shocking honesty. I could barely put the book down, it’s such compelling reading. The novel is narrated by Dr Katarina Holliday, aka Kitty, and we journey with her throughout her entire first year as a junior doctor in a Sydney teaching hospital. I’ve always been partial to a good medical drama but don’t go into this thinking that it’s Grey’s Anatomy or Chicago Med. It’s actually real life. Going Under was written by an Australian doctor who currently lives and works in Sydney. This novel follows on from an article the author wrote anonymously in 2017, which was published on Kevin MD, a leading American physician blog. Titled, ‘There is something rotten inside the medical profession’, I encourage you all to read it. And then read this novel.

‘There is something wrong when young people with a qualification as difficult as a medical degree, who have the skills and intellect to contribute to society in an enormously meaningful way, are pushed into a mental space where they think their only option is to take their own life.’ – Author note.

We’ve all had bad experiences with doctors. When you live remotely like I do, I’ve often had occasion to despair over a misdiagnosis, and I’ve had plenty to say about the revolving door at my local GP clinic at which you can count yourself lucky if you see the same doctor more than once – or maybe unlucky, depends which doctor it is! Don’t get me started on our local hospital. But I’ve also had some really great experiences with doctors too. In the town I lived in for twenty years before I moved way out west, I had two rather excellent GPs. They are both dead now. In a terrible coincidence, each died of a heart attack before the age of fifty. I started as a patient of one of them, and then after he died, the second one took over the clinic and since I immediately liked him, I stayed at the clinic instead of looking elsewhere. The second one died not long after I moved away. I was particularly saddened by the loss of my second GP because he’d been my doctor for much longer and he was also my obstetrician through three pregnancies and my children’s paediatrician. I always thought it was rather astonishing that both died so young. Now, after reading Going Under, and considering the character of the lovely Dr Prince, I am less convinced about fateful coincidence.

‘I wonder if he realises the impact he has on me, quite apart from our mutual attraction. Any senior consultant who shows an interest in the wellbeing of their struggling juniors and is kind to them can make an enormous difference.’

There are some utterly despicable characters within this novel, just as there are some truly great ones. Some of the great ones make some really questionable decisions that have a negative cyclical impact on their physical and mental well being, but they’re young and under enormous pressure, so it all rings very true to me. The abuse of power that plays out within this story was at times distressing to read, because it’s so authentically portrayed, and given that it’s written by a doctor who is a clear advocate for improving the treatment of junior doctors, it hits with force. As it’s meant to. I think this is a novel that has been intelligently written, managing to successfully straddle that line between fictional entertainment and honest disclosure. Going Under is a novel that has wide appeal and I recommend it highly to readers of all tastes and genres. As a high school career advisor, it’s honestly made me a little uncomfortable about guiding students into medicine. I almost feel now as though helping a student get into medical school is akin to plunging them into a Hunger Games arena. If awareness plays any part in affecting change, then do your bit and read this novel. And then start talking about it.

‘Personally, I don’t think being a senior surgeon should excuse someone for being a total maniac, but that’s how medicine works. I also don’t understand how being an arsehole will increase your surgical dexterity, but maybe I just haven’t had enough experience yet.’

Thanks is extended to Allen & Unwin for providing me with a copy of Going Under for review.

About the Author:

Sonia Henry is in her early thirties and lives and works in Sydney as a doctor. When she’s not being a medic she devotes her spare time to writing and has been published in Kevin MD (America’s leading physician blog), the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Medical Students Journal, and has scientific publications in the ANZ Journal of Surgery.

Her most widely read article was an anonymous piece, ‘There is something rotten inside the medical profession’, which detailed the stress of medical training and was shared more than 22,000 times and re-published widely around the world. This article led to the start of a conversation that her novel Going Under seeks to continue. Dr Brad Frankum, head of the AMA NSW, penned an open letter in response to her piece, as did many other doctors who decided that it was time to speak out.

In her spare time, Sonia loves drinking wine with her friends, eating good food, and trying to save money to travel to new and fabulous places. She is a keen skier in the winter and likes Sydney for its beaches in the summer. She tried to join a gym but isn’t a morning person so has replaced exercise with an extra hour of sleep.

She is passionate about the topics covered in her book and would love to be an advocate for change in the medical system.

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Going Under

Published by Allen & Unwin

Released September 2019

Jolley Prize 2019 (Winner): ‘The Point-Blank Murder’ by Sonja Dechian

Sonja Dechian is the winner of the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. She receives $5,000 for her story ‘The Point-Blank Murder’. Dechian was announced as the winner of the Jolley Prize by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke at a special ceremony at Readings Hawthorn on 11 September that featured readings from all three shortlisted stories by the authors.

The judges had this to say about Sonja Dechian’s winning story:

At once tender and sinister, ‘The Point-Blank Murder’ is a story of parental vigilance, with all of its new terrors. ‘That’s one of the things about having a baby,’ our narrator explains, ‘you have to think things through.’ On an isolated rural property, a couple learn how to comfort and care for their newborn. The rhythms of parenthood are new and strange to them – almost otherworldly – and that strangeness echoes against the landscape. One of the pair is listening to a true crime podcast to give the days shape. Why does its distant violence feel so claustrophobically resonant? Why does the sleepless quiet of their rural idyll feel so fraught? This assured story is drum-skin taut – it trusts that its readers will find their way into its dark corners, and then emerge, bleary-eyed, back into the merciless sunlight.

My Thoughts:

I don’t read a lot of short stories so it’s not a medium I feel I can adequately evaluate within its intended context. However, I really did enjoy this short story, The Point-Blank Murder and I agree with the judges: it’s both tender and sinister. It really took me back to those early first baby days, the delirious haze of joy swamped with tiredness and all of your senses, and even your usual judgement, completely off kilter. This story is deceptively layered, take this passage here:

‘I think this is normal, to constantly check that your baby is still alive and to imagine all the ways you might accidentally kill her. She’s our first baby. Our only one, I mean.’

I could entirely relate to this sentiment. With all three of mine, I constantly checked for life and I certainly, in my more tired and delirious moments, drove myself crazy thinking of all the ways I might accidentally kill one of them through my inexperience or as a consequence of my exhaustion. But that very last sentence, ‘our only one, I mean.’ Such a remarkably concise way to convey so much.

‘It’s all about time, with babies. We measure their lives in days and then weeks: once trivial blocks of time that must now be counted, changes catalogued, remarked on. But it’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? The accounting of time, that’s where it begins. How long until I can sleep, how long has the baby slept, has she had enough sleep or am I doing something terrible to her brain by not knowing how to make her sleep? And yet, the days grow so long when you’re not going to work, immersed in routine, that time on the larger scale begins to unravel, reflect. You forge links with your own childhood in this way, reconnect with the long past while the life you had just months ago becomes distant, foreign.’

Time factors heavily within this story as the couple are very much living out their daily lives to the rhythm of their baby’s needs. Our narrator, the baby’s father, passes the time he spends walking each morning with his baby listening to a true crime podcast, The Point-Blank Murder. As he walks and listens, he’s headed to a creek that is supposed to be on the property, one he is convinced he can hear, along with frogs singing, which should only be around if there was water, yet he never seems to find it. Back at the house, instead of resting during her baby free time, his wife becomes obsessed with uncovering a smell that repels her. The sinister undertone and mysterious implications put me on edge, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect and I was bracing myself to a certain degree. Given that it’s a short story, all of these things remain unresolved and left to the reader’s imagination, which is really my main beef with short stories in general. I’m always left wanting more. Unless that’s the intention?

The Point-Blank Murder is a tautly delivered, compelling story. I extend my congratulations to the author on winning the prize.

You can read The Point-Blank Murder here.

About the Author:

Sonja Dechian is the author of the short story collection An Astronaut’s Life, which won the 2016 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award the same year. Her writing has previously appeared in The Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories 2, and elsewhere. She has co-edited two books of children’s writing about the Australian refugee experience, No Place Like Home and Dark Dreams.

#BookBingo – Round 19

Prize winning book

Well, this was an obvious selection!

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton

Winner of four ABIAs: Book of the Year, Literary Book of the Year, the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year and Audio Book of the Year (Wavesound, narrated by Stig Wemyss). It’s also on the 2019 Miles Franklin longlist. Check out all the medals on this cover!

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Ultimately, I took away a lot from reading Boy Swallows Universe, but there are a few things, take home messages I suppose, for want of a different way of putting it, that I particularly appreciated:

1. At some point, everyone is faced with a choice: go this way, the same as everyone around me, or go that way, forge a new path. The cycle can be broken. You can go your own way. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

2. Love is messy, particularly when it comes to family. You can hate what someone does, but still love them fiercely. You can be deeply ashamed of your family, but still love them wholly.

3. There are shades of grey in all of us. Good people can do bad things. Bad people can do good things. Sometimes it’s not about the labels, but more about the moment of action.

4. People make mistakes. People can be bad parents but still love their kids.

5. Forgiveness can be as much for yourself as for the person you are forgiving.

Boy Swallows Universe is brilliant. The way it’s written; there’s nothing else like it. Total immersion.

Read my full review here.

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For 2019, I’m teaming up with Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse for an even bigger, and more challenging book bingo. We’d love to have you join us. Every second Saturday throughout 2019, we’ll post our latest round. We invite you to join in at any stage, just pop the link to your bingo posts into the comments section of our bingo posts each fortnight so we can visit you. If you’re not a blogger, feel free to just write your book titles and thoughts on the books into the comments section each fortnight, and tag us on social media if you are playing along that way.

The Week That Was…

It’s been a long week. School holidays can’t come soon enough…

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Joke of the week:

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TV of the week:

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Book of the Week:

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Disappointment of the week:

Discovering that The Goldfinch is not listed for screening at my local cinema. And we only have one. Looks like I’ll be waiting even longer until the digital release.

#TBT: What I was reading on this day three years ago…

According to Goodreads, on this day three years ago, I was reading The Dry by Jane Harper.

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It’s interesting for me to note that it took me five days to get through it. That seems like a long time upon reflection. Especially since the book I read directly after The Dry only took me two days and it was almost 100 pages longer.

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Historical fiction is my preference – we all know that! And even though I’ve rated each of Jane Harper’s novels with five stars, I will confess that they take me ages to get into, every time.

Any genres that you find more hard going than others? Any books that you’ve read that have been unquestionably good yet still hard to get lost in?

Book Review: The Alexandrite by Dione Jones

The Alexandrite…
About the Book:

Who is the stranger found dead in the woods, outside Pamela Lady Scawton’s family home? Why was he carrying a stone that changes colour and a threatening letter?

The quest leads from World War One to the present day and from an English village to New Zealand farmland, to discover how past events are intertwined with the present. To unravel the mystery Pamela is forced to confront truths that shatter her beliefs about her family and their place in the world.

The Alexandrite is a story of class conflict, hidden sins, and deceit.

My Thoughts:

This was a most enjoyable book. Relying on my memory only, I thought for sure this was the first novel I had read that had been written by an NZ author and that certainly it was the first one in an NZ setting. I was wrong though, checking back through my tags: it is actually the second! About time I read some more NZLit. I have travelled all through both islands of NZ, twice now, and I really enjoyed revisiting this beautiful country within this novel. There was such a vivid sense of place and time right throughout The Alexandrite, and not only in the NZ setting but also in the parts that took place in England.

The story orbits around this stone, called an alexandrite, which is rare and only mined in Russia, but not in recent times. The 1920s generation of Scawtons were a secretive bunch and while the blurb for this novel hints at a family mystery, there are actually two skeletons rattling around in this particular generation’s closet. This story really had to potential to be confusing, it is so vast, but I found it immensely satisfying, a real ‘get swept up and lost in the atmosphere and intrigue’ sort of novel – the one’s I like best.

The characterisation was wholly authentic and very closely aligned to what you would expect within each era. The majority of the story unfolds during 2013, but we revisit key characters right back through the decades, learning more about the family and the origins of its secrets as we go. Pamela (Lady Scawton) was a character I had a particular soft spot for and her son Charles was one whose neck I would have gladly rung several times over. In between these two, were a whole cast of other characters and I felt the author really captured the essence of each without relying on cliché stereotypes. The characters were just so realistic, sometimes painful, other times wonderful (with the exception of Charles who was permanently painful but even this was true to form) and at all times authentically rendered.

I can highly recommend The Alexandrite to those who enjoy family sagas with an element of mystery and an attention to historical detail. The author’s particular care to draw attention to Maori culture did not go unnoticed and added to the story. I also really enjoyed the commentary on class within England and the struggles of the ‘titled poor’, something I have come across in another novel this year and which held particular interest for me. All in all, there is little I could fault with this novel and much to be enjoyed. Dione Jones writes with flawless precision and I am keen to see what she might have waiting in the wings for us next.

Thanks is extended to Cloud Ink Press for providing me with a copy of The Alexandrite for review.

About the Author:

Dione Jones attempted to write her first book at aged 10. She was born in England and grew up in the countryside surrounded by National Trust common land. She achieved a B.A. at Trinity College, Dublin and then worked for an aeroplane salesman and learnt to fly, before venturing to New Zealand to help set up a laboratory to collect animal blood. In 2014 Dione was awarded a Master of Creative Writing from the Auckland University of Technology.

Married to Chris, she followed his involvement in farming, polo and property. They have two adult children and three grandchildren and live in south Auckland. Apart from her family, dogs and horses, she is interested in the environment we live in, historical changes in society – and, of course, good books and writing.

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The Alexandrite

Published by Cloud Ink Press

Released 20th August 2019