Tag: fiction

MOKEY GRIP by Helen Garner

Here is an book about the author’s experience being a young mother in 1970s Australia. She lived a kind of sincerely hippy lifestyle that I am not sure exists anymore. It’s all communal living, unsupervised children and relaxed attitudes to hard drugs. Also no one seems to have a job. It made me wonder wtf I am doing, really.

What I found particularly unusual and interesting in this book was the immediacy of the writing. She does not worry with backstory or context, you are just plunged right into the day to day. And its a very detailed day-to-day, she goes to the toilet a lot, something that almost never happens in books.

Like try this bit from near the beginning:

“Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.

It was early summer.

And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack . . . “

GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry

I don’t really read genre fiction, except for Emily Henry. She writes clever, fun rom-coms. I was excited for this new one to come out. But it wasn’t really for me. It is about two authors striving to be given the chance to write a celebrity’s memoir, and the main story is intercut with a summary of memoir’s plot. This means half the book is a summary of another, less good book? So I was underwhelmed, though the other half of the book was fun, standard, Emily Henry.

ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler

In this book we see what happens when you date someone who’s not that into you.

Adelaide is madly in love with her boyfriend Rory. He thinks she is okay. She puts in an incredible amount of time and effort for him, and he enjoys it. To be fair, he does not lie to her. When she tells him she loves him, he explicitly tells her he doesn’t love her back. And yet somehow she just cannot let him go. I get it. It’s sad. She’s drinking too much, working too hard, and not eating enough, and SPOILER ALERT it all goes pretty badly wrong.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this book was set very precisely in recent years in London. The main character and I have been to the same plays, same exhibits, same restaurants. That was kind of eerie and I enjoyed it.

KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly

I typically avoid books described on the back cover as ‘lyrical,’ and this one sailed dangerously close to that dreaded adjective. I can’t say it was a bad book; it’s just not my kind of book.

It tells the story of a gay man who finds himself falling in love a woman. This part was interesting, actually, about how unexpected desire is and what it means for your life and identity. But then it just got kind of sad, and well, lyrical. A great book for someone, just not for me.

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

Here is a multi-million copy bestseller.  It’s about school for dragon riders, kind of GAME OF THRONES meets HARRY POTTER, with some added TWILIGHT, and you can see where that got the publisher’s immediate greenlight, because let’s give the people what they want.  I read a charming article with the author, Rebecca Yarros and learnt she is a military wife (and mother of six!) who’d written twenty or so contemporary romances that sold only middlingly well, before she hit on this mashup of high fantasy and romance, which has made her famous.  Her mind is blown.  

So I love the author, but I’m afraid this is not really my kind of book. I just can’t get passed how dumb it is.  I think this is more a me-issue than the book’s issue though, and is all down to my being rigid and joyless.   A better person would not be immensely bothered by the fact that the love interest’s name is ‘Xaden’!  I mean: Xaden?!?.   In any case, I did read the whole thing – it’s very more-ish, with lots of plot and twists and turns and will-they won’t-they – which I really admired.  And I’m delighted for this lady’s success.

DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner

In this novel a woman scraps her wedding after falling in love with the best man.  JUICY!  Interestingly though, this exciting premise only takes up the first maybe 20% of the book.  Then we follow the main characters – the ex-groom, the wife, the best man, through what turn out to be long and interconnected lives.  It’s pretty sad at the end. This is not because they lead sad lives.  It’s full of all the stuff lives are full of, children, jobs, crises, etc.  It’s not even sad because at the end they are old, and deal with the stuff that comes if you are lucky enough to get old, dementia, cancer, etc.  It’s more just a feeling of: so that was that.  All that drama, changing husbands, breaking hearts, and you all end up at the same place in the end.  

I really loved some of the descriptions.  We’ve got a child “seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie;’ we’ve got chimpanzees “lounging around their enclosure like Romans after an orgy;” or this, on Haloween:  “Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer. ” 

Or this, from when the bride first meets the best man, Garrett: 

“He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender.    . . . Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time – what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk ‘a bit of a hard time’ generally meant something much worse.  It meant depression or addiction of both.”  

LOL.  Well done this author.  This must have taken some serious work. 

SAO BERNARDO by Graciliano Ramos

Here in a deeply charming elderly edition is a book that assumes a lot of background knowledge about Brazilian land ownership in the 1930s. Lacking this, it was slightly puzzling. But I can say it was bleak. Apparently a classic in Brazil, it tells about a man who pulls himself up from poverty to ownership of a large rural estate. He marries a woman who he thinks is too good for him, and proceeds to make her life hell. She kills herself. Then he feels sort of bad but not that bad and keeps building his estate. Not sure what the political context was in Brazil at the time, but I can say that this was probably not intended as a ringing endorsement of landowners.

PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross

I had a lot of contradictory feelings about this lengthy book. On the one hand it was full of incident, covering a year in the life of a fourteen year old child actor, who is being groomed by a family friend, while his parents consider divorce. On the other hand it was kind of dull. And yet I read the whole thing. And I guess I’m happy I did, it was so detailed and fully realized, I feel like it was a kind of vacation in 1980s New York adolescence. Mostly it made me glad to be an adult in London in the 2020s.

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy


This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

This is a fictional account of the first meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma.  I really enjoyed its effort to deeply imagine the Aztec empire.  It is a book very much about daily life, e.g., how did the Spanish trim their toenails?  But what I mostly liked was the freedom of the author, who brought a very contemporary voice to these historic figures. I can’t think when I’ve seen that before.  Try this: “Inside each of us is a skull,” Enrigue writes, “and that’s all that will be left of us when we’re gone; thanks for your participation.”

We did get into slightly dicey territory at the end, when the author inserted himself in the present day into the story (snore) but overall I found it an unusual and interesting take on a famous moment in history.