Tag: humour

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

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

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: My Friends by Fredrik Backman – a coming-of-age story and a meditation on life, art and love

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I’ve not often read a book that took such a philosophical look at the human condition, in particular the emotional cost of loving other people and of loving ourselves. About being able to say yes to life, when all around you is pain. This sounds kind of heavy, but in Backman’s hands it never is. Not really.

My Friends begins with a famous work of art and a young girl soon to turn eighteen, who has run away from her foster home with cans of spray paint in her backpack. Lousia has had a hard start to life, and when things go wrong at an exhibition of a painting loved by all the world, she runs down a back alley, where she meets, of all people, the artist. That’s all he has by way of a name, the artist, and when Louisa meets him he’s very ill.

Before long Louisa is on a train, running from her life, and latching on to Ted, the artist’s childhood friend. They’re also lugging along with them, the painting, yes, that one. The artist had got Ted to sell everything he had to buy it back and then unexpectedly bequeathed it to Louisa, a girl with nothing and whom he’d only just met.

Yes, it’s a crazy kind of premise, but soon, shy awkward Ted is heading home on a train, reluctantly with Louisa, who never stops talking, except to listen to his story of how the painting came to be. It’s the story of a summer when four friends are turning fifteen, how their odd friendship came about, and how things are all set to change before school starts again.

“I’m not an artist, I’m -“
The janitor interrupted him so sharply that his ladder wobbled:
“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet … but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until its’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”
The boy hesitated for a long time before saying:
“I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things. There’s something wrong with my brain.”
“That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied.

First Ted tells Louisa about the artist, that weird kid who tends to get bullied, until Joar steps in and fights back on his behalf. Joar is loud, brash and tells terrible jokes. It’s Joar who crashes into Ted on his bike and who brings him along to the pier – where the friends hang out. Then there’s Ali, the only girl, who is fierce and loud, and a match for Joar. The four build a tight friendship that sees them through the difficulties of their home life, each of which is heartbreaking in its own way.

The story is teased out in chapters interspersed between Ted and Louisa’s lengthy train journey, which is interrupted by all kinds of hiccups. Louisa is difficult to put up with, and yet Ted can see why the artist took a shine to her. She draws too, endlessly sketching away, though doubtful of her talent. You get a lot about the need to believe in yourself and the power of art to transform lives.

At times I did find this book lacking in pace – the kids are always getting into trouble and there are endless anecdotes about that. And that train journey seems to take forever. But it all comes together well and the there are enough surprises to keep you interested. I’m glad I read My Friends. It’s original, inventive and thoughtful and leaves the reader thinking about it long after the last page – a four-star read from me

Book Review: Eat Slay Love by Julie Mae Cohen – a never-a-dull-moment revenge comedy

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I often enjoy novels in audiobook format that I wouldn’t necessarily pick up as a print copy and find some unexpected delights. Unlikely friendships lie at the heart of this story about three women from very different walks of life conned by the same man.

To Lilah, he’s Zachary, a caring, romantic man she bonded with over books at the library where she works. Lilah is in her twenties and has recently won a lottery. She’s shy and naive, but while she has a loving dad, a retired postman with a fondness for model trains, she’s very much in need of some guidance about managing her nest-egg. Zachary is always there to lend a helping hand – of course he is.

Opal is a post-menopausal fitness guru with a blunt, matter-of-fact manner determined not to let another woman fall for her ex-husband’s tricks. Only to Opal he was Zander, and three years ago, he’d disappeared with all her money. Then there’s Marina, a harried mother of three, who has just started dating again after her divorce. Xavier has helped her rediscover her sex-drive, but Opal knows that while Marina may be strapped for cash, she has just inherited her grandmother’s well-appointed house in the leafy suburbs of London, which makes her a sitting duck.

The story opens with a man at the bottom of Marina’s cellar stairs, unconscious, tied up and with Peppa Pig plasters on his head to stop the bleeding – Marina’s not completely heartless. Opal and Lilah arrive to assist – and so begins a friendship that bonds over what to do with Zachary/ Zander/Xavier. Each woman has a back story. Lilah with her love of books, her job at the library where she has to deal with a resentful colleague, and then the money, a break-in at her new house which ended in tragedy.

Marina struggles to convince her mother that she is in fact divorced and that she shouldn’t have to sell her grandmother’s house to share the inheritance with her brother and cousins. Her granny was a woman ahead of her time and knew the value of independent means for a woman like Marina. Her legacy is dependent on Marina being no longer married to her selfish, cheating ex.

Opal has never had friends before – she’s a determined business woman and not very likeable, a bully to her staff. But someone seems to be following her. Could it be Zander? Her bonding with Marina and Lilah over the Zander problem is unexpected and transformative. The story flips between each main character so we can see their insecurities around trusting the other two, their dilemmas and the dangers. Complications pile up on top of each other, bringing out new strengths the women never knew they had.

Opal couldn’t stop looking at the man on the floor. He’d used to have black hair, and now it was silver-gray and white. Had he dyed it? Or had they both aged so much in the past three years?
No, it was dye. She knew how he worked. Black hair hadn’t been his real hair color, either.
But none of this was part of his plan: the basement, and the duct tape, and the Peppe Pig Band-Aids, and the three women together.
She wondered: would a normal person, a better person, feel pity for him?
Lilah sidled up to Opal. “I think Marina pushed him down the stairs,” she whispered, her words trembling. “On purpose.”

This was such a fun read, well written and bubbling with humour. The narration by three different actors (Clare Corbett Katherine Press and Rebecca Norfolk) for the three narrative voices was brilliantly performed. Eat Slay Love is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Time of the Child by Niall Williams – a beautifully crafted period novel set in rural Ireland

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

This is one of those novels that rewards perseverance, opening as it does in a way a fable might begin, and taking its time with setting the scene and establishing character. The writing also takes a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of it, you might find yourself utterly hooked, as I was.

Time of the Chid is set in Faha, a small town in Claire. It’s 1962 and we’re in the lead up to Christmas with a story centred mostly around the town doctor, Jack Troy, and his unmarried daughter Ronnie. There’s a lot of scene setting as we follow Jack on his rounds, and his reminiscences about lost love. He and Ronnie are isolated from the rest of the town in that they have no obvious social equals. Ronnie’s sister begs her to let her find a match for her, but Ronnie is happy where she is – what seems like loneliness to others is freedom to her.

Doctor Troy and Ronnie rattle around in Avalon, a large rambling home that doubles as a doctor’s consulting room, the house riddled with mice and various kinds of rot. It’s not a place you’d want to spend winter in, and the weather here is a character in itself, in various versions of wet – rain, sea mist or fog – and always chilling. Jack has a lot on his plate working in a town where people are mostly struggling to pay doctors fees in a timely manner, an ageing population and a priest who is losing his mind to dementia.

In the parish, the doctor had the standing that close acquaintance with suffering bestowed. Beneath his waved grid of silver hair, his sunken eyes said that acquaintance came at a cost. He had a worn air, his complexion tending now to ashen, his top lip covered with a shoebrush moustache he had grown to put a small distance between himself and the hurt of the world. Although he lived in the magnificent dilapidation of Avalon House, and carried himself in a manner that Faha might have summarised as Not like us, he was vouchsafed a place of honour in the parish by the twin virtues of not leaving and being indispensable.

There’s also young Jude Quinlan who comes from a poor farming family, with a father who drinks and gambles away much of what he earns. We follow Jude helping his father bring the cattle to sell at the town fair and you get more on this colourful event, the characters and how the townsfolk interact with each other, the expectations and buzz as people prepare also for the Christmas season. All of this before the pivoting event of Jude discovering an abandoned baby.

The story follows what happens with the baby, rescued by the doctor and Ronnie, and secretly cared for. We get a view of an Ireland where children born out of wedlock were a shame to be whisked away by the authorities, and your imagination conjures up orphanages run by nuns and not a lot of love. The baby meanwhile captivates Ronnie and the doctor, and as Christmas looms, each separately imagines what might happen next and how to fix it.

This is a delightful read, a gentle story that packs an emotional punch, with characters that you really get to care for. It’s all particularly enhanced by the wonderful writing in spite of sentences that are often long and convoluted in an Irish sort of way, and brimming with imagery that is somehow just right. Some, particularly the humorous ones, I just had to read out loud. There’s plenty to make you think, with themes around what is the right thing to do, about guilt and atonement, the spirit of Christmas and whether there is in fact a God.

I loved this book and seeing that Time of the Child is the second novel set in Faha, will be hunting out its predecessor, This Is Happiness – there’s a third, Oh, Now to be published later this year. Time of the Child won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2025 and is a five star read from me.

Book Review: The Wedding People by Alison Espach – a witty comedy-of-manners and second-chances novel

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I must say I was a little dubious about the premise of this book, but I’d heard so many good things, I hesitantly plunged in. In The Wedding People, life has hit rock bottom for our protagonist, Phoebe Stone, an academic who teaches Victorian literature, but has never finished her dissertation. She’s stuck in a low paying role at the same university as her ex-husband Matt. He’d left her for her best friend after he and Phoebe had tried and failed to have a child. Already at a low ebb, the discovery of Harry, her cat, dead in the basement is too much and she plans to kill herself. What better place to do it than the Cornwall Inn.

The Cornwall Inn was a holiday destination Phoebe had hoped to enjoy with Matt, but he’d had other ideas. It’s a luxury hotel on the coast, so she books herself into the penthouse suite and arrives in her best dress and with no luggage, Harry’s painkillers in her handbag. She’ll order room service, watch the sunset and pass gently away on the canopied bed. The thought of reading about someone about to take their life was a little daunting but, as Phoebe waits to check in at the hotel’s reception, I soon realised this novel was going to be fun.

Also at the hotel, people are gathering for a wedding. Lila is throwing a huge, million-dollar affair to celebrate her nuptials to Gary, and thinks she’s booked the entire hotel for her guests for the week. She’s not pleased to find an interloper in the penthouse suite and challenges Phoebe about it in the lift. The two strike up an odd kind of alliance over the days leading up to the wedding, and Phoebe finds herself a confidante to all manner of concerns Lila has, which for some reason she doesn’t share with her bridesmaids. Lila seems to be as much alone as Phoebe.

“I never understood why my mother was so obsessed with art. I studied it for four years, and honestly, I get it even less now. Like seriously, what’s the point of it?”
Again, the bride looks at Phoebe and waits.
“Are you asking me?” Phoebe asks.
“Have you never been in a conversation before?”
“It’s been a while, actually.”
“I can tell.”
“And to be honest, I’m not sure I get the point, either.”
When Phoebe left for graduate school, she had very clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us feel alive. And this had been true for Phoebe – Phoebe used to read books and feel astounded. She used to walk around galleries, inspired by the beautiful human urge to create. But that was years ago. Now she can’t stand the sight of her books. Can’t bear the thought of reading hundreds of pages just to watch Jane Eyre get married again.

As the wedding draws closer, Phoebe becomes swept into the wedding preparations, filling in for a missing maid of honour and taking part all kinds of events – from the bachelorette party to learning to surf – and develops an unfortunate attraction to the groom. Without a charger for her phone she is quite cut off from her old life, and starts to imagine something new. I loved how her area of expertise appears in the book, her knowledge of Victorian heroines like Jane Eyre and also the Mrs Dalloway she decides to finish when she finds it on the hotel bookshelves.

There’s also a host of humorous characters that you get to know, like Jim the best man who Lila finds a bit over-friendly, and Patricia, her mother, accused of drinking in the afternoon. Phoebe gets to know them and learn their secrets. Weddings, it seems, don’t bring out the best in people, and Phoebe discovers all sorts bubbling away under the petulant exterior of Marla, the groom’s sister, or the sullenness of young Juice, his daughter. You can talk to someone like Phoebe, who you’ll probably never see again after the wedding, a bit like talking to a priest.

Which is the other thing I love about this book – the dialogue, which is hugely entertaining. I can just imagine the book would be terrific on screen (apparently, film rights have been sold). The Wedding People is probably the most enjoyable book I’ve read this year – it’s fun, clever and resonates emotionally too. So it’s an easy five stars from me.

Book Review: Go Gentle by Maria Semple – a smart comedy caper that gives you something to think about

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I confess I still have Where’d You Go, Bernadette on by bookcase, unread, but hope to rectify that soon, having just finished Maria Semple’s new book: Go Gentle. This was such a fun read, although on opening the book, I hadn’t a clue what to expect. And I’m still not quite sure what kind of book it is, as it seems to blend a lot of genres: mystery, romance, intrigue, family relationships, and comedy.

The narrative is all from the point of view of Adora Hazzard. Now in her mid-fifties, she’s planning her later years by ensuring the other people moving onto her floor of the New York apartment building where she lives are like-minded older women she approves of. Known by some as the coven, the idea is that they’ll look out for each other as they age, avoiding aged care facilities and sharing costs.

Adora has a stipend with an old-money family, the Lockwoods, Layla and Lionel, tutoring their young twins in things philosophical in their extraordinary glass house, or at work across the road at the Lockwood Library, with its amazing art collection. For a confirmed stoic, there’s a lot of abundance on show. Her stoicism comes from a dark part in her life when she was a twenty-something comedy writer in Hollywood. The story dips back in time to fill you in, along with Adora’s recovery and path to philosophy.

Nietzsche said, Amor fati. Love fate. You have to love what happened to you. I actually got that tattooed. When it truly clicks, no matter what the universe throws at you, you’re like, Please, sir, I want some more. I’m not talking Wagyu beef and béarnaise, I’m talking the grand parade, the whole catastrophe, I’m talking life.

Adora is an interesting character with many layers, which Semple reveals little by little. She’s not always likeable – to start with she’s got a smart stoical answer for every situation, something her fifteen year old daughter endures not so stoically. If there wasn’t an art heist, a fascinating handsome stranger, a flit to Paris, and a close call with danger, there’s still plenty to keep you turning the pages. I enjoyed the balance between the two. The way Adora tries to live a planned life of the mind, but also how events take her by surprise and shake some of that out of her.

The story is rounded out with a wide cast of characters – the people in Adora’s apartment building, including staff; the Lockwoods and their entourage. I loved meeting landscape gardener Blanche and her South American contractor Dorris, who are full of surprises. These characters are all shown through Adora’s perspective and in the lively dialogue, which as a non-American did sometimes challenge my knowledge of American slang. But in the end I decided to just go with the flow and still found heaps to enjoy.

Go Gentle is due for release on 14 April. I enjoyed this novel courtesy of Negalley and Hachette Australia in return for an honest review. It’s a fun, intelligent novel that gives you plenty to think about even after the last page – a four-star read from me.

Book Review: This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum – an original and riveting L.A. thriller with all the feels

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I hadn’t a clue what to expect from this debut novel, and even looking back having turned the last page, it still seems an interesting mix of genres – by turns a psychological thriller, a dramedy and a love story.

This Story Might Save Your Life is named after the massively successful podcast hosted by besties Benny and Joy. The idea behind the show is life-threatening situations, and how to survive them. Each episode describes one such event researched by one of the team, who then asks the other, how would you escape – for instance, being caught in the mouth of a humpback whale. So yes, we’re not just talking house fires and boats capsizing.

There’s a lot of comedic banter, and it’s really the personalities of the two that make the show work. Neither Benny or Joy ever thought they’d be still doing the show years later but subscribers write in with their own near-death survival situations and it goes from strength to strength. Joy’s husband Zander has helped grow the brand, running the business side of things and even taking the show on tour.

The situation is complicated by Joy’s medical condition. She has narcolepsy, which means those closest to her are aware that she might just fall asleep at any moment. With care and meds she leads a fairly normal life. The other complication, which happens right at the start of the book, is that during the season that the Santa Ana winds threaten trees and cause general mayhem, Joy and Zander disappear from their home.

We get Benny’s story about the disappearance, the police investigation and the growing concern that the two may be in danger. Benny’s not a big fan of Zander – there’s some jealousy there between them – so his main concern is for Joy whose narcolepsy makes everything tricky anyway. Interwoven with the all the CSI, the search teams and suspicious looks from a probing Detective Keller is Joy’s story. She and Benny have a publishing deal to write a two-person memoir, so this is her story, going back to her learning to deal with her illness, make a life for herself, her meeting Benny and then Zander.

The switching between the two stories makes you beaver through the chapters desperate to see what happens next. Joy’s backstory is just as interesting as Benny’s search for clues, slowly bringing us up-to-date with potential reasons for the disappearance. The plotting is excellent, but the characters are engaging too. Joy and Benny are charming and funny – Joy captures our empathy because she’s just so positive in spite of her medical condition, while Benny’s a bit of a goof, but also intense. He’s also been through some difficulties and has a temper.

Zander is a bit of a dark card, and there are other characters who have emotional connections to the two MCs – among them Zander’s sister Mallory, and Benny’s ex, Luna, which adds further complications. It’s quite likely someone’s lying, but who? And even Benny and Joy seem to be hiding something. So there are plenty of twists that keep you eagerly reading to the end. I also loved the L.A. setting which Tiffany Crum helps you visualise – a place I’d be happy to revisit.

I read this novel courtesy of Netgalley and Hachette, Australia for an honest review. It’s a great story, and I’d certainly be keen to read more by Tiffany Crum. This Story Might Save Your Life is due for publication on 10 March and is a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: Hastings: a boy’s own adventure by Dick Frizzell – an entertaining memoir of growing up in 1950s provincial New Zealand

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

Gosh life in the 1950s could be dangerous. Kids jumping on bikes and disappearing for the day, nobody really knowing where they were, mowing the lawns with bare feet, impromptu caving adventures under a mountain known as The Peak. Somehow the author managed to survive childhood to write this entertaining memoir about growing up in his home town of Hastings – that’s Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand – not the one in England or any of the other Hastings around the world.

Dick Frizzell is one of New Zealand’s most instantly recognisable artists – his paintings, that is. When you read this book, you’ll discover that not only did he win an art prize at his high school, but an English prize as well. As a writer, he has a chatty style, the kind that you can imagine him using to tell a funny anecdote over a beer. It’s also very descriptive, with many original and quirky turns of phrase that help you imagine what things look like. The visual artist coming out in his prose.

Although I missed the 1950s entirely, my quite a bit older siblings would tell similar tales from their childhood and a similar picture of New Zealand would emerge. This book begins with Dick’s early years, and the arrival of a whole bunch of sisters, his parents’ concern that he needed a brother and the sudden arrival (and departure) of Ray. The book is full of characters, beginning with his parents – his engineering father’s ability to build and fix, and to get through large amounts of beer during a rabbit hunting excursion. Or his mother’s love of entertaining, her cottage art and determinedly sunny nature.

These characters – neighbours and kids from school, elderly aunts and teachers – emerge in the stories, which are often wild and whacky tales, capturing the young Richard as an innocent at large. The decision of Dick and his mates to test the saying ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’, which of course meant ‘borrowing’ a gun and fish; the unusual ‘mates’ he makes in hospital on a men’s ward following a burst appendix; joining a theatre troupe performing South Pacific as a call boy and painting on tattoos.

A couple of days later we got the fish into the barrel. Well, we got one fish into the barrel; the other one was dead when I retrieved the bucket from its hiding place. Maybe the crushed-up Snax biscuits didn’t suffice. Could’ve been the salt.
So now we had a fish in a barrel and were beginning to feel a bit half-hearted about the whole enterprise. The actual logistics were starting to look a bit daunting too. Just how do you shoot a rifle into a barrel? We were going to have to stand on boxes. Maybe it was meant to be ‘shooting fish in a half-barrel’.

Such a busy time, and all through it a nostalgic look at how we lived. New products at the corner shop, like the arrival of the first popsicles (marketed as TT2s), driving his mother’s 1936 Austin Sherborne, saving up to buy Beano, Phantom and Uncle Scrooge comics, teenagers with motorcycles at the milk bar. Through it all lots of drawing and art, the future painter starting to develop. It all seems so innocent now.

Did the outside world impinge at all on any of it? As a kid, I remember being very aware that my older brother could get drafted into the Vietnam War, that there was a nuclear arms race, pollution and not enough food for countries in Africa, George Harrison singing about Bangladesh. I remember getting really worried before I even got to high school. It was a different time, I guess.

Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a fun read though. I chuckled my was through the thirty stories, some of them quite hair-raising. A trip down memory lane, or your parents’ memory lane. It’s the kind of book you can pick up and put down as each story is a separate vignette, which makes a nice bedside read, or gift, I should think. The first in a series of planned memoirs, Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a four-star read from me,