Islands by Peggy Frew

Islands is the second book I’ve read by Australian author Peggy Frew, after reading Wildflowers this time last year.

I found the characters in Wildflowers to be cold and hard to like, possibly because they were difficult people who were going through very difficult times. The characters in Islands had different problems and were probably no happier than the characters from Wildflowers, however I liked them and their story better, possibly because of my familiarity with the Melbourne setting – even though all of the action in Islands took place ‘out the other side’ of Melbourne.***

The ‘island’ of the book’s title is Philip Island, south-east of Melbourne, where the main characters holidayed but it also alluded, perhaps slightly too obviously, to how separate they were from each other. The rest of the action took place in Belgrave, a suburb at the bottom of the Dandenong Ranges.

The story is about a family, Helen and John Worth and their daughters, Junie and Anna. Helen and John were mismatched from the start, as she was a free-spirit and he was conservative. When Helen fell in love with someone else and left John for her new bloke, the family disintegrated.

Junie was a teenager and had been living with her father in the 1980s when Anna, who had been living with their mother and her latest new bloke (there were many), went missing at the age of fifteen. The remainder of the story showed June, Helen and John coping with Anna’s disappearance, and their fractured relationships over the next few decades. The effects on all of them were terrible, however June’s relationship with her mother was the most difficult since she blamed Helen for putting herself, her sexuality and her relationships above what she and Anna needed from her, Anna having been particularly troubled.

The story went back and forwards in time, used different tenses from chapter to chapter, on occasion used catalogue descriptions of June’s paintings, poetry, psychologist’s transcripts, and even Christmas Day menus to tell the story, using different points of view, although Junie seemed to be the main character.

I like Peggy Frew’s writing style, but probably won’t go back for more anytime soon, as I prefer more joy in my reading.

***People from my side of town are more likely to take a beach holiday along the Great Ocean Road while people from ‘the other side’ of Melbourne to mine would be more likely to take a beach holiday at Philip Island.

My purchase of Islands continues my New Year’s resolution for 2024 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (April). I purchased Islands at Ironbird Bookshop in Port Fairy (past the far end of the Great Ocean Road).

On a personal note, I’m taking a break from blogging and will be back in May.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is the first book in a series featuring four retired characters who get together to solve unsolved murders.

Elizabeth is the leader of the pack and her mysterious past points towards her having been a spy, Ibrahim is a retired psychologist whose main contribution is research, Ron, a former union leader who bulldozes his way through the group’s investigations and a newcomer to the group, Joyce, was a nurse before she retired. Joyce’s diary entries were used to narrate some of the story, which began with the owner of the retirement village where they lived being murdered.

Elizabeth’s gang also leaned heavily on local police officers with whom they shared information (begrudgingly, at least on the part of PC Donna De Freitas) as the police and the gang investigated the murder. Later in the story, other murders occurred or were uncovered, complicating the investigations being carried out by both parties.

The story is a real page-turner. I enjoyed it enormously and sat up far too late reading. The solution to the murders was quite convoluted though, and I had to re-read the last section the next day to try and figure out how the various murders and solutions fitted together. Not sure if this was because I was too tired to take anything in so late at night during the first read.

My only other complaint was that there was a cast of thousands, some of whom didn’t need to be in the story. I genuinely enjoyed getting to know the main characters, though and thought the story itself was fun.

I will probably read the next book in this series eventually.

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

After reading Joel from I Would Rather Be Reading’s review of Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, I bumped a few other books from my list and raced down to my local library to borrow this book.

Book Review: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

The structure of the story is fascinating, with stories inside stories, and inside stories again and if that sounds confusing, it was. I had to concentrate to keep up.

The story began straight-forwardly, with Wilder Harlow’s memoir of himself as a socially awkward and bullied teenage boy visiting a cottage that his parents had inherited in Whistler Bay. Wilder’s memoir was called The Dagger-Man of Whistler Bay, which entwined the story of Wilder’s summer with chilling details of a mysterious serial killer who had recently been breaking into local houses to take photos of sleeping children with a dagger beside them.

Wilder had left New York that summer hoping to fall in love for the first time and to make friends. On his first day in Whistler Bay he met Nat, a local fisherman’s son and Harper, a troubled British girl. The trio became firm friends, although Wilder and Nat were in competition for Harper romantically. The friendship ended after the trio visited a cave hidden in the cliffs where they discovered bodies in barrels, which led to the serial killer’s identity being exposed.

The next section of the story began with Wilder’s first day of college. He was still socially awkward, and was also suffering from nightmares and panic attacks after the traumatic events at Whistler Bay. Wilder was surprised when Sky, a fellow student, befriended him. Sky wanted to be a writer, however his motives were shown to be less kind when it transpired that Sky stole Wilder’s memoirs in order to write his own book about the events in Whistler’s Bay called The Sound and the Dagger.

The next sections of the story were fictionalised versions of events and this is where I really had to start concentrating, trying to work out who was real and who had been made up, and which, if any versions of the story were true.

I liked the sense of place in this story. Whistler Bay sounded exactly like the sort of place I would love, with the wind whistling spookily across the rocks on the beach during certain weather, hidden caves in the cliffs and sparkling, cold blue seas. I liked the characters and felt uneasy and anxious on their behalf as the story developed. I liked being surprised and the feeling of the rug being pulled away from underneath me when what I thought to be true turned out to be more complicated than that.

Joel recommended beginning with other stories by this author before reading Looking Glass Sound, but none of those were available to me. I will seek these books out in future though.

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

While I’ve had mixed reactions to Joyce Carol Oates’ books in the past – I disliked We Were the Mulvaneys and Jack of Spades and liked Cardiff by the Sea, I loved The Falls and can now see what all the fuss is about this author.

The Falls began with a bridegroom throwing himself into Niagara Falls the day after his wedding, in 1950. The story of the wedding night was told from the point of view of the bride and of the groom and were similar enough in that they were both disgusted by and terrified of sex, at least with each other. Perhaps not surprisingly, Gilbert and Ariah’s versions of their wedding night experience also differed wildly.

For the next week, Ariah, who the media dubbed ‘the Widow Bride of the Falls,’ waited for Gilbert’s body to be found. Dirk Burnaby, a local businessman with a big heart stood vigil with Ariah, warding off the media and generally smoothing the way for the woman he had been instantly smitten by. Even Dirk couldn’t say why, as Ariah was plain, socially awkward and strange, notwithstanding the fact that her husband, whose name I had forgotten by about the twentieth page, had suicided after a single night with her.

Less than three weeks later Dirk turned up with flowers and champagne at Ariah’s home in Troy, New York and told her he was in love with her. Perhaps it was the champagne, but with Dirk, Ariah discovered sex and love, and despite the disapproval and condemnation of her parents and her first husband’s parents, she married Dirk and went to live with him in his luxurious townhouse at Niagara Falls.

Ariah and Dirk built a life together, and later when they had children, reconciled with her parents.

The ‘honeymoon’ section of the story was dreamlike, but the story and the emotions it generated eventually changed direction again. Dirk was a lawyer with a great many social and business contacts but when he took on a case to fight big businesses responsible for polluting a neighbourhood where an unusual amount of residents had cancer, he was ostracized socially and professionally. I felt terribly unsettled while reading this middle part of the story, but was still surprised when it ended with a murder.

The story and the character’s lives then dramatically changed again.

I loved the constant changes in this story and the twists and turns in the character’s lives. I loved Dirk, although was also frustrated by him being so good and idealistic that he risked his whole life for his cause. I also felt very attached to Ariah, even though she was far too prickly to love. She was the most frustrating, annoying, neurotic, yet fascinating character I’ve come across in a long time. The Burnaby’s children, when it was their turn to tell the story during the 1970s, were much more likeable than their mother but just as interesting.

The location was also fabulous (who doesn’t want to visit Niagara Falls?) and the writing itself was excellent.

I couldn’t put this book down, but it was so big that I read it for a solid week – luckily for me there was a long weekend during that week. I’ll probably wait a while before reading something else by Joyce Carol Oates, but I will read more eventually.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

I suppose The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon was so popular and won so many awards when it was published in 2003 that many readers would already have read this book. I’m not sure why I hadn’t come across this already, perhaps I disregarded it because it was marketed to Young Adult readers, but better late than never, as the saying goes. I certainly enjoyed the book more than twenty years after it was published.

The story was narrated by Christopher, a fifteen-year old who lived with his father in the UK after his mother’s death. It began with Christopher wandering around his neighbourhood at night and finding Wellington, neighbour’s dog, dead in a yard with a garden fork sticking out of it.

The neighbour found Christopher cradling her dead dog and called the police. Christopher was able to answer their questions but when a police officer tried to touch him, he hit the officer and was arrested. Later, Christopher explained that he did not like to be touched.

The story continued as a murder-mystery, with Christopher investigating who had killed Wellington and why, however the more he probed, the stranger the actions of the adults around him seemed to become, with other mysteries arising and being solved, and relationships being tested.

Christopher was extremely analytical and so completely literal that he was unable to relate to his father or any of the other people around him unless they spoke to him without using jokes or metaphors or anything that was not completely truthful and exact. In an early chapter of the book he included drawings of faces on the page then explained what the expressions meant. Christopher recognised the depitctions of happy and sad, but went on to say that he was unable to understand what other, more complicated facial expressions meant.

The chapter numbers also leaped around in a way that made no sense to me until I recognised them as prime numbers, after reading Christopher’s explanation of these. If I’m being completely honest, I wouldn’t have known what a prime number was without the explanation!

The level of detail of the world around him that Christopher observed and described was overwhelming to me as a reader, and even more overwhelming to him. I believe Christopher had Aspergers Syndrome, however this was not confirmed.

I liked Christopher and his story, and think that even though The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is YA, it also has a lot to offer adult readers.

Sylvester by Georgette Heyer

I read Sylvester by Georgette Heyer on my first day of my Christmas holiday. I started reading before I got out of bed, kept reading while stirring my breakfast porridge on the stove, continued to read on the couch later in the morning instead of doing something useful, then finished the story sitting outside in the afternoon sun. I had a fabulous day.

Sylvester (the Duke of Salford) had a fairly specific list of what he wanted in a bride – as he told his mother, his potential bride required some degree of beauty, to be well-born and intelligent, possess countenance and elegance. He’d narrowed his list of possibilities to five of the current London debutantes when his mother told him that she and her dear friend had joked about their children marrying each other one day, causing Sylvester to wangle an invitation to meet the Honourable Phoebe Marlow.

Phoebe was not a beauty and her behaviour was rude and hoydenish when she and Sylvester met, so not surprisingly she didn’t meet any of his criteria but as it turned out, Sylvester didn’t meet Phoebe’s idea of a husband either.

Knowing that her step-mother would force her to accept Sylvester if he offered marriage, Phoebe ran away, escorted by her best friend Tom. Obviously (!) their curricle was overturned in a ditch and Tom broke his leg. Holed up in an inn during a snow-storm, guess who turned up next to stay at the inn? Sylvester, that’s who! Funnily enough, Sylvestor turned out to be okay, if a little arrogant, and he and Phoebe became friends during their time at the inn.

When Tom’s father arrived at the inn intending to bring Tom and Phoebe home, Sylvester helped Phoebe to escape so she could stay with her grandmother in London, knowing how cruelly she had been treated by her father and step-mother.

Sylvester’s nose was still slightly out of joint at having been rejected by Phoebe so he decided to make her fall in love with him, but of course Phoebe saw through that and planned to punish him instead. All would have been well had Phoebe not written a book before they met, depicting Sylvester as an evil uncle in a story that co-incidentally mirrored his actual circumstances. The book was published anonymously, but of course Sylvester guessed that Phoebe had written it and that he was the book’s villain.

I liked this story and Phoebe very much, but had mixed feelings towards Sylvester, who had a tendency to bear a grudge and behave spitefully. The supporting characters were fabulous, especially Phoebe’s friend Tom who in my opinion deserves to be the hero of his own Georgette Heyer novel himself one day.

Sylvester and Phoebe’s romance was comparable to that of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith

After a recent book swap with Aunty G, I received an enormous bag of books which included Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny. Many of the stories in this collection weren’t misogynistic, but they were all nasty.

The first story, The Hand, was misogynistic. A man asked a father for the hand of his daughter, and received her actual left hand in a box.

Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman was the story of a physically unattractive, yet sexually irresistible woman who didn’t need to be clubbed on the head for her to have sex with the men in her clan. Perhaps not surprisingly, Oona inspired the men of her clan to create art, words and music. This story left me wondering what to make of it, and hoping that no one was looking over my shoulder to see what I was reading while I was on the train to work.

Apart from Oona, who was a victim of her own sexuality, the women in the rest of the stories in this collection were generally horrible. Rest assured, for those who like fictional wrong-doers to be punished, these horrible women mostly died at the end of their story.

The coquette from The Coquette was murdered by her lovers. The lesson from that story is to make sure that your rival lovers don’t start talking to each other about you and then gang up on you.

The woman in The Dancer was also murdered, after making her lover and dancing partner jealous of each other.

The woman in The Mobile Bed-object was drowned in a canal by her most recent lover and the woman in The Victim mysteriously disappeared after a date with a man in Tangiers. The wife in The Invalid, or, the Bed-ridden came to a bad end too, after pushing her husband (otherwise known as her meal-ticket) too far.

However, the woman in The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife managed much better after she murdered her husband and got away with it. She inherited his insurance money, received a widow’s pension and retained the title of ‘Mrs,’ which allowed her to do what she wanted to in future and remain respectable.

The stories were very short, but were so similar that they stopped being shocking about half-way through. I suppose the humour would be described as black or satire, although I never found myself laughing. Very often the women were raped, sometimes children were raped, and even though these characters were horrible, they were nearly all murdered at the end of their story. The lesson was not to be the woman in any of these stories, which also included The Prude, The Evangelist or The Perfectionist, but I found the repeated murders of the women at the end of each story to be overly similar for the stories to have impact.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang was a weird story.

The plot sounded good on paper, an apocalypse-type scenario with smog spreading across the world and blocking out the sun, which prevented food crops from growing. People everywhere were starving, although the narrator, a young, female, Chinese-American chef working at a restaurant in London with access to frozen fish, dried herbs and a miracle mung-protein flour that grew in the dark, was luckier than most.

When the un-named narrator took a job as a private chef for a wealthy Italian man and his daughter, Aida, who owned a mountain-top that occasionally saw the sun, she suddenly had ingredients available to her that hadn’t been seen anywhere else in years. Some of the foods she cooked for her boss’s extremely wealthy guests were from massive underground storehouses, while others were grown in labs beneath the mountain-top compound by Aida and her team of scientists. Some of the meat the narrator cooked was from animals that had previously been extinct, as Aida and her father played God, deciding what species of animal or plants they would continue to grow.

I thought it particularly odd when the narrator began a relationship with Aida, especially after Aida’s father expanded the narrator’s job description to include impersonating his missing wife, Aida’s mother, at formal dinners and functions.

I think I would have enjoyed the story better had it been less literary.

The characters were cold. It was hard to get to know them, which in turn made it hard to get to like them. The sumptuous descriptions of food was the only thing that kept me turning the pages.

Strawberries, bread, clotted cream and sour Heritage apples. Honey and wine, peanuts and macadamias. Panna cotta and fruit butters. Wild carrots. Barely a page went by without the description of a taste or smell of something lovely.

Karissa from Karissa Reads Books reviewed Land of Milk and Honey just before I started reading this book and she makes some interesting points about the plot.

Book Review: Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Silas Marner by George Eliot

I spun Silas Marner by George Eliot in The Classics Club’s spin #36 and have to admit to having been very pleased because I knew the book was short!

However, I still found the first half of Silas Marner to be a hard slog and couldn’t seem to get interested in the plot or the characters. Eventually something clicked and I loved the last half of the book. I’m now planning to re-read the first half.

The story is set ‘in the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farm houses’ near the village of Raveloe, where the title character, a weaver named Silas Marner lived in a quiet spot next to a deserted stone-pit. Silas had moved to the area after being falsely accused of stealing church funds when his best friend set up him up, then stole his girl.

The only real joy in Silas’s life was counting his gold he earned from his work, which he hid under beneath the floor of his home.

When the local Squire’s good-for-nothing son Dunsey stole Silas’s gold, Silas felt as if he had nothing left to live for. Dunsey went missing the same night as the theft, but no one connected the two events and so the identity of the thief was a mystery to Silas and the Raveloe community.

Godfrey, Dunsey’s older brother also had a secret, in his case, he had a wife who was addicted to opium. Dunsey had been threatening to expose Godfrey’s secret family to their father, Squire Cass, who would probably have kicked Godfrey out of his home and his will if he knew of Godfrey’s marriage, so Dunsey’s disappearance was a blessing for Godfrey.

Godfrey had outgrown his short-lived lust for his wife and was now in love with Nancy, the daughter of a neighbour. Both Godfrey and Nancy’s fathers hoped their children would marry and couldn’t understand why Godfrey wouldn’t get on with things.

When Godfrey’s wife decided to bring things to a head by taking their child with her to Squire Cass’s New Year’s Eve party, I became more interested in the story. The wife took opium then fell asleep in the snow during her journey and died, and Silas Marner, of all people, adopted the child, a little girl whose golden hair reminded him of his lost bags of gold. Silas’s love of little Eppie and hers for him brought about his redemption into society.

Godfrey recognised his child but she didn’t recognise him, so he kept quiet about who she was. Godfrey’s story eventually came to a head, also.

I liked that there were some happy endings and that characters who behaved badly were punished, although some characters experienced hardships they didn’t deserve as a result of their connections with those who did. I liked the messages and the characters, and little Eppie, whose character reminded me of Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.

Silas Marner was book seven of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 08, 2028.

The Visitors by Jane Harrison

The Visitors by Australian author Jane Harrison tells a story of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour from the point of view of the First Nations people, who watched the eleven sailing ships arrive on Gadigal land on January 26, 1788.

On the day, seven Aboriginal Elders from seven different clans gathered on a high cliff overlooking the harbour where the ships had anchored, which were larger than any bark canoe the watching Elders could ever have imagined. The seven men then spent their day trying to come to a unanimous decision about whether the unwanted visitors should be welcomed to country or made to leave.

Based on their experiences from an earlier visit by people in sailing ships, initially most of the Elders wanted to repel the unwanted arrivals but as the day went on, even though the visitors were demonstratably cruel, ignorant and rude, the Elders continued to talk and argue their points, as they changed their minds about what to do.

The first thing that threw me was when one of the characters, Lawrence, rolled up his loose cotton pants before wading into the sea to collect mussels. The reference was only in passing, but I rolled my eyes, thinking that the author had made a silly mistake. When the Elders wore their best suits to attend the meeting and followed formal, long-established protocols I realised that the European clothing along with the Elders’ English names Walter, Gary, Gordon, Albert, Joseph and Nathanial had been deliberately chosen to demonstrate that the First Nations people had culture, history, laws, ceremonies and traditions, one of which was welcoming visitors to their country.

The author’s descriptions of the Gadigal area (Sydney), which included the sea, beaches and land were truly beautiful and the character’s knowledge of the birds, fish and animals as both food sources, weather and season forecasters and as cultural totems was interesting. The characters seemed very real and I liked that although the Elders who gathered on this day were all men, that was only because the women were already engaged in their own important business that same day.

The before and after of the Aboriginal people following the First Fleet’s arrival was particularly jarring.

This story was originally written as a play, which showed in the character’s dialogue. I would love to see the stage play of The Visitors in future.

My purchase of The Visitors continues my New Year’s resolution for 2024 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (February). I purchased The Visitors at The Bookshop in Queenscliff.