Dear Reader. Yes, you! You haven’t heard from me in ages because I’ve been busy getting my website and book covers done. You know I’ve been rambling on about writing books for ages but here’s a refresher!
My new website is up and running and you can see descriptions of my three books there. Yes, three: told you I’ve been busy! Pre-orders are up on Amazon now.
I have cheated a bit because one is a poetry book hahaha. Where Sunflowers Grow is the Rome novella I’ve talked a few times. Ashgrove Park is my gothic fiction, paranormal romance novel. It’s the first in a series of three books under the title A Jack & Bea Mystery.
The second novel, On Jacaranda Street, I will start writing on May 1 and it’s set in my hometown of Sydney in the 1920s.
So, I’ll be swinging over to my website now but will keep this blog active because the stats tell me I have some very popular posts. My website also has a blog. Obviously, I will be blogging about what I’m up to with writing, but I’ll also do books reviews.
I hope to see you over on my new website, but it’s goodbye from Up North.
Even though I’m still in the thick of writing, I’m trying to keep up with my reading. Here’s what I’ve read in September so far.
The Smoke Hunter by Jacquelyn Benson. Debut novel. Historical thriller, adventure fiction. Published in 2016. If you’ve seen Indiana Jones movies and Tomb Raider, no need to waste your time reading this book. At over 400 pages, there’s a lot I didn’t like, so I’ll start with this. First, how many adverbs can we pack in? Everyone spoke wonderingly; everyone smiled thinly; everyone replied awkwardly; or everyone said baldly. I’m not a fan of adverbs at the best of times, and if a good editor had slashed, we might have ended up with 250 pages LOL. Yes, I do use some adverbs in my own writing but never in overkill mode. For this reason alone, I nearly gave up on the book early in the piece as it was SO irritating. Second, I’m not a fan of chic-lit romance novels, particularly not ones where the woman is swooning over bare chests and rugged handsomeness and losing her mind because of a sweaty, beefy male.
But – I overlooked these annoying aspects because the book promised a pretty wild adventure. It’s a mash-up of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft with a strong female character in Ellie Mallory. There’s also a touch of Rider Haggard in this novel with its Victorian-era setting.
We start off in London in 1898 where Ellie is an archivist in the Public Records Office. Unusual for that time period, Ellie has a degree but is outed as a suffragette. She loses her job, but discovers on the desk of her less-than-supportive boss a map and a curious metallic disc. She steals them both and off we go on a fast-paced adventure into the uncharted South American jungle in hot pursuit of a mythical lost city that, if discovered, would make Ellie’s name in archaeology. Throw in a disgraced professor who’s also after whatever treasure there is; his dastardly boss who wants to shoot everyone; and a smoking mirror with extraordinary powers thought to reside in the lost city, and you have a roller coaster ride. Oh, throw in some huge nasty bats, too.
The male lead is Adam Bates – a surveyor in British Honduras. He becomes Ellie’s guide as they venture into the jungle (he’s the bare-chested bloke). Like Indiana Jones who’s afraid of snakes, he’s afraid of heights. And like Indie who has to solve riddles or be skewered by a stake or pinned down by a ginormous rolling stone, Adam and Ellie have to solve a number of trials as they move through underground caves in search of the artifact everyone wants. I found Adam a bit cardboard cut out for me. He couldn’t quite hold his own against Ellie.
I did end up feeling a bit like I’ve read this all before as the novel is very derivative, but on the whole, I enjoyed it.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Published in 2013. Fantasy/magical realism. Gaiman is a well-known speculative fiction writer, and this book is his second adult novel. I’ve long been curious to read something by Gaiman, but I wish I hadn’t started with this book. It left me cold to be honest. So the story goes like this –
An unnamed narrator who’s in his late 40s returns to Sussex for a funeral. He grew up there in a house along a lane and decides to visit. The house is no longer there, but he drives to the end of the lane where the old Hempstock farm is still standing. He starts to remember things – when he was 7 years old, the South African lodger at his parent’s house killed himself and this act unleashed a malevolent force. The three women of Hempstock farm are guardians and their job is to stop dark forces from destroying our world. The narrator gets caught up in all the evil stuff going on and 11-year-old Lettie Hempstock saves him. The title refers to a pond at the back of the Hempstock farm and in this pond lies a deep ocean, which as I understand it, shows the narrator the nature of all things and how everything is connected. He has knowledge of everything when he becomes immersed in the water. As an adult, he discovers that he has returned to the farm a number of times but has no recollection.
Why didn’t I like it? I found the narrator’s voice dull to be honest. Gaiman’s writing style also irritated at times. He writes well, but used the first person POV and there was a lot of “I did this. Then I did that. And then I did this.” I also felt the novel (which is pretty short at around 150 or so pages) read like a YA book. No problem with this, but it’s billed as an adult novel. I also wondered why Sussex wasn’t a character in its own right – I wanted more of the setting. My grandmother was from Sussex, so I know there’s a lot of fascinating mythology and history to the area.
On the plus side, Gaiman really captured childhood fears, uncertainties and imagination. There’s a lot of lovely folklore and fairy tale elements to the story, and in a wider context, the book is about rediscovering (or perhaps discovering) who you really are from the perspective of adulthood. And I did like the contrast of childhood innocence with ancient wisdom. On the whole though, it lacked energy for me. However, I’m not going to let this detract because Gaiman has a huge following. I plan on dipping another toe in and reading Stardust next.
Love these mossy rocks on our property.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Asian/American literature and published in 2014. Every time I’ve tried to borrow this debut novel from the library, it’s been on loan. I can see why – what a profoundly moving book with exquisite prose. Apparently, it took Ng six years to write, and I think I read somewhere there were four different drafts.
The story opens in 1977 Ohio with the drowning of a 16-year-old girl, Lydia Lee, who is one of three children in a Chinese/American family. James Lee (the father) is Chinese, and Marilyn (the mother) is white American. Marilyn wanted to be a doctor, but lived out her own mother’s dream of marrying and having children. James is an academic who teaches the subject American Cowboys at university. Being Asian, he has never felt as though he belongs, especially in 1950s/1960’s lily-white America, and being an expert on American cowboys and the frontier gives him an anchor in American culture.
Lydia’s death is a springboard to dive deep into this dysfunctional family’s problems. It’s all beautifully nuanced – the struggle of the 1960’s woman to get out of the kitchen and have a career of her own; what it means to be American; how we sometimes take on the ambitions and hopes of our parents; how grief plays out in different ways. Was Lydia murdered? If you’re looking for a thriller this isn’t it because her death isn’t the primary focus of the narrative. I was mesmerised by the writing and will definitely be reading Ng’s next novel Little Fires Everywhere.
In the Time of Foxes by Jo Lennan. Australian author, debut short story collection published in 2020. The title had me at hello. I was really looking forward to an eclectic bunch of stories (mainly contemporary). The settings range from a London garden, to Mars, Russia, the Spanish coastline, and Tokyo. One story even mentioned a small Aussie town I used to live near (Wangi Wangi). A fox or fox-theme passes through all the stories, but in some, it was a bit tenuous e.g. in the Mars story, there’s a reference to a flower called fox’s breath. I wondered if it was a gimmicky thing to have foxes popping up or inhabiting a garden or describing someone as “fox-faced”, but Lennan is a clever writer, she uses the characteristics we associate with foxes – curiosity, trickery, cunning, wisdom, guidance, betrayal, survival – to explore and observe (with camera-like detail) the human condition.
I didn’t really engage with the whole collection though and here’s why. Her stories lacked imagery for me. I never really gained a sense of place. Day Zero is set on Mars for example, but I never felt the red dust up my nose or clinging to my skin. The writing style is sparse, minimalist (yep, I like that), but it was flat for me and the characters were two-dimensional. I thought the opening story (the same title as the book) was the strongest. The MC has a fox problem in her London backyard, and back home in Australia, her mother has Alzheimer’s and will most likely need to go into care. So Lennan explores a sense of home, and what it means to have to leave one’s home.
It wasn’t a collection of stories I wanted to get back to, although Lennan is a good writer, and I know many readers will enjoy her debut collection.
For some reason unknown even to me, I’ve always been fascinated with Mars. Mars the planet – not the Roman god of war. As a kid, I think my parents must have been frustrated with my refusal to hear bedtime stories about fairies or princesses. Nope, I wanted them to read about the planets and the stars from what I think were called Wonder Books. If they were frustrated they never said a word, and by the time I hit high school, I knew every planet in the sky and could point out Alpha Centauri, Sirius (the dog star), or Canopus. It didn’t escape my notice that when I started university, the coat of arms of the uni featured Sirius.
Dad bought me a telescope when I was 10 or so, and I’d spend hours in the backyard gazing at the heavens. I still do. I often go out late at night and stand under a night sky burning with stars.
But I digress. Back to Mars. Somewhere along the line, Mars became a thing for me. I could tell you when I was around 11 years old that the planet’s two moons are Deimos and Phobos – panic and fear – very apt names considering it would be pretty hellish to live on Mars. I was caught up in all the Apollo missions and was devastated when NASA brought moon missions to an end.
Source: Wikipedia. Author: ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team
It seems to me that people of the space age took risks we’re unwilling to take anymore. It was 1972 when the final mission (Apollo 17) landed on the moon – nearly 50 years ago – and since then? We’ve had the shuttle, which shuffled astronauts and cargo off to the ISS, but no real plans to go to Mars. Elon Musk has Mars firmly in his sights now, which is great, and he’s got the re-usable rocket thing covered. And re-usability will be key to bring down the cost of missions to Mars. President Richard Nixon had the choice between going with the space shuttle or adopting Wernher von Braun’s plans to land on Mars. Wernher von Braun was the architect of Germany’s rocket technology in WWII, and he had plans to put people on Mars by 1982. Nixon went with the shuttle, and I remember reading he had been deeply affected by the Apollo 13 near-disaster. No one likes dead heroes, but humankind’s advancement depends on people who are willing to fling themselves into space to see what’s out there or sail in a ship to test whether the Earth is flat or not.
I watched Away on Netflix last week (highly recommend it – starring Hilary Swank) about the first Mars mission, and I’m re-watching (for the gazillionth time) Mars. I can’t imagine the courage it would take to be sealed up in a spacecraft for 8 months or so (although I reckon Musk will figure out how to shorten that flight time). Anything could go wrong, and if you manage to land safely, there’s the thinner 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars, which would (literally) make your blood boil; the plunging nightly temperatures of minus 80 degrees F (minus 62 degrees C); the abrasive, toxic dust storms that rise up in the Martian sky higher than your average building (get caught in that and human lungs are toast); and then there’s the radiation that will zap you (because of the thinner atmosphere).
Wernher von Braun in 1964. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: NASA
I don’t see how humans can live on this savage planet long-term, but I dream of the technology that will one day make it possible. There’s a race between Musk (who believes humans could be on Mars by 2024) and NASA (who are working on photons to propel the spacecraft forward instead of fuel – see? I still keep up with all things Mars).
Right now, Mars is amazingly red in the New Zealand sky, and every time I look up at it, I think maybe we should leave well enough alone. We’re basically wrecking this planet, why trash Mars? And once we’ve trashed Mars, what next? But then again, I think if humans don’t take that giant leap, our civilisation will be reduced to the banality of social media and watching endless cat memes.
I’ve instituted quiet time again. This is when I spend at least one hour a day reading, and the dogs are supposed to be sleeping. Yes, well: the latter doesn’t always happen, so I snatch 30 minutes here and 30 minutes there in between walks, play and feed times.
All my life I’ve read books. I remember reading James Michener’s Chesapeake sometime in the 80s. Couldn’t put it down. I still have most of Michener’s books in my personal library, but the one I haven’t read is Caravans. Must do so. I plan to get back to reading (or re-reading) some of the panoramic adventure writers like Michener and Wilbur Smith. Their kind of mainstream storytelling isn’t so common in today’s writing world. Their stories took you through generations within a family who faced some sort of drama and instilled some good old-fashioned values along the way.
A table setting from the 1800s – what stories were told around the dinner table?!
I’ve come to the conclusion that the very best writers are those who can tell a ripping yarn. It doesn’t have to be exquisite writing, but there must be great characters who go on some sort of adventure or delve into a mystery. You should be able to imagine a film or Netflix series being made. There are so many books I read now, and I’ve forgotten what they were all about months later.
Here’s an interesting thing. Compare the best-selling books from the 1970s to those of 2000-2010. I’ll give you a moment. What do you see? Yes, now we have genre writers, and very often I find genre writers full of tropes and formulaic structures. Of course, there are some very good contemporary writers, but we tend to now talk about genre – Oh, I write historical fiction. I read romance. I love sci-fi. Was young adult fiction even a thing in the 1970s? I don’t think it was. And why the swing away from the Micheners of this world? I’m not sure.
So what I’m going to do is revisit some of the old mainstream writers like Irwin Shaw, Michener, Leon Uris, John Updike, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Mary Stewart, Robert Ludlum. I plan to start with the bestsellers of the 1970s (read a lot of them but will reread) and some from the 60s and 50s.
If you have any recommendations, you know what to do.
Having said I haven’t been reading much in this year due to focusing on writing – I’ve been reading a lot hahaha. Previous book reviews for 2020 are here and here in case you missed them. There’s a mixed bag with this lot below.
The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson. Historical fiction/magical realism, published 2020. I couldn’t get beyond page 35 I’m afraid. I found it dull going and sometimes had no idea who was narrating. The premise was interesting though.
Magnusson is the author of The Sealwoman’s Gift, which I enjoyed and reviewed here. But this book, meh. The story goes like this – set in 1856, a young doctor’s wife (Isabel Aird) goes with her doctor husband to Loch Katrine where there is a public health scheme to provide clean water for Glasgow. The area is crammed with Scottish fairy lore, and the novel was inspired by the real-life Episcopalian minister Robert Kirke, who apparently wrote about fairies and Celtic supernatural beings in the 1600s. Local lore has it he was taken into the fairy realm on his death. Okay.
This is about as much as I can tell you because I gave up early in the piece. I do know that Robert Kirke makes an appearance some 200 years later and seems to stalk Isabel and that Isabel had suffered a number of miscarriages.
I was looking forward to learning the historical contest of the public water scheme but…I couldn’t deal with the confusing, multiple points of view. Sometimes, I had no idea who was narrating, and it was all a bit dull. Perhaps I should have persevered but I have a rule – if the book hasn’t pulled me in by the 25-page mark or less, it’s a DNF for me.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles. Historical fiction/Western fiction. Published in 2016. I struck gold with this little gem. Loved every minute of it. The setting is Texas 1870, and 71-year-old Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is given the task of returning 10-year-old Johanna Leonberger to her German family. Kidd is the veteran of two wars and a widower. He’s offered a $50 gold piece to take the girl to San Antonio. Johanna was captured by the Kiowa after they killed her family, and she lived with them for four years. She barely remembers English and must travel with Kidd through pretty dangerous territory to be reunited with her only family left (aunt and uncle).
To be honest, I wasn’t optimistic about this book. A Western/American frontier setting is not something I gravitate to. How wrong could I be?! The voice of Kidd was wonderful. He jumped off the page. Grisly but kindhearted. Kidd reads the news – he buys newspapers from around the US and overseas, then rents a hall in a small town, puts on a performance and reads the news to a community that delights in hearing the news from exotic places.
Johanna escapes at first, but then the story becomes one of a close relationship being formed between the old man and the girl. What was amazing (and didn’t bother me one bit) – there’s no dialogue tags but… no problem because you’re so caught up in the evocative description of landscapes and a world long gone, you don’t even notice. You know who’s doing the talking.
I felt like I was right there in lawless Texas (still a bit shambolic after the Civil War). Every single character was beautifully drawn. Johanna really tugs at the heartstrings (I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to be captured, only to be sold for blankets and silverware as Johanna was, then returned to a family you have forgotten).
No way will I give the ending away because this is a book you must read. Let me say I had a tear in the old eye (any book is hard-pressed to make me emotional – stiff upper lip and all that!). Jiles can write. Beautiful, simple prose with an emphasis on building up believable and relatable characters. She’s been writing for many years (why haven’t I heard of her?!) so there’s a good catalogue of books to make my way through.
Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac. Cyberpunk sci-fi published in 2019 and translated from Spanish. Oloixarac is an Argentinian author of some renown in her country. This book has glowing reviews, but it wasn’t for me. I was bewildered most of the time, although I appreciate this little novel’s allegorical intent.
I thought the premise sounded interesting, but it turned out to be one wild ride: a European plant biologist discovers a mysterious substance in the jungle in the 19th century that seems to break down the barriers between species; a young boy, Cassio, grows up in the 1990s and becomes a hacker; and Piera works with Cassio in 2024 in a research group dedicated to curating the digital data of citizens. I wasn’t exactly sure what the plot is because the novel is a postmodernist, disjointed narrative of a new technological species being born, computer viruses, weird sexual encounters, surveillance by governments, DNA mapping etc etc. But it all comes together in the sense of everyone in the novel having a quest for knowledge and technology that may lead to the demise of humanity.
I think I would have enjoyed it but for the flowery, dense language. There were times I had to reread a whole page to figure out what was going on. Possibly, I’ve missed the beauty of this book because it has rave reviews. It’s a meh from me though.
Beneath the Earth by John Boyne. Short story collection published in 2015. I like anything by this Irish writer to be honest. I’ve reviewed two of his books, here and here. His confident writing style always draws me in.
There are 12 short stories in this collection and the breadth of subject matter is impressive – 1930’s Australia, the trenches of WWI, a teenager selling his body, the devastating effect of social media, what it means to be Irish. All stories focus on the vulnerable: people who have a secret or who will go to any lengths to protect their family. I felt that some stories were so good they might work better as novels (case in point would be the story I most liked: Rest Day about soldiers on the front in WWI). And the endings of a few stories left me a little dissatisfied, but they’re extremely readable tales with not a whiff of prejudice or judgement in them. Liked this collection a lot!
Continuing on from my last post about being stuck in the 90s, I started thinking about the early days of the internet, and the search engines I used. I worked in Sydney law firms during the 90s and had to search for legal information. We used to say surf the net back then I think.
The internet was the new frontier. It was pretty thrilling to hear the modem “dial up” and connect to this world of information out there somewhere. I don’t remember the internet before 1996, but I do remember the computer and modem being kept – like some sacred object – in a glass-panelled room with a log book sitting next to it. Everyone had to detail what searches they’d been doing. I think because the internet dial up/connection was expensive back then, and lawyers needed to charge searches to the client.
What I vividly recall where the bright colours of websites and search engines. Shocking greens, blues, or yellows. And then there were the search engines. I used DogPile a lot, as well as Alta Vista, Netscape, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Webcrawler.
Once Google arrived in the late 90s, Netscape started to bite the dust. The other day, I decided to find out what had happened to some of the other search engines and – Mein Gott! – some are still going. Who knew! Maybe you did, but nope, not me.
These are the ones still in existence 24 years or so later – Lycos, DogPile, Webcrawler. Maybe it’s my imagination, but DogPile kind of looks the same. Guess I could go onto the Wayback Machine and find out. Ask Jeeves became Ask I’m pretty sure.
I’ve bookmarked these three and intend to use them. I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine with Brave as the browser. I try to stay off Google as much as possible (not at all paranoid about privacy, no!!).
Most Aussies of a certain age know the song Living in the 70s by Skyhooks. Good old Oz music. The first two lines of that song you could use to describe the times we’re living in. Go check it out. But this isn’t my post for today. I’ve been thinking about Living in the 90s a lot. No idea why, although I think it was sparked by scrolling through my music library and seeing the song We Weby Angelique Kidjo (released in 1992).
I’m a great fan of her album Logozo and listening to We We took me back to the mid-90s when I was dancing around to this song with my great Aussie mate. I started remembering the whole decade – one I always thought was dull-as – and now I have a new appreciation of it. The big thing I recall (living in Sydney and being obsessed with makeup) are the Poppy King lipsticks in any brown shade you liked – because brown was big in the 90s. I think this Aussie gal was 22 years old when she started her lippie empire. The line was named after the seven deadly sins, and my favourite I wore for years was Envy. Don’t know what happened to the original line, but she’s now revamped as the Lipstick Queen. Haven’t tried any lippies from this line – if you have a favourite, drop me a comment.
Early morning in New Zealand
Other than this, I remember mobile phones as big as bricks; the dial-up tone a modem would make trying to connect to a sluggish internet (those hideous 1990’s website designs, but the thrill of being able to search stuff, albeit slowly and not much of it); the search engines Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Excite; MTV; where I was when I heard the dreadful news about Princess Diana. There were some terrible civil wars (Kosovo, the Rwandan genocide).
I asked friends on Facebook what stood out in their minds and the responses were: 90210; Teletubbies; Super Nintendo; Nirvana; Y2K (which yep, I’d forgotten about despite having been on a Y2K team in a law firm); denim jackets; Groove is in the Heart.
I’m probably doing the whole rose-coloured glasses thing, but seems to me the 90s were a far better time. No social media to drive us mad; no flippin’ Facebook (I have a love/hate relationship with FB. It’s totally mindless, yet to keep in contact with school friends, I have to maintain a presence); people had better manners in the 90s; the fashion was better (what exactly IS the fashion these days??); music was more interesting and not “sounds the same” as it does today.
What do you think? And what do you remember from the 90s? My Gen Z friends laugh (yes, I have some even though I’m ancient) because one was born in 1996, another was born in 2001 – they have no idea about the 90s and what they missed. Kind of feel sorry for them, because when they look back, their young adulthood will have been defined by a global pandemic, chaos in the White House, rampant individualism….the list goes on.
Nearly the end of July. Can’t believe it. Also can’t believe the state of the world. I don’t think in my long existence on this planet, I’ve ever seen people so angry. Clearly, we’re in the midst of societal upheaval that historians will be able to unravel in years to come. We’ve seen statues toppled or decapitated and people refusing to wear masks in the middle of a global pandemic. I don’t think any of us can understand the many levels of societal angst and turmoil. Each of us has our own lens through which we view and try to make sense of the events happening around us.
It would be very easy to become anxious about the future. Better to remain focused on our daily lives and work towards achieving things, helping people and so on.
I’m literally in remote rural New Zealand, sitting on top of a hill surrounded by cows and sheep. So what I do is write. It keeps my mind calm.
Speaking of which – I won an international poetry contest for a Haiku I submitted. As it’s going to be published in an anthology later this year, I can’t post it but SO pleased to have won.
Every day throughout July, I’ve tried to stick to my writing. Remain laser-focused. What are you doing to get you through each day while society crumbles? (A dramatic description I know, but sometimes I think that’s exactly what’s happening).
Yes, I’m writing away but also picking up on my reading again. I try to write from early morning to around midday and then spend the afternoon reading. There are two cracker novels I’ve read in the last few weeks, so here we go with the reviews.
Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger. Historical fiction published in 2020. I would say this is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time, and in my view, it’s because of the exquisite prose. Leipciger is a Canadian author who was inspired by the 19th-century death mask of L’Inconnue de la Seine – an unidentified Parisian woman who may have drowned herself in the Seine.
L’Inconnue de la Seine – Public Domain image
There are three stories connected through time: the young woman (whose character is not given a name) who decides to end her life in the Seine; a Norwegian toy maker who designed Resusci Anne in the 1950s; and a young girl, Anouk, with cystic fibrosis who grows up in Ontario in the 1980s. The stories weave fact with fiction, the factual part being (not a spoiler) that Resusci Anne is the real-life resuscitation mannequin that we practice on when learning CPR and has the face, taken from the death mask, of the Parisian woman (said to be the most kissed face of all time). The death mask of the young woman was reproduced many times and is said to have inspired countless artists and writers, including Nabokov.
The fictional Norwegian toymaker, Pieter, is based on Asmund Laerdal – the soft plastics manufacturer who designed Resusci Anne – and whose son nearly drowned when he was two years old.
Leipciger imagines what the Parisian girl’s life might have been like in Paris in 1899 and what heartbreak or shame may have led her to take her own life. Water and drowning flow through the connected stories. I was particularly taken with how Anouk is quite literally drowning within her own body due to her lungs. I think the scene where Pieter’s four-year-old son drowns is possibly one of the most beautifully written scenes I’ve read.
The novel explores the stillness and power of water (rivers, oceans, coastlines) and how one copes when needing to take a breath but can’t.
Different points of view are used and this didn’t bother me in the slightest. It could have gone horribly wrong in the hands of an author who isn’t a masterful storyteller.
What I really like about Leipciger’s writing is that she focuses very much on action – biting into food, placing an arm around someone’s shoulders, baby mice squirming, the sensation of drowning. It gives her writing a stunning sense of immediacy. And she has an uncanny ability for picking the most perfect adjective to describe something or the perfect verb for action.
If you read one book this year, Coming Up for Air is the one. I borrowed it from the library, but I’m going to buy a copy for my own library.
The Uninvited by Cat Winters. Historical fiction/paranormal romance (at least I’m going to describe it this way). I’ve seen it referred to as part-Gothic ghost story, but it doesn’t have the elements of a good Gothic novel. It was published in 2015. I sort of liked this book but…
And here’s why there’s a but. The title of the book led me to think it would be a story full of tension and a few scares along the way. Nope. I found it to be a fairly straightforward story, set in Buchanan, Illinois during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. It opens with the murder of a German man in a furniture store – supposedly he’s killed by vagrants passing through town – but we learn early on that her father and younger brother killed the man (don’t worry: this isn’t a spoiler).
Ivy Rowan tells the story. She’s 25 years old and rises from her sick bed, having contracted influenza, only to see the ghosts of loved ones who always herald impending death. It’s a gift she shares with her mother. She sees the ghost of her brother Billy, who was killed on the front.
She’s not able to cope with her violent father and brother after what they’ve done, so she leaves home and sets off to start the proverbial new life (this is where I found the novel a coming-of-age story). But, wracked with guilt, she becomes involved with the surviving brother of the German victim and tries to atone for her family’s actions.
Ivy decides to remain in Buchanan, helping two female Red Cross volunteers to drive an ambulance around town, picking up victims of the influenza. She meets up with people she’d been to school with and hadn’t seen for years, loves to hear music from the Masonic hall opposite the furniture shop of the Germans, and is stalked by Lucas – a school friend who has joined the American Protective League, a patriotic organisation devoted to erasing all things German in American society (since the story takes place at the tail end of WWI, we learn about anti-German sentiment).
I won’t tell you the ending as you might want to read this book. It was obvious it was heading that way but…(another but!)…I think it was an interesting twist and handled pretty well. Sometimes a bit too syrupy for me, but I understand the attraction for readers.
The real strength of this novel is the setting – small town America during WWI and the flu pandemic; the references to the popular songs of that time period played by the band at the Masonic hall; the terrible way Germans were treated in America.
Winters is a YA author I believe, although she has written adult novels. This novel read very YA to me. Lots of cliches, and I didn’t really believe in the Ivy/German chap relationship.
However… there was something about the novel that kept me going. I think it was the very-well researched setting and the original angle (for me anyway – Germans in America in WWI and during the Spanish influenza outbreak). I also thought the character arc of Ivy was well done – when the reader learns what the hell is really going on, we see Ivy grow from a naive, sheltered girl to a woman who discovers herself and what she wants.
Because of the title I was expecting darkness and a lot more ghostly stuff. On reflection though, I think it’s a good title as so many things were “uninvited” – WWI, the pandemic, intolerant attitudes and so on.
I’m intrigued enough to read Winters’ debut YA book, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, which received critical acclaim.
The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd. Historical fiction/climate fiction, published in 2020. I REALLY liked this book. I also liked Glasfurd’s first novel, The Words in My Hand, which I reviewed here. I didn’t engage with her first book as much as I’d hoped but The Year Without Summer I thought was more restrained, and consequently, worked very well on an emotional level.
The premise is fascinating – 1815/1816 when Mt Tambora erupted on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, killing around 90,000 people, sending its ash around the world, and causing strange weather patterns and freezing temperatures, famine, poverty and riots.
It’s an ambitious novel that follows the stories of six characters – Henry Hogg, a ship’s surgeon on the Benares, a British ship sent to investigate what was initially thought to be the booming guns of pirates; the writer, Mary Shelley, who created the first draft of Frankenstein while visiting Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva; the artist, John Constable, whose painting Weymouth Bay shows dramatic dark grey storm clouds during the summer of 1816; Charles Whitlock, a preacher in Vermont; Hope Peter, a soldier returning from the Napoleonic Wars who finds his family home has been lost to the enclosure of common land; and Sarah Hobbs, a young working class girl from Littleport, UK who is always hungry and gets caught up in the civil unrest and class struggles of that time period.
It was a novel I couldn’t put down to be honest, and the scene were Whitlock’s family is forced to eat the meat of a dead foal (lost to snow in what should have been warm months) is gut-wrenching.
The six stories don’t interweave. We simply find out how the volcanic eruption affected the lives of six people, their families and communities – people who had no idea that a volcano thousands of miles away had caused their misery. I thought all six major characters had a different and engaging voice, and I connected with them all. Also enjoyable (to me anyway) was the use of old-fashioned language to mirror the speech patterns of the early 1800s.
There are obvious parallels to the contemporary climate crisis, and I thought Glasfurd did an outstanding job of capturing the anxiety of a rapidly changing time in history. Highly recommend it.
I don’t know how this happened, but I wrote over 18,000 words in June on my new novella. It’s taking a very different path to the one I mapped out. I normally write a detailed outline for a big writing project. For my first novella (which is on ice until September when I’ll go back and add to it), I had a 14-page detailed outline and largely stuck to it.
For this new one (which is about spirit photography), I tried something different and did a four-page bullet point outline. Each day I’m finding the characters are going off where they want to go. Okay I say, and I now have a completely different ending planned.
Zeph
I’ve also been researching for my next travel article that won’t really be a travel article hahaha. I’ll be writing a historical article on Pacific navigation using star paths. It’s something I’ve been intrigued by for years, and the research for this is so interesting, I have another novella/book in mind.
Apart from this, life continues on doesn’t it? We’re still stuck in the grip of a pandemic (and how crazy are those people in the US who protested and rushed out without masks?).
My PC has decided not to talk to my iPhone. They’re having a domestic of some sort. Did I tell you that I was so fed up with my last Mac laptop crashing that I decided, after 20-something years of being a Mac-only user, to buy a PC? That was about a year ago, and I’m really happy with my HP laptop. All I do though is use Word, social media, and blog.
The only problem is that my iPhone won’t upload to the PC. It used to but some upgrade of either the PC operating system or the iPhone has caused it to be on strike. I’ve found a couple of work-arounds but they are convoluted. Not sure I have the patience or time to figure it out, and I may have to rely on free or public domain photos going forward. I’m a great fan of historical public domain photos. In fact today, I was lost in photos of Christmas decorations in English houses in 1918!
Up North 