Tag: fiction

Book review – Other Houses, by Paddy O’Reilly

Title: Other Houses

Author: Paddy O’Reilly

Publisher: Affirm Press, 2022; RRP: $32.99

Paddy O’Reilly is a well-known Australian writer. She has written four novels including 2022’s Other Houses: The Wonders (2014), The Fine Colour of Rust (2012) and The Factory (2005). She has also written two collections of short stories and a novella, all published over the last couple of decades. Paddy has been short-listed and successful for numerous awards, both in Australia and overseas. Paddy O’Reilly lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Set in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Other Houses tells a vivid story of disadvantage and struggle. Lily is the mum of Jewelee, a rebelling teenager, when Janks, a reformed drug addict joins their family. They decide to leave the rough side of town and move across the tracks. Their motive is to give their daughter a chance to attend a better school and provide her with the opportunities in life they never had.

Lily collaborates with a friend, Shannon, cleaning other people’s houses. Their boss is a shifty character with his  own interests at heart. The daily grind of the work is back breaking for the two women, but they pride themselves on their ability to achieve exacting standards. They are good friends supporting each other and making the most of earning a wage together. The clients they work for are a precious lot but cleaning their houses on a regular basis provides the women with amusement, concern and intriguing insights into the secrets and oddities of other people’s lives.

Janks works in a factory. He and Lily are dependent on both their wages to make ends meet but no matter how hard it becomes, Lily and Janks are determined to turn Jewelee’s life around, and they are comforted when she finally shows signs of responding. They teeter on the edge of financial fragility each week but believe in what they are doing, for Jewelee and themselves. Then something happens that shatters their plan for a better existence.

George Haddad on Other Houses: ‘trauma without the porn’

@ the sydney review of books

This book has Paddy O’Reilly’s signature written all over it: clever and humorous storytelling that bursts alive on the pages. It also contains an honesty that is cringe worthy but so accurate that the reader becomes acutely engaged with the characters. Lily, Janks and Jewelee don’t mince words. They are living and evolving products of a world where privilege is absent and surviving without it is harsh.

Written with a tension that has the reader turning pages, Other Houses provides a window into hardship and poverty and the extreme difficulty of finding a way out. I was left with a reminder of how the circumstance of class inequality and disadvantage is difficult to exit. In fact, for some people and families, escape is near impossible.  

I loved this book and the characters danced in my head for days after I finished reading it. It’s a close-up read. Clever, funny, serious and real.  

Reviewed by: Heather Whitford Roche, October 2023

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Book review — The Witching Tide, by Margaret Meyer

Author: Margaret Meyer

Title: The Witching Tide

Publisher: Moa Press/Hachette, 2023; RRP: $32.99

Margaret Meyer has a wealth of experience, having been born in Canada, grown up in New Zealand where she began her working life, and subsequently working and studying in the UK. She was a journalist and fiction editor in New Zealand, and, in the UK, publishing director for the Museum of London before being appointed Director of Literature with the British Council. She then trained as a mental health therapist and worked in a variety of settings including schools, prisons and addiction recovery centres, as well as her own private practice. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia before writing The Witching Tide, and now lives in Norwich.

Her location provides the inspiration for this novel. During the middle years of the 17th century, a witch hunt took place in East Anglia in which at least 100 innocent women were executed. In Britain few witch trials took place in the Middle Ages, however, the majority occurred in the 1600s, reaching a peak during the 1640s of the English Civil War and the Puritan era of the 1650s. Records indicate that about 500 people, more than 90 per cent of them women, were condemned to hang as witches or were burned at the stake (if convicted of another crime at the same time) during this period. One hundred people from one small area constitutes a significant proportion of the population at the time. The women who were targeted were often old, with a bad reputation amongst their neighbours, or who had particular skills with herbs and other healing techniques.

Martha Hallybread, the protagonist of this story, is neither particularly old, being in her 40s, nor with a poor reputation; she is the ex-nurse of her master, Kit Crozier, and now works as a sort of housekeeper for Kit and his wife, Agnes, who is pregnant with the couple’s second child – the first had died at birth. Martha is also the local midwife and is known for the healing qualities of her ‘physick garden’. She has always been mute, communicating by a system of hand signals and gestures, well known to those around her but more difficult for strangers to interpret. Kit is a merchant, and a kind man who treats his servants as family, especially Martha, as it was she who essentially raised him.

Margaret Meyer on the idea that became The Witch Tide, getting an agent and the thrill of a bidding war

@ the Spinoff

The book opens with one of the young servants, Prissy, being taken by a gang of men working for the witch hunters. This begins a time of great upheaval in both the household and the town of Cleftwater. People turn on one another, interpreting illnesses and hardships as evidence of witchcraft amongst some of the local women. At Kit’s bidding, Martha becomes one of the assistants to the witch hunters, seeking marks of the devil on her fellow villagers in order to try to save Prissy.

And Martha has a secret – a collection of items left to her by her mother, amongst them a wax doll, called a poppet. When Martha realises the danger that is looming, she retrieves this poppet from the box of her mother’s items and ponders over whether she should use it, and if so, how. Ancient beliefs, predating the Christianity of the time, seem to inform Martha’s understanding of the power of the items bequeathed by her mother.

Margaret Meyer talks about witch trials and the lessons perhaps not learnt

@ saturday morning on rNZ

Over the course of about two weeks, we see the whole town become consumed with the witch hunt and how this has an impact on everyone from the priest and the judge, to the poorest of the townsfolk, and especially on the Crozier household and their friends. The weather becomes an additional character when persistent rain causes flooding, adding to the misery of the accused women.

There are gritty and disturbing descriptions of the place the women are imprisoned, as well as the other torments they are subjected to in the effort to determine whether or not they are witches. As was the situation at the time, even the most benign events are twisted to provide ‘proof’ of cavorting with the devil or his imps, or of intent to harm neighbours. Martha’s inability to utter spoken words also works against her, allowing inaccurate interpretations of her signing and gestures.

Martha, unlike some of the other characters, ultimately survives the ordeals enacted by the witch hunters, but it is not clear exactly how this happens. It is also difficult to determine how much Martha believes in the power of the poppet and whether she is really at ease with its use. This could just reflect the confusion of the time and be a deliberate device used by the author. However, it means that the Martha character remains enigmatic in relation to her inner thoughts and reasoning. What is not enigmatic, however, is the horror of the events and the unjust ways in which women were treated during that disturbing time.

Reviewed by: Elisabeth Bridson

Ballarat Writers Inc. Review Group

Review copy provided by publisher

Book review – The Housekeepers, by Alex Hay

Title: The Housekeepers

Author: Alex Hay

Publisher: Headline/Hachette, 2023; RRP: $32.99

Alex Hay has been writing as long as he can remember.  He studied History at the University of York, and wrote his dissertation on female power at royal courts, combing the archives for every scrap of drama and skulduggery he could find, and this knowledge is evident in this, his debut novel, that won the Caledonia Novel Award 2022.

Mayfair, 1906, a Park Lane mansion and a recently dismissed housekeeper combine for an audacious heist orchestrated by a talented and criminally connected group of women.  Never underestimate those below stairs. 

A combination of Ocean’s Eleven and Upstairs, Downstairs, this is an engaging novel with a well-developed plot and characters.  The heist is not just a matter of monetary gain or simple revenge for some of the characters.  As dark and long-held secrets emerge, the stakes become higher and higher. 

Alex Hay talks about The Housekeepers

@ the bookstorm podcast

The plan is to strip the mansion of all its goods on the night the former employer holds the ball of the season.  Seven women; two former housekeepers, a seamstress, a black-market queen, an actress and the amazing duo of Jane 1 & 2 all have skills to offer, scores to settle and everything to gain. 

Well written, well researched and set against a background of new technology, social change, suffragettes, and political conflict.  A fun read with depth and insights into the glamorous world of the newly and the established rich and those who serve them. 

Reviewed by: Marian Chivers, August, 2023

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher

  • Maria Chivers has a lifelong interest in reading and writing with her work and study involving books from children’s literature to post-graduate studies.

Book review — Southern Aurora, by Mark Brandi

Title: Southern Aurora

Author: Mark Brandi

Publisher: Hachette, June 2023; RRP: $32.99

Southern Aurora is Mark Brandi’s fourth novel. Initially Mark published Wimmera, which won the British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award and the Best Debut at the 2018 Australian Indie Book Awards. The Rip, his second novel, was published in 2019. His third novel, The Others, was short listed in 2022 for Best Fiction in The Ned Kelly Awards. Mark worked in the justice system prior to his writing career. From Italy originally, the author was raised in rural Victoria before moving to Melbourne.

In Southern Aurora, Jimmy is a kid living on the wrong side of the tracks in Mittigunda, a fictional small country town on the Southern Aurora’s line halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. Jimmy has a younger brother, Sam – he’s different, goes to a special school and Jimmy looks out for him. His older brother, Mick, is in jail, soon to be released. His mum’s boyfriend, Charlie, is an angry man causing Jimmy to weave his existence between watching for signs of something about to go wrong and making sure his mother and brother are okay if it does. He lives in a constant state of hyper vigilance. He attends school but doesn’t much care for it; he’s a bit of a loner except for his friend, Danny.

Mark Brandi talks about Southern Aurora

@ the canberra times

Jimmy’s mum has a drinking problem, which leaves her vulnerable and exposes her and her boys to the harmful and dangerous influence of her boyfriend. Charlie comes and goes and so does any normality in their lives. Jimmy and his mum wait in false hope that when Mick returns from jail, somehow life will improve.

A billycart event planned by his school entices Jimmy and Sam to resurrect Mick’s old billycart, The Firefox, from the shed. A series of events take place around the billycart and Jimmy’s honesty is compromised. His inner thoughts are always churning.

From the first page of Southern Aurora, the story grips hard. It bites at the imagination and delivers the reader to the very spot.

There’s hardly any shade at our school, just one big pepper corn tree that makes your hand sticky if you touch the leaves. Most of the yard is boiling hot asphalt.

Mark Brandi brings the voice of Jimmy to the page in a manner that very few writers manage. His acutely accurate descriptions and spare text bring alive Jimmy’s difficult and often tortuous attempts for something to go right for him. This story touches the very heart of what it is to be underprivileged and without power. There are, however, some very poignant and tender moments.

This story remains in the consciousness long after the end of the book.  A story of family, ongoing life struggles and kids who are left to navigate the tough circumstances that adults get caught up in. This book is impossible to put down.

Reviewed by: Heather Whitford Roche

Ballarat Writers Book Review Group, June 2023

Review copy provided by the publisher

Book review — The Anniversary, by Stephanie Bishop

Title: The Anniversary

Author: Stephanie Bishop

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2023; RRP: $32.99

It is well-accepted that writers should make their protagonists suffer, putting obstacles in the path of redemption or whatever it is the story arc demands. Stephanie Bishop, in her fourth novel, The Anniversary, constructs a most arduous life for her main character J.B. Blackwood. There is no sparing of the difficulties, mind, I thought most of Blackwood’s difficulties were her own doing, poor life choices.

Bishop is a highly credentialled writer, and I felt it showed, impressed by the writing and the construction of the characters. I just didn’t warm to the story or the characters. I felt the misfortune contrived and difficult to accept, even if it was necessary to develop the theme.  Despite suggesting contrivance in the plot, it would not surprise me to find it is based on the real experiences of actual people. Truth is stranger than fiction.

A husband lost at sea, falling overboard, I know it does happen. Flying off to glamourous literary awards and being interviewed by the New Yorker magazine, so what? I do read the New Yorker. With some elements of the story, I was reminded of the “airport novels” of Harold Robbins, all that arbitrarily injected glamour. Is that still a thing?

Stephanie Bishop talks desire, creativity and sex scenes.

@ good reading

The circumstances of Blackwood’s life are not that unusual: difficult childhood, mother-rejection complex, difficult relationship with father, married young – to an older man, her idolised lecturer, who represented recognition (for Blackwood), sophistication and possibly authority. Bishop puts Blackwood’s life under the microscope with references and excerpts from her childhood, and the stages of her relationship with her now deceased husband.

I thought Bishop did an interesting job of laying bare the emotional morass of Blackwood’s life. Perhaps too good a job. Bishops teases out the pressures brought about by complex relationships in a creative’s life. I am sure this book will appeal to many, but it didn’t resonate with me.

Reviewed by: Frank Thompson, June 2023

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher

Book review — The Bellbird River Country Choir, by Sophie Green

Title: The Bellbird River Country Choir

Author: Sophie Green

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2022; RRP $32.99

Australian author Sophie Green’s The Bellbird River Country Choir follows a successful track record.  Her 2018 debut novel The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club was long listed for the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year and the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction. It, along with The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and Thursdays at Orange Blossom House, were Top 10 bestsellers.  

This is a book about relationships between men and women, about women alone and in their friendships with other women, and between family members held loosely together within their shared experiences as members of a small-town community choir, and the town community itself.

As can be seen in the titles of her other bestsellers, there is a formulaic base to her works, but I say this without judgement.  I, like countless others, value the security of a familiar narrative formula that we already know is going to work for us. Her presence in Top 10 bestseller lists also signifies more than just commercial success. I chose to read this book because I like small-town stories and anything with a choir in it but also because I was in the mood for an easy-reading escape.

From the beginning that is exactly what The Bellbird River Country Choir offers, but as the story unfolded this changed — what it lacked in depth was made up by the range of relationship and personal issues it covered. It does not pretend to be an in-depth exploration, but the events and the feelings, thoughts and reactions of the characters concerned are familiar or easy to identify with. Most importantly, they become characters easy to care about, a vital ingredient in any reading experience.

The choir is the focal place where the main characters mingle and bounce off each other. The other setting is the town itself and the dry, brown country surrounding it. The town itself and surroundings are experienced and explored through the different characters who inhabit it, both longtime and new.

Sophie Green on her books and writing practice

tell me what to read @ youtube

The story begins through the eyes of single mother Alex who has moved out of the city, motivated by a need to live more cheaply and be able to spend more time with her daughter.

Some of the issues the choir members experience include the battle between Alex and her daughter, who desperately wants to return to Sydney to live instead with the beloved grandmother Alex is in continual conflict with; a mother riddled with guilt, released from a jail sentence she knows she deserved, fighting to reconnect with the children she knows she betrayed, and fearful of the townspeople finding out; a close brother-and-sister relationship fragmented by the brother’s schizophrenia after a seemingly normal childhood, his parents unable to cope and the daughter who tries to protect him; a closet artist; a compassionate stepmother unable to bear her own children responsible for those of another; a strong and dignified older woman forced to deal with her husband’s desertion for someone younger; a famous soprano unable to accept her diminished vocal range after a throat operation; a child bullied endlessly at school and her mother’s struggles to help her.  

This tapestry of personal and relationship issues is not unfamiliar. Many can be found behind the closed doors of ordinary homes and streets around us. A success of the work is that they are woven together seamlessly, creating an image of a community of individuals that covers a lot of ground without collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.

In each case the situations the choir members are dealing with are also set within the context of the society in which they play out, and include the thinking and self-exploration by the individuals suffering each trauma, from the irritating or temporary to the toxic. The bullied child exists in the story within the context of the school and the town and the psychology of the school playground — bullying that many parents will identify with. The female victim of a bullying lover looks deep within herself, extricating her own fear, loneliness and a desperate need for affection from the ugliness of the man who abuses her. The soprano is suffering what many older retired Australians experience when their working lives retreat.

It is not a poetic work using clever literary devices, nor does it offer anything new to the genre, but nevertheless I was totally engaged as the story slowly unfolded deeper into the lives of the different choir members and the life of the town. It strength is the skill with which the narrative is constructed: how it all hangs together and its humanity. There are also places where the author captured sensitive and delicate states of being, pinpointing subtle emotional responses.

When the distraught soprano rings an old friend complaining about the choir, we read,

‘Dear me,’ purrs Ivan comfortingly. Which is the reason she rang him: he’s good at being reassuring.

Or another leaving her lover,

Checking twice over her shoulder to see if he’s followed her, because for some reason she feels like prey.

It is still what would be described as light reading but sometimes the simplest of narratives travel a long way. There are one or two undeniably corny bits, but they fit in the end because life is sometimes corny too.

Very satisfying for when you are in the mood for an easy, reliably feel-good read that does not demand much thinking but which carries you away, believably, from your external world with its demands and into another place. With its distinctly Australian setting – located in a tiny fictional town a short distance from Tamworth — it will also appeal especially to small-town Australian readers.

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

Book review – Dinner with the Schnabels, by Toni Jordan

Title: Dinner with the Schnabels

Author: Toni Jordan

Publisher: Hachette, 30 March 2022; RRP: $32.99

Toni Jordan is an established Australian author with six novels to her credit. Amongst her well-known works are Addition in 2008 and the Miles Franklin longlisted historical novel Nine Days in 2011. Nine Days was also judged Best Fiction in 2012 at the Indie Awards. Toni has received numerous other prizes and accolades for her writing and holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a PhD in Creative Arts. She lives in Melbourne.

Dinner with the Schnabels is an entertaining, fast moving, funny and relatable story that ranges over a one-week period. Simon Larsen is having a tough time. He’s lost his job and business and he and his wife, Tansy, and their two children have moved to a cramped flat after being forced to sell their former home. Tansy now works full time and Simon spends time on the couch, his self-worth in tatters and struggling daily for motivation.

Tansy’s family, her mother, sister and brother are heavily involved in her life and add to the pressure Simon feels to get his life in order. He agrees to take on a hurried backyard landscaping job for a friend who is to host a special event for the Schnabels. Simon has from Monday to Saturday to complete the undertaking before the big occasion on Sunday.

A relative who is unknown to them arrives and Tansy takes her in despite the difficulties the family is under. Monica has alternative ideas and views about life and comes and goes at all hours. In the meantime, Simon procrastinates with the backyard overhaul but convinces his in-laws, Tansy, and himself that he is on track for completion for Sunday. He is also worried about Tansy and the future of their relationship as he discovers she is holding a secret from him.

Toni Jordan on writing

at the garret

This is a modern-day depiction of life in the fast lane and how quickly life can unravel when circumstances change. The story delves into the daily struggles, ambitions, and pressures from extended families.  Simon, Tansy and their children, Mia and Lachie, are lovable and funny and at times sad and reactive. The reader is invited to travel with them, particularly with Simon who is suffering emotionally and yet trying to pretend otherwise. His agonising, lingering procrastination brings tension and frustration as the time ticks by and the backyard work remains unfinished.

The characters are vibrant, well developed and stay in the reader’s head well after the last page is turned. There are several twists and turns laced with anticipation that keeps the story galloping along at an enjoyable pace until the very end. Does Simon make the deadline?  What happens on the day?

Toni Jordan’s Dinner with the Schnabels is relevant to current-day life and is a laugh aloud reading experience.

Review by: Heather Whitford Roche

Ballarat Writers Book Review Group 2022

Review copy provided by the publisher

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