Book Review: The Good Mother by Rae Cairns

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Whew, just closed the last page of this debut mystery thriller and am still trying to recover.

Sarah Calhoun, a Sydney divorced mum of three is living her life, arguing with her children, making the school lunches and working. She gets along with her ex-husband and negotiating their family life in two separate households. Along comes a detective who pops into her life digging up her past, a past in Ireland when she worked as a youth worker during the nineties.

The detective wants her to testify against a man who has become a leader of the IRA, and he is not about to let her forget the terrifying past when she dodged bullets and grenades. To complicate matters she sixteen-year-old son has won a trip to play soccer in Ireland.

That same IRA leader finds her whereabouts and threatening her family, he directs her to return to Ireland. Trusting no-one, she reluctantly turns to her estranged father for help. Having no choice she and her father leave Australia, leaving her two daughters in the care of her ex. The detective assures her safety and her father protects her son but she doesn’t reckon on what the IRA leader will do to her.

This debut novel is simply astounding. It sets a cracking pace of tension and edge-of-your-seat page-turning action. I found myself screaming (in my head of course) for Sarah not to make the decisions and action she chose. But having no idea what else she should do, you just know you’d probably do the same to save and protect your children no matter what the cost.

Cairns has captured the very essence of the mother lion in all of us and thankfully, is very rarely tested in the circumstances that Sarah faces. Yes, there’s some violence, a lot of tension and even a bit of romance. It’s well-written and there’s a lot to learn about the battles between Protestants and Catholics during the 1990’s. It’s also about resilience and learning to trust.

If this one isn’t a movie soon, then it really should be. Calling all movie producers! Get this one made. Move over Jack Reacher for Sarah Calhoun. In the meantime, go out,  buy this one and prepare to read it quickly.

The Month that was… June 2022

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The Melbourne winter seemed to hit colder and faster this year and we explored ways to stay warm without breaking the bank. Living in a mostly gas-powered home, we are trying to minimise our use and our carbon footprint which is very hard to do. We purchased an electric throw rug which, for $65 is worth every cent. The throw rug by Jason (as pictured above) heats up quickly and is ideal to drape over two people on the couch. It is machine washable, turns off by itself in case you forget, and feels very plush. No need to have the gas central heating on and it’s a fraction of our electricity bills. Jason is life-changing (in winter anyway), and I don’t know how we lived without it. Get one if you can.

Theatre: The Sound Inside

I was fortunate enough to attend the play, The Sound Inside by the Melbourne Theatre Company written by Adam Rapp.

Yale student, Christopher turns up uninvited to the office of his creative writing professor, Bella Baird. She is a published writer and he, an author wannabe. The two are lonely and mismatched but Christopher’s earnestness and persistence breaks down Bella’s barriers and the two strike an unexpected friendship until a life-changing dilemma is thrown into their connection.

The play was unexpectedly riveting despite the chunks of monologue by Bella who often spoke to the audience about her friend despite he being right there. This in itself was an interesting method employed by the playwright although somewhat taking the audience away from the story. That aside, the acting was superb, the story compelling and thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Author Talk

I attended a fabulous event hosted by one of my favourite authors, Lyn Yeowart who wrote The Silent Listener (see my earlier review). The event was held at Robinson’s Books in Glen Waverley. Lyn was in conversation with another Australian crime writer, Rae Cairns. The discussion was riveting and entertaining. Having just finished Rae’s debut novel, The Good Mother it was really interesting to hear how she came to write it by drawing on her years as a youth worker in Ireland in the mid-90’s during “The Troubles”. Watch out of my review in the next couple of weeks.

Reading.

I should have increased this months reading but Crossroads is a meaty novel, equivalent to at least two short ones. That’s my excuse anyway. Watch out for my forthcoming reviews on these two during July.

Writing

My novel The Palace Hotel is due to come back shortly with lots of great feedback from my beta readers. So I’ll be polishing, enhancing and playing with my new novel in July.

Until next month…

Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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A delightful idea done extremely well, this novel sets you thinking about your own life and mindset wondering if it can be the best it can be.

It opens with the main character, Nora Seed whose life spirals from a pivotal point in her primary school years when her library teacher Mrs Elm breaks the news of her father’s sudden death.

Nineteen years later, Nora’s life is a mess and she convinces herself that her life is not worth living. Instead, she finds herself in a place between life and death in a library where the shelves are filled with the opportunity to try another life in order to see what might have happened if she’d made different choices. Her old library teacher, Mrs Elm is there to guide her through the many regrets Nora has about her life. She takes the opportunity to discover what she could have become but more importantly to view the consequences of those choices on others around her. She learns about herself as she journey’s though the various lives.

Her book of regrets includes such things as not becoming an Olympic swimmer, a glaciologist, Dan’s wife, a mother, the lead singer of the Labyrinths, or just a good person. These and many regrets reflect how lost she was during her life. I couldn’t see her as a glaciologist or philosopher or an Olympic swimmer and neither could she. And this is the brilliance by Haig in casting that uncertainty and for the reader to cheer for Nora.

This novel is not all gloom. There are some truly moments of hilarity as Nora is dropped into the middle of situations where she must adapt and bluff her way through. And when she realises it’s not the life for her after all she finds herself back in the Midnight Library. At times the book became a little moralistic delving into various philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Thoreau. There was even some quantum physics thrown into the mix which at times, lost me yet somehow seemed quite profound.

Nora in one of her lives tells a person, ‘There was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.’

It’s a beautifully written and crafted novel and for some, could be quite impactful, and divisive for others.  The author makes you think and reflect. The only down side is that I did begin to tire of the lives as it became a little repetitive, but not for long.

I enjoyed this easy-to-read book.

Book Review: The Younger Wife by Sally Hepworth

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As with many of Sally Hepworth’s books this is a  page turning novel full of intrigue and suspicion.

The book opens at a wedding and while out the back during the signing, someone is injured. Then we meet Stephen Aston, a highly respected heart surgeon and his daughters, Tilly and Rachel. It seems a happy family but we soon realise that not all is quite right with Tilly, whose middle-class lifestyle is falling apart, when her husband loses the family fortune and she turns to shoplifting to cope. Her sister, Rachel is a baker-extraordinaire who hasn’t been with a man since she was sixteen.

Sound interesting? Well then, there’s more when we meet Stephen’s new young fiancé, Heather, an interior designer whom he met while she was designing Stephen’s house for him and his wife.  How’s that for a bit of drama as the reader is taken on a guessing game of intrigue. What happened to the wife?

The story flicks in and out of Tilly, Rachel and Heather’s point of view and their characters are well drawn as we see their perspective about each other as well as their growing awareness of who their father really is. Not to mention that we are sporadically taken back to the church by an unknown character.

There were a lot of clues along the way and I could see what was coming fairly easily which merely pushed me to see if the three women could work it out too. I quite like that technique of letting the reader know first, yet teasing us along as well.

Overall, a quick and easy read – very enjoyable.

Book Review: Beautiful World, where are you? By Sally Rooney

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This is an angst-ridden novel about four people, two couples actually, in their late twenties, still trying to work through what they want out of life and love.

 Alice, a well-known novelist meets Felix, a storeman in a warehouse in a small beachside town. She invites him to come along on her book tour in Italy and a relationship form between these two unlikely people. Her best friend Eileen has just come out of a relationship and is flirting with their mutual friend Simon. 

This is the third Sally Rooney novel I’ve read and I picked this one up because I primarily like her writing. The writing, however, in this novel left me a little cold as I found it quite monotone and mechanical.

‘At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city centre, scrolling through a text document… At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved to her from behind their monitors.’

Large sections of the novel were relentlessly like this, sometimes with one-page paragraphs and no dialogue tags. I don’t mind that so much but it was what was in those paragraphs which turned me off.  The only relief was the dialogue and email exchanges in first person between Alice and Eileen.

Eileen is unhappy and has loved Simon since she was a teenager. He loves her too but there is a lot of heartache as we wonder why these two just can’t seem to get together.

Felix is a curious character often inadequate in the company of the other three but difficult to get a handle on. I found myself wondering why Alice was with him and the relationship between them just didn’t ring quite true as we never seemed to get right into remote and wooden character of Alice.

I wasn’t actually compelled by Alice and Felix’s characters and would have put this one down yet somehow, I plodded on hoping for some resolution or character development or even plot, perhaps. The sex scenes became repetitive serving little purpose in driving the relationships forward. The philosophical and opinionated discussions on the world, climate change, the bronze age and so on offered up little to make me feel anything for the characters.  I was curious about Alice’s mental health but it skirted the discussions.

 I just couldn’t connect with this one.

The Month that was… May 2022

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My post is a little late but then I’ve been travelling, writing and reading…

Firstly to travels…

We took a mini trip to Horsham exploring the wonders of the Wimmera in Western Victoria, a solid four hour drive from Melbourne.

Pink Lake

Then along the coast, past the Twelve Apostles, then across the border for the first time in more than two years ( because our borders were closed for so long) to beautiful Mt Gambier. It’s caves and blue lake are simply a wonder.

Interview

I had the privilege of being interviewed last month by best selling author, Kathryn Gauci who herself is an accomplished author of historical fiction.

A Literary World: An Interview with Sylvia Karakaltsas

Reading

This months reading was …

Writing.

The Palace Hotel is now with a couple of beta readers who will pull it to bits, hopefully not too savagely.

Until next month…

Book Review: Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks.

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This novel spans three time periods from 1903 to 1937, and set mostly in Austria. There are two central characters, Anton a journalist and Lena, the daughter of an alcoholic single mother.

The first part centres around Anton as a young man escaping the family sausage business. He goes to university in Vienna with his friend Friedrick and begins his career as a journalist. In 1914, he falls in love with French woman, Delphine whom he lives with happily until he is sent to Paris to cover a trial. War breaks out and he rushes back to Delphine only to find she has disappeared.

Lena’s story is one of poverty and hardship and when she is fifteen, she meets Rudolph in a hospital where she works. Believing that she is in love with him, she moves to Vienna only to find that her love is not reciprocated. 

Then in 1933, Lena takes a menial job at a mental asylum where she meets Anton who is there to write an article exploring whether Austria has lost its status of being at the cutting edge of psychanalysis.

Faulks brilliantly weaves the history of the time throughout the story, taking the reader to such places as the opening of the Panama Canal, which I loved, to the rumblings and rise of Nazism before WW2. We also learn a lot about mental health and how it was dealt with at the time, particularly in the beginning, when women’s issues were regarded as hysteria. And we see the unfolding events from the eyes of these two major characters.

Yet the story is long and drawn out and at times I felt I was taken out of the action by the dumping of a lot of historical information, sometimes a little out of context. As a historical fiction writer, I know how tempting it is to put in everything you’ve researched but I’ve learnt it can also detract. Not that I would ever compare my writing to the wonderful Faulks, but this is how I felt as I read Snow country.

The story of Lena skipped many years without any reference to what she’d done in some of her formative teen years. She had slept with Anton once yet became obsessed by him, forever thinking about him. It seems a little far-fetched belonging the realms of male fantasy perhaps?

At the three-quarter mark my interests began waning, primarily because of the growing implausibility of this very loose plot. We were repeatedly told he was in love with Delphine and still searching for her. And that’s why I just couldn’t buy into the development of Anton’s feelings for Lena and her for him.

Lena reminds Anton of Delphine yet he doesn’t remember actually remember sleeping with her on one occasion years earlier. When he’s told that she’s left the Shloss, he is unsettled, gets drunk and doesn’t know why. Really? I couldn’t be persuaded that he was that dumb.

And the relationship between Rudolph and Lena was unfathomable with no emotional connection. Perhaps he was just using her as a front for respectability? But what was in it for her? Other side characters along the way also seemed like fillers with little purpose.

In summary, the writing is beautiful, the history fascinating but the story line leave a little to be desired.