New Year’s Eve by Sarah Todman

I read The Catcher in the Rye ‘yesterday (not literally) when I was young’ after one of my earlier stuff ups had left me feeling lost and wallowing in self-pity, and I became obsessed with Holden Caulfield too, just like Sarah Todman’s Eve. This was in the days when J D Salinger’s writing style came as a revelation and although he never published another novel he wrote some brilliant short stories about Seymour Glass and the assorted Glass family members.

Now, back to Sarah Todman. I’m a big fan of her poetry/prose and as I expected her novel is full of true-to-life characters. Eve is pretty much her own worst enemy, being highly self-critical. She is also obviously loveable, funny and sweet. She had grown up in outback Queensland but when she was sent to boarding school in Brisbane she came up up against the ever-present-in-such-places ‘mean girls’ and was made to feel different. Back home in the bush after Brisbane, however, she now saw her home town through new eyes and from then on christened it as ‘Nowhereville’.

The story of New Year’s Eve follows Eve from Brisbane back to Nowhereville and introduces the people in her life. She makes mistakes for which she punishes herself; has a wonderful friendship in Brisbane with Phil; a strained relationship with her mother, adores her father; still harbours a secret crush on Andy. Sounds like a standard stock story line, but all of these characters are blindingly real: back home in the family hotel are terrific Australian country characters, and the small town is filled with nosy, but mostly well-intentioned busybodies with whom Eve is reacquainted when she  returns to face a family crisis. In Brisbane Phil, her husband, Anton, and their little boys give Eve a safe, secure base; Betty, a nice little white cat comes to visit. Eve also reacquaints with Andy from her teenage years. As well as mutual attraction they both have sadness in their lives, and their story is sensitive and beautifully romantic.

This was another unputdownabler, to mangle a well known descriptor. I am on a roll with my reading, and loving it! Write another one please, Sarah!

Published by Hawkeye

Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell

 

People don’t know what reserves of strength they have until they are called upon to draw on them. At least, this was Ciara’s experience when she knew she had to get away from her coercive, narcissistic husband. She showed enormous bravery and determination to find accommodation for herself, her two small girls and her unborn baby through Dublin’s overcrowded welfare system.

This is a powerful book which moved me so deeply I found it hard to put down. There were so many times when it would have seemed easier for Ciara to go back to her former home but she knew she had to weigh up the hardship of making a new life for her children against the potential emotional damage they would suffer growing up with their father.

How to tell if overpowering love is going to turn into total control? Friends can sometimes see signs from the beginning of a relationship but if they try to raise them they risk losing their friend, or even their family member. I’m speaking as an outsider.

I hope this book reaches the people who need to read it.  Ciara’s strength would be inspirational. In fact, anyone who loves stories of triumph over adversity would, I’m sure, find it as gripping as I did.

You won my heart, Roisin O’Donnell. I’ll have it back now, thank you!

Published by Scribner

One Dark Night by Hannah Richell

 

It is Halloween. Teenage pupils from a nearby private school are partying in a wood with the name of Sally in the Wood. They have gathered around a ouija board and are endeavouring to scare themselves witless, hoping for a message from the above named Sally who, legend has it, was a young bride murdered by her husband on their wedding night when he discovered she had been unfaithful to him. Sally is said to drift through the wood in her white wedding gown, appearing at the top of an old, crumbling tower, known locally as the folly.

The following morning a girl guide troop stumble upon the dead body of a girl in a white dress at the foot of the tower. A rather delicious murder mystery story follows. Rachel is a counsellor at the school and she and her daughter, Ellie, live in a cottage in the grounds of the school which Ellie attends as a scholarship pupil. Ben, the detective assigned to be in charge of the investigation, is Rachel’s ex husband. Ben has a new partner but he and Rachel keep in close contact as they co-parent Ellie. Various suspects begin to become apparent but the red herrings are handled very smoothly and I didn’t guess who the culprit was, which is exactly how I like my mystery stories.

7

I prefer books to be written in the past tense but this is just a little niggle in an otherwise most enjoyable novel, and I’m going to look out for Hannah Richell’s other books now.

Published by Simon & Schuster

Performance Anxiety by Jonathan Lerner

 

Jonathan Lerner’s memoir, Performance Anxiety, has the subtitle: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. I remember all those many years ago reading Catcher in the Rye, the groundbreaking fictional account of the life of an American mid-century kid, Holden Caulfield, and being captured by JD Salinger’s writing style. I had never read anything like this before, and I even had an American boyfriend at the time. It felt like I had discovered a new, exotic species!

Jonathan Lerner was an adolescent American kid at that same time and he writes with clear-eyed honesty about what life was like for him. He had experienced life in a foreign country, Taipei, when his father was posted there with the American embassy, which singled him out from other kids; but he was always able to find common ground with new groups when they returned to America, even while inwardly questioning his sexuality and, quite honestly, not knowing the answers. He had to learn over the years what effect the death of his mother when he was sixteen was having on him. His father was quite distant with him, but so were a lot of fathers in those post-war days; the world was still recovering and people were getting used to lives of comfort and opportunity again.

There is much contained in this short book. Jonathan recalls his activism in the anti-segregation movement, as well as lots of encounters and friendships which makes page turning of this heartfelt memoir very easy to do. I would be quite happy for him to expand his memories and fill in some of the spaces he has left one day.

Recommended for readers who appreciate well-written biography.

Published by Resource Publications

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

 

In 1788 twin sisters, Mary and Eliza, are convicts on board a ship transporting them from England to the colony of New South Wales. They are packed in with other female convicts under appalling conditions, fearful of what fate awaits them.

In Australia in 2019 Lucy has just graduated from high school and is going to visit her older sister, Jess, an artist who has bought back the former family home in Comber Bay on the New South Wales south coast. Famously, a convict ship sank when it hit the rocks outside Comber Bay in 1788; over the years there has also been the disappearance, presumed drowned, of a number of men.

Lucy and Jess both suffer from an allergy to water which leaves their skin tender and flakey and has brought them both anguish and vulnerability. Jess has secrets that Lucy has yet to learn and which unfold dramatically over the course of the book.

Both Jess and Lucy have strong, subconscious connections to the tragic twins, which come to them in dreams, although neither of them is aware that the other is experiencing the same thing. The story of the convict ship is woven vividly through the book and it is sad and shocking. I discovered recently that one of my ancestors was a female convict transported to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) and it is pretty unbearable to think of what she must have suffered in order for me to exist in this beautiful country. She married a male convict and I hope they had some measure of comfort together as they or possibly their children moved to New South Wales (I’ll have to check with the family historian).

Emilia Hart’s intriguing, atmospheric story is going to stay with me for a long time, as I am sure it will for all of its readers.

Published by Harper Collins Australia 

Venetian Lessons in Love by Jenna Lo Bianco

 

A

Venetian Lessons in Love by Jenna Lo Bianco is like a sumptuous Italian opera: fabulous settings, tragic heroine, evil villain and mysterious but gorgeous hero. Lucia has been known to all as l’Orfana since an intrusive photographer snapped a picture of her as an eleven year old child at the scene of the horrific accident which took the lives of her parents, along with others.

Now, twenty years later, Lucia is running what was her parents’ Italian language school from her inherited palazzo on the canal in Venice with the assistance of her two trusted friends, Mariela and Francesco. All is well in Lucia’s safe, secluded though lonely life until a blow is delivered which threatens to upset her fragile sense of well being.

A romantic, melodramatic story follows: Venice is an enchanting backdrop; Lucia is beautiful, vulnerable and, at times, maddeningly stubborn in her fear and mistrust of her handsome neighbour, Alex, with his intriguing, Australian-accented Italian.

This is a book for lovers of romantic fiction and, of course, Italy. Jenna Lo Bianco has written two previous books: The Italian Marriage and Love & Rome.

Published by Pan Macmillan.

To Die For by David Baldacci

 

Travis Devine is a Homeland Security agent. Ellen Saxby is an FBI agent. Betsy Odom is a twelve year old girl whose parents have died. Danny Glass is a criminal kingpin. Devine has been assigned to accompany Saxby and Betsy to a court hearing at which Glass is petitioning to adopt Betsy who is his niece.

Devine soon becomes aware that this assignment is going to be loaded with danger when a man who has offered to sell him information about the deceased Odoms is murdered.  Devine is already on the alert for a mysterious stranger, ‘The Girl on the Train’, who is obviously tracking him with the intention of killing him.

This is fast moving, thrill-a-minute action. Danny Glass is of special interest to the FBI, while Devine uncovers a huge home grown terrorism threat. There are some very bad people and some very good people and the trick is to find out who falls into which camp.

Travis Devine is one of my favourite recurring Baldacci characters. He is noble and heroic, and a symbol of hope. Just what the doctor ordered for gloomy old 2024!

Published by Pan Macmillan