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