#aww2017 Book Review: “A Dangerous Language” by Sulari Gentill

Title: A Dangerous Language (Rowland Sinclair Mysteries #8)
Author: Sulari Gentill
Genre: Historical fiction/mystery
Date Read: 20/09/2017 – 27/09/2017
Rating: ★★★

Review:

Leaping into the eighth book in a series without having read the others is a risk. I have to admit the main reason I picked this ARC up on NetGalley was because I had seen Sulari Gentill host a panel at the recent Canberra Writer’s Festival and was interested to sample her writing. I think I probably would have been a bit more engaged had I been familiar with the core cast of characters from books one through seven, but this book was enjoyable nonetheless.

In 1930s Australia, Rowland Sinclair finds himself caught up in intrigues between the government, and Fascist and Communist factions when he agrees to help a notorious anti-Fascist speaker get into Australia before the government can ban him. The journey takes him across Australia and nearly gets him killed on more than one occasion.

I enjoyed the characters in this far more than the mystery or the political machinations, really. The core cast are a really fun bunch, and hopeless romantic that I am, I also really enjoyed watching Rowly wrestle with romantic feelings and other related entanglements. I did enjoy the way Gentill wove actual historical events into the story, though at the same time, I am never quite sure how to feel about actual historical figures as characters in novels.

There were two murders featured in the story, though they felt like window dressing for the political machinations, which seemed to be more of the focus. For a significant portion of the book, there was no focus on either death. One of them was solved towards the end, but the other one was just concluded via a note in the epilogue, and I think was mostly there to create some tension at the beginning of the story, when Rowland and his friends thought the victim might have been their friend and colleague, Edna. Once it was established that Edna was safe, there was no real reason for the main characters to give the death any more than a passing interest.

That sort of peripheral focus on the murders is something I am not sure isn’t a feature of the series. I have no idea what form the mysteries take in the other books and so I don’t know if it is just that I wasn’t used to it, being a newbie. Ditto the excerpts from newspapers and other publications of the time at the beginning of each chapter. I have no idea if this is a stylistic feature present in all the books; if it is, I would probably bear with it a bit more, though as it was, I felt they weren’t always necessary and at times, I even skipped them.

Still, I can definitely see why this is a popular series, especially with those who are big readers of historical fiction.

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(Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for providing a free copy of this book in exchange for a review)

(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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#AWW2017 Book Review: “the Betrayal of Bindy MacKenzie” by Jaclyn Moriarty

Title: The Betrayal of Bindy MacKenzie
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Genre: YA contemporary
Date Read: 08/06/2017 – 13/06/2017
Rating: ★★

Review:

This is the fourth Jaclyn Moriarty book I’ve read this year, and it was definitely the strangest. While the writing was up to her usual standard, I am still not quite sure what to make of the convoluted plot and… interesting stylistic choices.

Bindy MacKenzie is the top of her class. She has been employee of the month at Kmart seventeen months running, she offers study groups for her fellow students, but she resents having to show up for a new class, Friendship and Development, which she feels takes away from valuable study time. But lately, she’s been feeling lethargic and sick, and doesn’t even care when other students are receiving higher marks than she. What could be causing this sudden change?

The first thing is, Bindy is not an easy character to warm to. She thinks herself far superior to her fellow students, and talks like the heroine of a Jane Austen novel (which is fine in a Jane Austen novel, but weird in a YA contemporary). Of course, getting over herself is a major part of her character arc, but it meant that I spent a good deal of the book being annoyed at her.

The second thing is the format. The novel is epistolary in nature, taking the form of Bindy’s diary entries, transcripts she makes of others’ conversations, memos and emails, amongst other things. It sometimes made it hard to get a real hand on the other characters as well, since we were seeing them all from Bindy’s judgey perspective and couldn’t really get a sense of them as themselves until towards the end.

The titular “betrayal” seemed quite far-fetched, though there were clues throughout the book. Still, it seemed unlikely that people would go to that much effort. Overall, when I reached the end of the book, I was left feeling non-plussed, and not quite sure what I had just witnessed, which isn’t a great sign.

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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#WWW and #WIPpet Wednesday – 19 April, 2017

Welcome to WIPpet Wednesday! This is a weekly blog hop hosted by yours truly. If you’re a writer, you are very welcome to join us by posting an excerpt from your WIP that somehow relates to the date. You can click the blue guy on the right of this blog to be taken to the link up.

I’ve finished the first draft of Memories and Magic! The last chunk is a bit haphazard, as I realised I need to fix some structural issues in the third act before I can make it run smoothly, but I sort of have a whole A – Z progression. In this scene, Clara’s memories of being a princess have just been restored after several months of her living with some false ones.

The scene didn’t change for several minutes. Finally, the blue of the rune faded and the ink on the wall disappeared, as usual. All eyes turned to Clara. She wavered on her feet for a moment.

“Huh,” she said weakly before passing out on the floor.

Yep.

My last assignment for the semester is due on June 09, so writing will go on the backburner for the next couple of months. It’s kind of a good time to finish a draft, as I’ll actually be distracted from wanting to start revisions too soon. I’ll still try to have something to share each Wednesday, even if it’s just something I’ve slapped together on the day.

Sort of on that note, a random writing observation: I realised the other day why I’ve never successfully written a contemporary. It’s because pretty much all ideas and characters I have for contemporary stories are based on my own experience, to the point where writing them in the third person feels weird and distant. Even though that’s what I write everything in, so it is kind of my default. Now that I have realised this, though, I’m going to try writing in first person and see if that helps.

And now it’s time for WWW Wednesday! This blog hop is hosted by Sam over at A World Of Words. Link up with us by commenting on Sam’s post for this week, and just answer the three questions.

What have you recently finished reading?

I finished Soulless by Gail Carriger and reviewed it here. It wasn’t my favourite but it was amusing enough.  I would have preferred a bit more urban fantasy and a bit less comedy of manners in the end.

I also finished The Secret Science of Magic by Melissa Keil. I fell in love with it on page one and stayed in love right to the end; not really a big surprise given how much I’ve enjoyed Keil’s other books. If you read YA and were ever a geek at school, you should read them. She nails it. It doesn’t read like she’s even trying, it just feels completely authentic.

Okay, I’ll stop gushing now. 😛 My review of that one will be up on Friday. If you’re interested, I also posted a review for The Man from Snowy River by Elyne Mitchell over here.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading The Asp of Ascension by B. R. Meyers, which I requested from Netgalley because I feel like there aren’t enough books that use Ancient Egyptian mythology as their basis and this one sounded fun. When I started it yesterday, I was fairly bored but I’m about halfway through now and it has grown on me.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Next I will be reading The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie. I have the sequel waiting for me on NetGalley, but I don’t think it’s one to read out of order. I’ve kind of hyped this series up in my head because it’s premise is lady pirates fighting genetically-engineered monsters in a dystopian future and also there’s LGBT representation, so it’s got huge potential. I just hope it lives up to it!

What are you reading this week? 🙂

#aww2017 “He’s not a boy, he’s a man.” // Review of “The Man from Snowy River” by Elyne Mitchell

Title: The Man from Snowy River
Author: Elyne Mitchell
Genre: Action/adventure/romance
Audio book narrator: Richard Aspel
Date Read: 04/04/2017 – 12/04/2017
Rating: ★★★★

Review:

I want to start by just saying how much fun I had with this book! It evoked the Australian bush landscape in such a way that made me feel nostalgic for home, even though I have no intention of ever moving back to my tiny rural home town. The characters were all vibrant and both the love story and the adventure story held my interested the whole way through.

After the death of his father, Jim Craig is told he must earn his right to continue living in the mountains by working down in the town.  He gets a job for a rich cattle owner, Harrison, and meets his daughter, Jessica, with whom he forms a bond. When Harrison’s £1000 colt escapes and Jim is blamed for it, he knows that finding the colt is the last chance he will get to prove himself a man.

As I said, every character in this book has their own individual personality; no two of them sounded the same. I sympathised with Jim and his fish-out-of-water situation while he longed for the mountain home where he grew up. I cheered Jessica on when she stood up to her father and I hated the way Harrison thought he had the right to dominate everyone else.

Life on the farm was also well-described, as was the mountain life and horse-riding. There was a mystery regarding Harrison’s past that wasn’t too hard to guess, but it did provide some good backstory. One of the few things that niggled me was the way at the end, Jim and Harrison both spoke of Jessica as something they could lay claim to. While Jim did say “Jessica can make her own decision on that”, it still bothered me a little.

While Banjo Patterson’s original poem, The Man From Snowy River, focuses solely on the escape of the colt and the mad ride to catch it again, this only accounted for about the last quarter or so of the novel. However, it was interesting revisiting the poem after reading this and realising just how many references from it were peppered throughout the book.

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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#WWW and #WIPpet Wednesday – 12 April, 2017

Welcome to WIPpet Wednesday! This is a weekly blog hop hosted by yours truly. If you’re a writer, you are very welcome to join us by posting an excerpt from your WIP that somehow relates to the date. You can click the blue guy on the right of this blog to be taken to the link up.

Today I have three lines (1+2) describing Max’s experience of Clara’s magic. Clara is transporting a group of Mages back to her home after a run-in with some not-so-good ones. This particular night is the first time this particular power has manifested, but she quickly got the hang of it.

Max couldn’t believe how instantaneous the transfer was. One second, he was on picnic bench in the park, the next second, in his kitchen. There was no darkness in between, no nausea like he had imagined travel at such a speed might induce. There was just nothing. It was seamless.

And now it’s time for WWW Wednesday! This blog hop is hosted by Sam over at A World Of Words. Link up with us by commenting on Sam’s post for this week, and just answer the three questions.

What have you recently finished reading?

I finished Walpiri Women’s Voices: Our Lives, Our History (Oral history series) and reviewed it here. It was interesting, but somewhat hard to read since it was just transcripts of the oral histories with no embellishments or anything. I actually left it unrated because I wasn’t sure what rating to give.

I also finished The Man from Snowy River by Elyne Mitchell. This was a really fun adventure story. Even though I had never read it before, nor seen the movie, it made me feel nostalgic, I think just because I grew up surrounded by the Australian bush (even though I have no desire to move back there).

I also reviewed Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey; you can read that here.

What are you currently reading?

I am finally currently reading Soulless by Gail Carriger. It has some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments due to clever writing, but I feel like there is not much plot to speak of. I imagine I will finish this over the next few days but at the moment, I’m not feeling terribly inclined to pick up the next book in the series.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I will probably read The Secret Science of Magic by Melissa Keil. This was only released last week and while I don’t read a lot of contemporary YA, I was at the top of my library’s queue for this one. I will read anything this woman writes. And I just found out it has diverse characters, too! The MC is South Asian. So yay that, too!

What are you reading this week? 🙂

#aww2017 “Rack off, ya fishface moll!” // Review of “Puberty Blues” by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey

Title: Puberty Blues
Author: Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey
Genre: Contemporary YA
Audio book narrator: Rebecca McCauley
Date Read: 04/04/2017
Rating: ★★

Review:

I think I can see how this book ended up a cult classic. First published in 1979, it encapsulates the youth culture of 1970s Sydney. But. While the language is completely authentic, it lost me on the content.

Puberty Blues tells the story of of Debbie and Sue, two thirteen-year-olds desperate to make into one of the surfie gangs that hang around Cronulla Beach. As they try to make it to the top of the social heirarchy, they learn about sex, drugs, boys, and ultimately, themselves.

First things first, Rebecca McCauley narrated the book perfectly. She had the Western suburbs accent down pat and this added to the authenticity of the book. There were times when I felt like I was listening to a three-hour Kylie Mole sketch, but this book is exactly the type of suburban Sydney life that Kylie Mole was parodying.

When Puberty Blues was made into a TV show a few years ago, they upped the ages of the main characters to sixteen, and I can see why they did, even if it did cop criticism. There’s something very uncomfortable about listening to a thirteen-year-old character describe a seventeen-year-old boy trying to have sex with her, or casually describing the gang rape of other girls from her school (obviously, the ages don’t matter at all there), or the fact that they would all spend their weekend dealing weed.

There was also the issue that while the characters were very well drawn, there was very little plot. I do wonder if it’s because I didn’t read this as a teenager that I didn’t connect with it. While I wasn’t the sort of teenager depicted in the book, there were certain things that would have still resonated. As it was, I had little to identify with.

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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#WWW and #WIPpet Wednesday – 05 April, 2017

Welcome to WIPpet Wednesday! This is a weekly blog hop hosted by yours truly. If you’re a writer, you are very welcome to join us by posting an excerpt from your WIP that somehow relates to the date. You can click the blue guy on the right of this blog to be taken to the link up.

I’m sharing from Memories and Magic again, and I have five paragraphs for you today. The last time I shared from this WIP was back in February; Clara was stalling for time so her friends could escape their enemies, by pretending she was giving herself up. What they don’t know is that she can transport herself places at will, as long as can visualise her destination. She had arranged to meet Max and Jana near a statue in a park that they were all familiar with.

Jana had been anxious from the moment Clara walked away with the other Mages, though Max had managed to calm her somewhat by explaining the plan Clara had outlined to him via her telepathy. They had taken seats at the picnic table near the sculpture in the park, and Jana drummed her fingers impatiently on the wood, her lips pressed grimly together.

The moment Clara appeared took them both by surprise, but Max all the more so, since she landed in his lap. He flailed slightly, nearly tipping off the back of the seat as his centre of gravity was displaced. Clara yelped as she realised what had happened, and grabbed the edge of the table with one hand and Max’s arm with the other, pulling him upright again.

Once there was no danger of anyone being injured, Clara scrambled from his lap as best she could in the cramped space between the bench and the table. She sat down next to Max with her hand over her mouth, but he could see the corners of her mouth quirking upwards on either side.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, lowering the hand slightly. One giggle burst out of her throat, which in turn made the same happen to Max. Before they knew it, they were in fits. Clara had her hand on his knee and he had his on her shoulder and they doubled over, until Jana noisily cleared her throat. Clara wiped her eyes and straightened up. Max forced his expression into something serious. Jana’s expression was kind but stern. 

“Don’t you think we should all be leaving?” she asked.

I had forgotten about this scene until I went hunting for something to share. I really love it. I think it’s a good demonstration of Max and Clara’s friendship. For a bit of context, Max and Clara are both in their early 20s. Jana is Max’s aunt, so obviously a bit older (it’s never specified, but I imagine her mid-50s).

And now it’s time for WWW Wednesday! This blog hop is hosted by Sam over at A World Of Words. Link up with us by commenting on Sam’s post for this week, and just answer the three questions.

What have you recently finished reading?

I finished He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly and it reminded me both how I really enjoy thrillers and how some aspects of the genre really annoy me. But the pages of this one did fly by. My review is here.

I also listened to the Australian cult classic Puberty Blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette. I can certainly see why some aspects of this book have remained controversial since its publication in 1979. There is a lot of underage sex and really casual talk of gang rape and things like that, which were uncomfortable. However, the authors really captured the Australian vernacular, which I really enjoyed, particularly as the narrator also had the perfect accent for the time and place as well. Review goes up Friday.

I also reviewed A Conjuring of Light by V. E. Schwab this week (unpopular opinion alert!). Click the title to read the review.

What are you currently reading?

I started Walpiri Women’s Voices: Our Lives, Our History (Oral history series) recently because I wanted to increase my reading of Indigenous Australian authors (even though this is an oral history so slightly different). I also started The Man From Snowy River by Elyne Mitchell on audio. Two Australian classics in a row! And here was me not signing up for the classics aspect of this year’s Australian Women Writers Challenge.

What do you think you’ll read next?

This is the third week in a row that Soulless by Gail Carriger is my answer to this. I’ll actually try to get to it this time. I may even start it tonight if I have time for some reading before bed. I also posted my April – June TBR the other day. We’ll see how that goes.

What are you reading this week? 🙂

#aww2017 “I’m always watching around corners. I just keep watching for something special.” // Review of “A Tangle of Gold” by Jaclyn Moriarty

Title: A Tangle of Gold(Colours  of Madeleine #2)
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Genre: YA/urban fantasy
Date Read: 11/03/2017 – 14/03/2017
Rating: ★★☆

Review:

Agggh, writing this review is causing me a lot of angst. Over the few days between finishing the book and beginning this review, I have tried to work out what to rate it. When I first rated it on GoodReads, I gave it four stars, stating in the text of the review that it was 3.5 but I was going to round it up because I loved the first two books so much. But then I thought about it and decided it was really only a three-star read for me, because while it had a few good moments, I didn’t love it as much as the other two. The next morning I was still thinking about what had bothered me overall, and realised there was really only one moment that I really loved, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it outweighed the stuff that frustrated me. So here we are, with a 2.5 star rating for the final book, after two solid four-star reads.

Yikes, that was a rambling paragraph.

Anyway.

In my review of book two of this series, I said that one thing I appreciated was the fact that it didn’t give more of the same, but instead built on the first book and took all the concepts further. The same could be said of this book, except that it didn’t have the same effect this time.

One of the issues (probably the main issue) was that Kiera, a secondary character in the second book, became a principle character in this one and I Did. Not. Like. Her. She looked down her nose at everybody, including my favourite characters, and even when she sort of addressed this, I didn’t feel like she stopped, just that she managed to hide her snobbery a bit better. I started flipping forward to see how many more chapters I would have to read from her point-of-view before we returned to Madeleine or Elliot.

Speaking of Elliot, I didn’t like his character arc either. He made a lot of decisions that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. He was using huge leaps of logic to come to the conclusions he based his decisions on, and he always seemed smarter than that.

I can’t say too much about Madeleine without delving into huge spoiler territory, but I will say that the large twist regarding her and her mother that took place was a big enough game changer that it changed the way the story worked, and it just wasn’t the story/premise/situation I fell in love with after that (having said that, the twist itself was the aforementioned one moment I really loved). Elliot and Madeleine had no way of corresponding like they always used to, and that was one of my favourite aspects of the series.

Plot-wise, everything also got quite convoluted. The theories behind the cracks between Cello and the World got very confusing and then there were secret organisations that kind of came out of nowhere playing their parts, and everything go tied up a bit too nicely at the end. I closed the book feeling unsatisfied, and there is little worse than that, particularly when it’s the conclusion of a series that started out so well.

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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#AWW2017 “How about we meet at midnight tomorrow and try this. I close my eyes, believe in you, and there you’ll be.” // Review of “The Cracks in the Kingdom” by Jaclyn Moriarty

Title: The Cracks in the Kingdom (Colours  of Madeleine #2)
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Genre: YA/urban fantasy
Date Read: 06/03/2017 – 11/03/2017
Rating: ★★★★

Review:

(If you haven’t read my review for the first book in this series, A Corner of White, you can do so here.)

My instinct when I finished this book was to give it five stars, but on reflection I decided it was more of a four. I’ve said in previous reviews that my star ratings are often based on  a vibe rather than any objective ratings system, and that’s the case with this one. I actually had to make myself stop reading the third one and write this review because I was so intent on staying with these characters, but knew I’d forget details if I didn’t stop now.

I won’t go into the plot too much because I don’t want to spoil anything for the previous book. The plot picks up where the first one left off, but rather than giving us more of the same, which is often what happens with middle books, this one builds on what came before.

It did seem that Jaclyn Moriarty clearly delighted in teasing me with numerous moments of Elliot and Madeleine nearly meeting through the crack between their worlds.  And those moments brought them even closer together, relationship-wise. Their relationship isn’t romantic, at least not really (it has the potential to go that way), but they’ve got such a deep bond, even though they sometimes disagree and argue and sometimes their friendship gets messy and difficult. I haven’t been this invested in two characters in a long time. I have so many feelings!

The other great thing with this book is that we got to see the other provinces of the Kingdom of Cello, via Elliot’s meetings with Princess Ko and the other members of the Royal Youth Alliance. Jagged Edge is full of interesting technology while Olde Quainte is… well, old and quaint. And hilarious. It’s a serious breach of ettitquette in this province to not have a simile in at least every third sentence you speak, though it doesn’t matter if the simile doesn’t make any sense. I also really enjoyed the descriptions of the Magical North, where magic interferes with technology, but where the Royal Family makes its home.

As with the first book, the action really ramped up in the last third. There were a few times where I was torn between stopping to make an “OMG!” status update on GoodReads and continuing to read. Continuing to read kept winning out and in the end, I only made one update for the entire book (which is unusual; normally I like to squee a lot when I’m enjoying a book, so that shows you how hooked I was).

I think I will leave this here before I get even more gushy and decide that actually yes, I should be rating this five stars (I think I figured out while writing this review that the main reason it’s only four is because Madeleine doesn’t really do a lot for herself, not anything that’s plot related anyway, and mostly just does what she’s told re: the Royal Family). And I’m going to go keep reading the next book in the series and spend more time with these characters.

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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“I don’t know where to start. She’s critiquing your existence!” // Review of “A Corner of White” by Jaclyn Moriarty #aww2017

Title: A Corner of White (Colours  of Madeleine #1)
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Genre: YA/urban fantasy
Audio book narrator: Fiona Hardingham, Andrew Eiden, Kate Reinders, Peter McGowan
Date Read: 21/02/2017 – 03/03/2017
Rating: ★★★★

Review:

Well, if this book isn’t completely charming. Very character-driven, and as such, probably not for everyone, but I was emotionally invested enough by the end that seeing evidence of character growth made me smile tearfully.

A Corner of White is set paritally in Cambridge, England, home of Madeleine Tully, and partially in the province of The Farms in the Kingdom of Cello. In the past, people used to  travel between the two places via “cracks”, though these have since been closed. The World has forgotten about Cello, and the penalty for not reporting a crack in Cello is death. But when Madeleine Tully pulls a letter out of a parking metre in Cambridge and begins a correspondence with Elliot Buranski, they become each other’s confidant as they attempt to navigate teenage life and love, and try to understand why the people they love aren’t around any more.

Madeleine is a tricky character to understand. A lot of the time, the Madeleine that came across in her letters to Elliot felt quite separate from the Madeleine that we saw through the eyes of her friends. It was sometimes  a bit hard to reconcile the two. However, she started to make more sense as the story went on. Madeleine doesn’t believe in the Kingdom of Cello for most of the story, instead thinking that her mysetery correspondent is a lonely, geeky boy world-building a novel. She critiques him on his world-building and gives him suggestions for how to make the writing stronger. While this is frustrating for Elliot, it did make the writing very self-aware and entertaining.

Elliot is a bit easier to get a grasp on. His father went missing a year before the beginning of the story, and while everyone in the twon suspects he ran off with the local physics teacher (who disappeared at the same time), Elliot is convinced that there’s something more nefarious at work. He just has no idea how close he is to the truth.

The world-building for Cambridge is quite straightforward, with Madeleine’s quirky friends and acquaintances adding colour to the scenes. It’s in Cello where things are different. While they still drive trucks or take trains and have TV and that sort of thing, they are also vulnerable to Colour attacks: strange weather phenomena that can affect their minds or outright attack them. Colours are graded depending on their ferocity. These took a little while to figure out at first, but there is enough description for you to get the idea, and then it’s easy to imagine the effects of differnt Colours. There is also Butterfly Child, a small fairy-like creature that Elliot catches but does not know how to befriend.

The writing is beautiflu and  lyrical. As I said, the story is quite character-driven (though the plot picks up in the last third maybe? And has left a lot of room  for further adventures in the next book) but I really enjoyed watching the relationships between various characters develop as they learned more about themselves and each other. I feel like this is one of those books where the story and writing are enhanced by the audio narrators, all four of them do a fantastic job (Fiona Hardingham and Andrew Eiden do the bulk of it, with the other two taking on smaller character roles). I am disappointed that my library’s Overdrive does not have the next two books in the series, but I have already obtained print copies, so I’m not going to complain too much.

I’m reading back over what I’ve written here and feel like I haven’t quite done this book justice. I do recommend it, though!

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(This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017. Click here for more information).

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