Book Review: Margaret, Are You Leaving? by Dianne Yarwood – an empathetic, insightful story about finding your roots

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Yet another book about a character coming to terms with her family’s past, but no less enjoyable for all that. I’d chosen the book for its interesting and attractive cover – yes, covers do matter – and was soon engrossed in Maggie’s story. She’s an engaging character, a real live-wire, now in her forties. We’re in Sydney a couple of decades ago and Maggie’s at work where she fields calls from viewers for a television channel. She’s interrupted by a phone call from her brother Lucas with the news that her adoptive mother is dead.

The news is a shock, but not because of grief, but rather because it reminds Maggie of her terrible childhood. Lucas also reveals that he has found some documents about Maggie’s birthmother, but she’s reluctant to go down that path, aware that the woman gave her up when she was two, and that makes two mothers that were unable to love her. The book follows Maggie’s eventual decision to find out more about her origins and the journey that takes her.

When Maggie’s not at work at the station, she also has a job as a part-time teacher aide, which she loves and has a talent for. She’s particularly good with troubled children, seeing in them the need for connection that she had missed out on. You can’t help thinking what a terrific mother she’d have been herself.

I loved the character of Maggie, who really carries the novel. She’s madly enthusiastic for cooking – there’s lots of delicious food described – and when she’s unhappy, goes fishing, whatever the hour. I particularly loved her dog, a pointer called Brian, who strikes me as one of the best literary dogs I’ve met.

She drove to Rodd Point and parked by the water, then set herself up on the stone sea wall with Brian locked by her side. The water was inky and changing in the moonlight. She wore a small head torch and it lit up her hands, the fishing line, the ledge where she sat with her legs dangling over its edge.
It occurred to her that she’d come here to scream. To scream and scream and not be heard. But there was someone else. A little further along a man stood on one of the small rocky ledges in front of the wall. Fishing as she was. Alone and quiet as she was.
So instead she held one finger on the line waiting for movement and worked to fend off despair. Her chest rose and fell, water lapped. Brian lay beside her with his head resting on her leg.

Maggie also bonds with her TV channel co-worker Anna, who has her own mother-related subplot. As an Englishwoman having settled in Australia, Anna desperately misses her family back home – particularly her mother. This mother is the opposite of Maggie’s mother, the two phoning each other most days, while Anna’s own home life revolves around children and family.

The story reveals some sad truths about Australia’s immigration history – particularly the difficulties European migrants found adjusting to life in Australia, often carrying the burden of their wartime experiences. Maggie’s experiences in institutional care as a troublesome child also make for sobering reading. In the Author’s Note at the back of the story, more of this is explained plus that this book is inspired by the life of the author’s friend.

But the overall feel of the book is uplifting, a feel-good read due to the empathy Dianne Yarwood creates for her characters, even the not very nice ones. There’s wisdom and humour as well, and maybe it was a little too feel-good for me, but you can’t help wanting a happy ending for someone who has had so much sorrow. Margaret, Are You Leaving? is a three-and-half star read from me.

Book Review: More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen – a warm and witty novel about family, friendship and DNA

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Anna Quindlen’s new book has some similar themes as Ann Patchett’s Whistler. And while Patchett’s obviously the heavyweight here, both authors have a wisdom and warmth about them with a real empathy for their characters. More Than Enough follows forty-two-year-old English teacher Polly Goodman who belongs to a book group where no one is allowed to read the book. They buy the book, each taking turns to choose the book, but no one is to read or talk about the book, because their monthly get together is a chance to talk about themselves and share what’s important.

It’s her three friends from her book group that have bought Polly a DNA kit as a kind of joke. Perhaps if she’d had a happier relationship with her mother, if her father wasn’t in a care home for early onset dementia, she would have hesitated longer before sending away her sample for analysis.

When Polly discovers she has a match with someone outside her family, the sceptre of a family secret emerges and she agrees to meet Talia, a troubled young girl she instantly warms to. Garrison, Polly’s brother is gay and insists there isn’t a chance of his fathering a child – I love Garrison, who’s both worldly wise and hilarious. She can’t talk to her father about it, and her mother’s a formidable, high-flying judge who doesn’t inspire confidences.

Meanwhile, Polly and her lovely husband Mark, a large-animal vet at the zoo, are trying desperately to have a child, have had several disappointing rounds of IVF, to the point that it begins to seem impossible. There are more book group meetings, and Talia introduces Polly to her grandmother, a wise and empathetic breeder of alpacas, which she uses for her absurdly expensive range of knitwear.

Polly and Mark are lovely characters, you want the best for them and you get the backstory of their relationship. There’s Polly’s school teaching and her growing up with that tough-cookie of a mother – something Polly has always resented. This reminded me of the mother-daughter relationship in Whistler, along with the sense of a mother keeping secrets. Again, we have characters that are well-meaning – there’s nobody whose nasty or manipulative , nobody driven to do something terrible – maybe because there can be enough things going on in ordinary lives to create the tension a story needs to keep you reading.

Each term I put a poster on the old cork board with a quote from a writer. This year it’s from Louisa May Alcott: “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” At least a few of my first-years will copy it down, worried that it will make its way onto the exam. Every time I look at it, I will think to myself, Lies, lies and damn lies. But that’s just me, still afraid of storms, and of capsizing.
“Who is George Eliot?” I’ll ask them right out of the gate so that I can get a snapshot: the ones who had researched the writer, the ones woh hadn’t, the ones who didn’t know who I was talking about, even occasionally the ones, usually transfers from other schools, who thought George Eliot was male. I loved my job, and I loved Windsor, but I had to start playing intellectual chess day one.

Over all, this is a warm, gentle read, laced with sad moments as well as humour. Although it may seem a little slow going, it’s well worth it as you become invested in the characters. I had to put it aside for a few days when I was away for a weekend – I don’t like taking library books on holiday – and couldn’t wait to get back to Polly’s story on my return. I’ve enjoyed other novels by this author and More Than Enough did not disappoint – a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Cold Sunset by William Boyd – Gabriel Dax returns, completing this accomplished espionage trilogy

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Gabriel’s Moon and its sequel, The Predicament, follow the career of reluctant spy, Gabriel Dax, a travel writer who has become useful to the British secret service. He’d unknowingly become involved in the movement of information thanks to his brother, and now, because of his infatuation with his handler, Faith Green, finds it difficult to extricate himself from the world of espionage.

In the third book, Cold Sunset, Gabriel can’t ignore the fact that he’s become a killer, with two deaths bugging his conscience, both self-defence, but still. Just as well he continues to see a therapist, who he’d originally contacted for help with a sleeping disorder. Now he unburdens himself quite openly about his spy work, which is troubling, and his relationship with Faith, which also raises red flags.

It’s 1964, and Boyd paints a very realistic and vivid picture of the time. There’s attention to all the details – the clothes and cars, the restaurant meals – that give you time and place without overwhelming us in period colour. We’re also very aware that we’re a couple of decades on from World War II, with social change in the air, that women can have careers, and that we are in the midst of the Cold War.

Gabriel’s trying to complete his new book, On the Beaten Track, with unusual angles to very familiar tourist attractions, a useful cover for a job for Faith in the United States. Nothing is ever quite as simple as she makes out, of course, and on his return he realises he’s in the sights of a man with a grudge – a hangover from what happened in The Predicament. The world of espionage is already encroaching, when Faith has a new assignment for him: to “exfiltrate” their double agent in Moscow.

So not long into the story, the pace is set for some nail-biting situations. Boyd also cleverly brings in characters from the previous books – Tyrone, his London friend who’s something of a fixer, or Varvara, his former Russian contact in London, a set-up designed to keep Gabriel onside with their counterparts in Moscow, and a nice little earner. It’s all meticulously plotted, as any spy novel should be. But it’s also a thoughtful examination of what life as a spy might be like – the lies Gabriel tells people, even his friends, the “kill or be killed” aspect that’s always hovering in the background.

And although Gabriel’s a flawed character – there’s his drinking and poor judgement with women just for staters – he’s also very much aware of how he’s caught in Faith Green’s web and what it’s doing to him. This gives the book an interesting psychological aspect, which along with the brilliantly crafted writing, makes the book a satisfying read.

I read Cold Sunset courtesy of Netgalley and Penguin Random House. Best read after the first two books in the trilogy, Cold Sunset is due for release on 3 September and is a four-star read from. me.

Book Review: Whistler by Ann Patchett – a surprise reconciliation and the story of a family

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

A new Ann Patchett novel is always such a joy, and this one did not disappoint. Whistler is written from the point of view of Daphne, a teacher at a private girls’ school in her fifties. She admits to being popular with older men, so it’s not surprising that Jonathan, her husband, is a seventy-year-old retiree. They’re at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when Jonathan notices an elderly man following them. It turns out to be Eddie, the stepfather Daphne hasn’t seen since she was nine.

The two reconnect – Eddie was always the nicest stepfather you could imagine and the pair had been close in the two years they’d known each other. But it all came to an end when Daphne’s younger sister, Leda (their mother had gone through a Greek mythology phase), developed appendicitis and Eddie was left to collect Daphne from school while their mother stayed at the hospital. A car accident on a snowy night ended with Eddie being sent packing and ever since Daphne felt it was her fault.

The story dips back into the past to recreate that night and also tells the story that Eddie was hoping to develop into a book – he’s an editor at a major New York publishing house. The story has a similarity to this one, and involves a horse named Whistler – in case you were wondering where the title came from. We learn about the girls’ father Buddy, who left his family when the girls were small, beckoned back to a life at sea; the resilience and mental toughness of their mother; and of her third marriage to the author of books about positivity, who has become an oddly bitter old man.

A lot of the book is Eddie’s story too. He’s a wonderful character, a genuinely nice guy who makes a strange pact with Daphne’s mother, which hampers his emotional life enormously. But out of it Daphne gets a fabulous dad and friend. Books are his life too, and this he passes on to Daphne. So this is a great novel for book lovers and writers too.

Eddie Triplett had been cut from an entirely different piece of cloth, and it was the same piece of cloth that Daphne came from, or that’s what she told herself. He read constantly, and not just finished books. He read books that were loose piles of paper and marked them up to make them better. “A work in progress,” he liked to say, as if the novel needed some help getting on its feet. At her insistent begging, he once marked up a theme paper she had written for English class, correcting it the way a teacher would so that she could write it out a second time, fixing her mistakes before handing it in. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” Eddie said, circling her misspellings, her word repetitions.
“Other parents to it,” she said. And they did. Not her mother but other people’s mothers. Never the fathers as far as she knew.

Segments of the accident as it is recounted are placed strategically through the book and the story builds to a satisfying ending. There’s a thread of grief that runs through it for the years of wasted time, and guilt too over how it all happened. I found this an enjoyable read with good company, but less compelling, less gritty than some of Patchett’s earlier books, in particular The Dutch House, Commonwealth or State of Wonder. The characters so well-heeled and comfortable, even if the past does shake them up a bit – but not for long.

It’s interesting to delve back into a family and see the difference between what a child sees compared to what really happened. I’m sure that the book echoes real life in this way for many of us. So while this is a quieter story than earlier Patchetts, there’s more than meets the eye. With that in mind, Whistler is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: This Is Happiness by Niall Williams – a coming of age story set when electricity comes to a small Irish town

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been reading these Faha novels out of order, but as we follow different but connected characters from this small Irish town in the middle of last century, it doesn’t seem to matter. Having read Time of the Child and loved it enormously, I picked up This Is Happiness, which I’d attempted once before. It had been a little slow and I didn’t have the patience for it at the time. Niall Williams has a very rich, unhurried and idiosyncratically Irish writing style that you have to take your time with it. But once you do, it’s rewarding and immensely entertaining reading.

The story begins with Noel, or Noe as his family call him, a seventeen-year-old who has just abandoned his studies to be a priest. He doesn’t return home to his father’s quiet house in Dublin, but decamps for his grandparents home on the outskirts of Faha, a backwater in County Clare. His grandparents, Ganga and Doady, live in a simple cottage that hasn’t caught up with technology or modern comforts, apart from the fact they have a telephone. It is because of the phone that Christy, a man working for the company soon to install electricity in Faha, asks if the elderly couple can give him room and board.

And so begins an unusual friendship between Christy and Noe. Christy is a terrific character, a striking man in his sixties with a white beard, a blue linen suit and no inhibitions, it would seem. He has worked all over the world and has lots of stories, but is very kind too, gentle with the old people and indulgent of Noe. The two strike out by bicycle in the evenings in search of music, and Christy regales Noe of how his life has one lingering regret, one that involves the widow of the Faha chemist.

Romantic inclinations also shape Noe’s story, in particular his admiration for the doctor’s three elegant daughters, although he receives little encouragement either from the girls or their buttoned-up father. The two romantics, young and old resort to various madcap plans to win the objects of their desire, which gives the story tension and humour. There’s heartbreak too, and Noe learns a few lessons, while in the background the work on the delivery of power goes on .

Christy was considerably shorter than me, but in deference to his bulk or age took Ganga’s taller bicycle and I the smaller one of Doady. There were bicycle clips somewhere, if only they could be found. Your right sock did emergency duty and was the better for being black and taking the streaks of oil without comment. See us then, a mismatched little and large, pedalling uncertainly out the yard.
The lamps on the bicycles had long since conked out. The small ambit in which my grandparents lived made them redundant, but less so for us, and we met each bump and pothole and progressed into the falling night by jolt and glide.

The writing is very descriptive, Williams capturing every sensation and immersing the reader in Noe’s world. The rain, which seems to be a continual presence in this part of Ireland, suddenly gives way to an unseasonably warm spring, bringing everyone out of doors to experience the sunshine. In 1950s Faha, we see a dying way of life as electricity is set to bring change. While this promises comfort and opportunity, the reader can’t help feel a touch of nostalgia for the old ways.

This was such a charming book, I found myself once again chuckling as I read, or reading sentences aloud to anyone who would listen, because Williams has such a lovely way with words. I am glad there’s a new book in the Faha series to look forward to – O Now! comes out in October. This Is Happiness is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: The Undoing of Violet Claybourne by Emily Critchley – a tense, coming-of-age, historical thriller

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This novel was long-listed for a Historical Dagger Award, so I had high hopes for an intelligent mystery. The Undoing of Violet Claybourne is more psychological thriller than mystery and built a well-sustained creeping sense of dread, for this reader anyway.

Most of the novel takes place over the 1938 Christmas holidays when Gillian is invited by new school friend Violet to her family’s crumbling mansion, Thornleigh Hall. Gillian’s mother died when she was born, and her diplomat father in Egypt has remarried and now has a young son, leaving Gillian’s care to a penny-pinching aunt.

Gillian is delighted to be staying with a proper family, and one with good connections at that. Violet is a little childish to Gillian’s mind, still playing imaginary games, and with strange rituals – her “undoings” – which the modern reader will flag as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Violet is also affectionate, exuberant and kind.

Violet’s parents aren’t quite what Gillian might have hoped for. Her father is war-damaged and vague, her mother a vain and snooty woman who doesn’t believe in education for girls, but Gillian is soon swept away by Violet’s glamorous older sisters. Only Laura drinks too much and is unstable, while Emmeline, a student of psychology, is calculating and manipulative. Ignoring her school friend, Gillian attaches herself to the older girls with disastrous results.

There are secrets which slowly leak out during Gillian’s visit. Why is Emmeline so mean to Violet? What happened with the tutor who left in a hurry? There’s also a poacher who Flora’s father is oddly tolerant of and who lives on the estate. Then there’s the small boy Robin, also tolerated, the child of one of the maids. This family seems somewhat benighted, so when disasters happen, I wasn’t in the least surprised. Much of what goes wrong seems to come from their general sense of superiority, and the necessity of keeping up appearances.

When I think of the Christmas of 1938, what comes to mind is the sound of the dinner gong, the shine of the silverware, the rustle of Emmeline’s dress as she swept up the central staircase. Jazz music drifting through the drafty, shut-up rooms, scarlet-clad figures galloping across the snowy fields, and Violet sprawled star-shaped across her bed. “How good it is to be home, Gilly.”
    But these are nothing more than scrambled snapshots, a slideshow of disordered images on a fuzzy projector screen. If I am to remember, to truly remember, I must go back to the very beginning.

There’s a Boxing Day hunt, then a ball, as things go from bad to worse, and by the end of the Christmas break, I was relieved when Gillian’s story is rescued by the start of a new term and then the the war. Gillian throws in school for London and gets stuck into the war effort, a chance to forget about everything that happened at Thornleigh Hall. Her story is bookended by glimpses of Gillian in her seventies as the past comes back to her and she finds out what has happened to Violet and her family.

This a nicely paced story, the secrets revealed at just the right intervals, and the writing and characterisation both excellent. I was reminded a little of The Go-Between by L P Hartley as well as Nancy Mitford’s novels, with this book’s exploration of a dying way of life and how secrets can tear a family apart. The audiobook edition was excellent too, read by Nathalie Buscombe. All in all, it’s a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher – a riveting retelling of the Snow White fairytale

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Book challenges are a great way to step out of your reading comfort zone and discover fabulous new books you’d never normally think of reading. And this was how I discovered Hemlock and Silver, a book recommended by a couple of colleagues and which I might never have got around to except that it happened to fit not just one reading challenge but two: our local library’s Turn Up the Heat winter reading challenge (discover a new genre), and the 52 Book Club 2026 reading challenge (read a standalone fantasy novel).

I think it was the strong narrative voice which appealed to me from page one. We meet Anja, a healer specialising in poisons, scruffily attired and with a chime adder for company, when the King arrives at her workshop asking for her help. He wants her to cure his daughter Snow, whose health has been in decline, with some kind of poison suspected. While Anja is thought of as a healer, she is at heart a scientist, observing, noting and experimenting, often with roosters, but also on herself.

Anja is the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, she’s a big woman, abrupt and sometimes tactless as her more marriageable sisters often remind her. But she has the respect of those who need her help. Her new task will take her away from her home of Four Saints, to a desert enclave where the Princess is sequestered, accompanied by two of the King’s guard, chatty and cheery Aaron and the strong but taciturn Javier.

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.
The poison was a distillate of chime-adder venom, which burned my sinuses when I took it off my wrist the way some people take snuff. The king was a tired man of medium height, with sandy hair and deep grooves worn into the sides of his face. I hadn’t recognized him at first when he stepped through the door of the stillroom. Well, why would I? The king was someone that I had seen far off, at the head of a long table or perched on a throne. Without context, he was simply a well-dressed man who had come in without even knocking.

As everything she knows about poisons throws up no obvious solution, Anja is forced to watch and wait and hope for a solution. Spying the Princess eat an apple that has not been brought from the palace kitchen’s, Anja is mysteriously drawn into a strange world involving mirrors, a talking cat and a sense of evil. There is indeed dark magic afoot, but T Kingfisher maintains a light touch with her storytelling, with humour and a touch of romance never far away.

She also does a brilliant job of creating a believable magical world that relates well to the original story. As such it was the perfect fantasy read for me, as we have that ‘stranger in a strange land’ feel, with Anja’s observant and scientifically aware character. She’s aided not only by a snarky cat who is only sometimes helpful, but by the practical and determined Javier. It’s a clever reinvention of a fairytale favourite, complete with poisoned apples, but missing the dwarfs.

I particularly enjoyed the audiobook narration of Hemlock and Silver, which was read by Jennifer Pickens who does the voices so well, I would seek out other books she reads on that basis alone. Hemlock and Silver is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Wreck by Catherine Newman – a funny and relatable novel about the trials of modern life

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So I never got around to reading Sandwich, Catherine Newman’s earlier novel about Rocky, a woman going through menopause and what happens when her family are on holiday together at Cape Cod. It was on my to-read list for ages, but you can’t read everything, and I somehow didn’t read Sandwich. Now, I’m seriously tempted.

In Wreck, Rocky is back and it’s another summer. She and her husband have a busy household, with Willa, her PhD student daughter, living back home, as well as her ninety-two-year-old dad in the cabin in the garden. Rocky and Willa both suffer from anxiety and a few things happen which bring this to the fore. A train accident when a young man is killed, someone they know vaguely who went to the same school as Rocky’s son Jamie, has her caught up in the social media storm that erupts. And then there’s the rash.

Rocky’s skin condition seems to defy medical explanation and she goes through a ton of tests. Time passes, and it’s Halloween, then Thanksgiving and Christmas and these issues threaten to unbalance Rocky’s world. This might sound a bit grim, but it never is because Rocky is such good company and Newman is such a witty writer. The way she and Willa bounce off each other, her father’s random comments about modern life, memories and non-sequiturs, her good-humoured and sometimes goofy husband, all add to the fun.

An email dings in, and I click over to it. It’s a new message from the patient portal EarlyGateway, which shows up in my inbox as ppearlygateway. Pearly Gateway! Like it’s a missive from the afterlife I’ll be arriving at ASAP. You have new test results, the message says. I hover my finger over the link, sigh, click back over to the Internet. I don’t even want to know just yet. It’s Schrödinger’s rash: Until I look at the results, I simultaneously do and do not have skin cancer. I’ll just loiter around scrollingly for a bit.

At first I wasn’t really sure where this slice of life book was going. Is it about the rash? Is it about the accident? And yet it’s all so entertaining. Can we really laugh about this stuff? The medical stuff is brilliant though – the calm indifference of the patient portal and its raft of lengthy latinate terms, the backwards and forwards between clinic and specialist appointments, the scans and blood tests. The endless wait for results, for a diagnosis. We can see why Rocky gets anxious. On top of everything, Rocky and her dad in particular, miss their mother who has died a year or so ago.

Somewhere in the middle the threads come together and the book suddenly has a lot more substance. Rocky is so vividly written you can’t help wondering if there’s something of the author in her. Both thoughtful and humorous, Wreck is by the end, a life-affirming read, fairly short – a short book is nice every so often – and very relatable. Wreck is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Bone Lands by Pip Fioretti – first in an Outback Noir series and a cracking good story

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Pip Fioretti writes a kind of genre blending crime novel with Bone Lands, which combines everything that we love about Outback Noir – the big skies and harsh, dry landscapes, the Aussie battlers who live there – with a hardboiled policeman and puts it all in the historical setting of 1911. And as a character, mounted trooper Senior Constable Gus Hawkins has a lot going for him. He’s complex in that he’s well-educated and sounds it, with several tours in the Boer War behind him which have left him with both mental and physical scars. He’s smart and resourceful, but that old PTSD means he drinks too much and gets into fights.

But then, everyone here seems to get into fights, well, just about. It’s a hardscrabble existence out in the back-blocks of New South Wales. Hawkins’ little town of Calpa is a ‘blink and you miss it’ kind of place, with a pub, a post-office, the police station and not a lot else. It’s a one-man station, with tasks often concerned with managing unrest – there’s not a lot to do in Calpa but drink your wages away – local admin like gun permits and the like. But riding home from monitoring behaviour at a dance honouring the King’s coronation, Hawkins comes across a serious crime – three young members of the same family brutally murdered.

The Kirkbride family are well-off landowners, running a huge sheep station, and not well liked in this haves and have-nots kind of place. With the endless work required to make money from wool, they have a huge labour force of hardened men of the land. Life is cheap and violence comes easy. But when the violence is against their own, the grim landowner and patriarch Robert Kirkbride is oddly reluctant to have Hawkins nosing around too much, preferring to believe in the ‘robbery gone wrong’ theory. It doesn’t help that Gus has had a romantic connection with the remaining daughter, Flora.

It was a six-hour ride upriver to Bourke. In summer it was a bastard of a ride, one I preferred to do at night if I had a choice. The thing to do was carry a tin of Josephson’s Australian Ointment. Buckskin breeches were made so you didn’t chafe, but six or more hours in the saddle on a hot day and everything chafed, from balls to brain. The glare was blinding but our official hat was a jaunty pillbox affair, which would be just the thing for a Parisian gendarme but was ridiculous out here. I shoved it in a saddlebag and wore a cabbage-tree hat like every other man in the bush.
The sun was on its way across a vast blue sky, a westerly wind blowing. I noticed a shape ahead in the distance, moving slowly. Dancer stopped at the sight of it. He didn’t like things that moved, nor did he like things that didn’t move. So there we were, his ears pricked forward, completely still, every muscle tensed and ready to flee.
‘How’d you get into the police force, mate?’ I said, stroking his neck. ‘Bribed someone, eh?’

But Gus is determined to find out what happened. These were his friends and he wants to bring some closure for Flora, too, who has become unhinged by the deaths of her siblings. It doesn’t help when two detectives arrive from Sydney with their own way of doing things, but none of the nous for dealing with the locality or shifty farm labourers. If conflict is the linch pin of a good story, then this one has it in spades. You can’t help but feel for Gus, even if he is, quite often, his own worst enemy.

Other characters are interesting too, particularly in relation to Gus. His initial dislike of Trooper Lonergan, a somewhat wet behind the ears type, sent from Bourke to manage the station while Gus looks after the detectives, mellows into friendship. Other characters are lightly drawn but the author captures their essentials in a way that makes them immediate. The few female characters – this really is a man’s world – have to manage as best they can, and we can’t help but sympathise over how they’re treated. The plot steams along towards some surprising revelations to make for a very satisfying mystery.

Bone Lands is atmospheric and absorbing, with sentences that are nicely honed and laced with wit, making Gus Hawkins good company. It’s a great start to a series – there’s already a second book (Skull River) with another due out next year, which is good news. Bone Lands is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan – a sweeping and emotional historical read

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

Patrick Ryan’s novel, Buckeye, haunted me for days after I finished it. The story takes us to the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, starting off during World War II. We follow the lives of two couples, Becky and Cal Jenkins, and Margaret and Felix Salt, through the events of the war, and on to the lives of their children. Events of the twentieth century, wars certainly, but social changes too disturb their lives, but nothing compares to how they deal with events themselves.

All four of them have something that makes them different. Cal has one leg shorter than the other. This exempts him from military service, so he drifts into marriage with Becky, who has a gift. She can communicate with the dead. Astonishingly beautiful Margaret hides the secret of being abandoned as a baby at an orphanage, while Felix, who is gay, tries to lead a conventional life with her. The war shakes them all up, well and truely.

The story begins on the day victory is declared in Europe (VE Day), 1945, with a young Cal working in his father-in-law’s hardware store. He’s interrupted by the arrival of Margaret who has to know what all the commotion is all about and asks if Cal has a radio. They listen to the news together and exchange an unexpected kiss. From there we dip back into the past to discover Cal’s story and Margaret’s, each of which is tragic in its own way.

When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.

Cal’s father Everett lives out of town, traumatised by a previous war as well as the loss of two children and his wife to illness, becoming irascible and a hoarder. I really enjoyed the character of Everett, particularly the way he writes angry letters to whichever president is in office at the time. His war service has made him fiercely against war and this theme recurs during the book as more wars upend people’s lives.

Margaret is an interesting character in that she never reveals anything about her upbringing, determined to appear ordinary – if only she knew what that looked like. And it’s hard to quietly figure that out when everyone, particularly men, see nothing but her stunning good looks. So she has secrets from Felix, who likewise hopes for a normal family life. If only the war hadn’t got in the way, he might have kept up the pretence.

Cal keeps on trying to make the best of things, dealing with a demanding father-in-law, as well as his own difficult father, who never shows him any affection. He struggles to understand his wife’s talent which puts her in demand for readings with people who have lost loved ones, some from WWI, and more when the next war rolls along. The complications of children put the characters through even more, with more secrets, but also possibilities.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Like many who lived through the twentieth century, the characters of Buckeye have had their lives overturned by world events. There’s trauma and the tragic losses incurred by war. The prosperous post-war period that imagined a bright future for people but with that a restrictive social order. The changing times with the Civil Rights movement, while gay rights and feminism also get a look in.

It all adds up to a gripping read and an emotional one, certainly enhanced by characters you sympathise with. And then there’s the fine writing. I shall certainly be looking out for more by this author. Buckeye is a five-star read from me.