Darkness and beauty in middle grade fiction: Wolf Hollow, by Lauren Wolk

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Symbolic and devastating: Rain Birds, by Harriet McKnight

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It's hard to talk about the ones we love the most: Exchange of Heart by Darren Groth

It seems as though the books that grab hold of us the tightest are the ones that are the hardest to write about. This is certainly true of Exchange of Heart, Darren Groth's newest novel for young adults. Even though I'm just a plain old adult, without the blissful 'young' prefixed to the front, this book sits with me in a way few contemporary books have. And I've wrestled for some time with how to write about it because it just feels so much, and it's hard to disentangle myself from the story.

To begin with, Exchange of Heart is set predominantly in Brisbane, and books populated by familiar places and landmarks and journeys are like new friends who instantly become old friends. Then, too, its main character, Munro, is wrestling with an anxiety that is hard to name and, although my experience is different to Munro's, I know this battlefield all too well. Most heart-squeezing of all, though, is the fact that Munro is mired in grief after the death of his younger sister Evie, who has Down Syndrome.

My youngest brother has Down Syndrome, and, ever since he joined our family, I have had these occasional dreams of terrible natural disasters threatening him: volcanoes spewing lava, tsunamis sweeping over everything, earthquakes upending the ground we're struggling to walk on. Always I find myself urgently reaching out to keep hold of his hand, to grab on to him and not let go. Even in my subconscious mind, losing my little brother is one of the most incomprehensibly awful things that could ever happen.

So to see a character grappling with this reality was like a beautiful, heartbreaking kick to the stomach. Munro's grief and confusion is tangible, a living thing that haunts him, taunts him, and threatens to overwhelm him, to rob him of the people who love him best and to sabotage any attempt to begin again. Blessedly, these people also refuse to let him stand alone in the depths of his grief, and it is through their love -- faithful, hard love that patiently makes its way through the walls of trauma Munro has built up around him -- that Munro can begin to see the possibility of healing.

Of course, it takes an international journey and a rag-tag gang of Australians to begin dismantling those walls, and each fresh character bursts into the story like a happy surprise. These are not perfect characters, but they are good ones, drawn in a way that doesn't make a novelty of their personalities or disabilities but, rather, honours them. This book is disability-positive in a very joyful, honest way. It's also therapy-positive and family-positive. In fact, even though it will make your heart squeeze up inside your rib cage, reading this book is a positive experience in itself. And now, after all my wrestling, this isn't even a real review -- just a slightly frantic whirl of feelings -- but I'm glad this book exists and I hope you read it.

Exchange of Heart
Darren Groth
Published July 31, 2017 by Random House Australia
288 pages

A small and aching sense of hope: Josephine Rowe's A Loving, Faithful Animal

 

Some books revel in heaviness and brokenness, wallow in them like pigs in mud, as if the heaviness and the brokenness themselves are important on their own. For me as a reader, however, heaviness must have a purpose within a story. It must mean something. The brief and bruised sexual encounters, the hands raised in anger to inflict pain, the profanity hissed at the ones our characters are supposed to love and protect, the regrets and unpaid human debts – they all must mean something, even if the meaning is only to reveal their meaninglessness, the characters’ futile attempts to heal their own brokenness.

In A Loving, Faithful Animal, the brokenness has meaning. The book is a history of sorts, a history of cyclical, hereditary pain passed on from a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD to his wife, who releases her own pent-up grief in moments of unpredictable violence towards her eldest daughter, Lani. Lani copes with the pain by hardening herself against family connections, self-medicating with prescription drugs, alcohol, and boys. Ru, the youngest, watches it all from her protective loneliness while the innate hope she carries inside herself grows slowly weaker until it is all but extinguished. And from afar, Les, the girls’ uncle, hovers at the periphery of their lives like a flawed guardian angel. This is a family estranged, even – perhaps especially – when they are in proximity to one another.

There is no single protagonist to this story, no hero. Instead, the book’s chapters alternate between points of view, offering insights into each character’s perspective. It draws a history of systematic hurt and cyclical abuse, tracing the injuries to their root cause and exploring how pain breeds pain. One especially powerful chapter takes the reader into the fractured chaos of the mind of someone suffering from PTSD. The past clashes with the present, and the cerebral pain is tangible.

Through it all, the book expresses a deep and true Australian sensibility, one of huntsman spiders, salmon-clouded sunsets, humid Christmas afternoons, and a mythological wildcat which is the stuff of local lore. The writing is beautiful, literary without being pretentious. And at the book’s end, there is a whisper of new beginnings, a small and aching sense of hope -- if not healing, then the promise of a promise of healing. 

Still, somehow, the spilled salt thrown over your shoulder, even in restaurants. Still counting the magpies in the cypress branches, as though a higher Something has taken the trouble to arrange them out there, for you to tally and make sense of. Still your heart slipping whenever a sparrow finds its way into the house, whenever a forlorn ornament stows into January.

A Loving, Faithful Animal

Josephine Rowe

UQP, 2016, 200 pages

This Lullaby won't put you to sleep.

'I wasn't afraid sleep would lead to my death. I was afraid sleep was death. That every night, I died.'
'But we wake from sleep,' I said.
'Somebody wakes,' she answered.
'I wake.'
'How do you know it's you?'

Lullaby has been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a while, calling out to me with its beautiful, promising cover art. When I saw it in the store, I knew nothing about it other than that it was by Bernard Beckett. That was enough to tell me that a) I should buy it, and b) I'd want to read it fast.

On the weekend, I got my moment. I started Lullaby in bed before breakfast, continued it in the car on a brief drive, read a little more as I iced an ankle injury, and finished the last fifty pages pedalling furiously on my stationary bike.

Reading in a condensed period worked well for this novel because, like Genesis before it, Lullaby is largely comprised of one extended conversation, a conversation between a psychologist, Maggie, and  a young man, Rene, whose identical twin brother Theo lies hooked up to life support just a few rooms away. Theo's brain is dead but his body lives, and Rene is being assessed to prove his emotional fitness to make a decision about Theo. But this is Bernard Beckett, and so the decision Rene has to make is not the one that immediately springs to mind.

Bernard Beckett is the master of the psychological twist, the unexpected realisation, the moment of crushing self-awareness or revelation. Lullaby is deeply philosophical, spare, and even clinical in spaces, yet incredibly emotive. Rene's conversation with Maggie is as taut and compelling as any thriller, and I read it breathlessly, greedily. The twists are perfect, gentle yet powerful. And the final pages are genius.

It's hard to talk too much about plot without giving things away, so I won't say any more. Lullaby defies easy categorisation, but to me at least, it reads more as an adult text than the YA under which it is sold. Regardless, it's original, thought provoking, and dotted with moments of slow-dawning realisation. Really good.

Lullaby
Bernard Beckett
Text Publishing, 202 pages
8/10

Everything I (n)ever wanted:

There are stories that you love because of all the little elements that combine to make them. Then there are stories you love in spite of those elements.

Life in Outer Space has so many elements that I’m not generally a fan of. There’s the manic pixie dream girl trope – the idea of the liberated, free-spirited girl who breezes into the life of a (usually geeky) guy, turns his world upside down, and awakens the attractive and charming man within. There’s also the 16-year-old guy-speak, with its profusion of words like ‘arse’ and ‘tool’ and ‘suck,’ as well as the accompanying insights into the whole raging hormone thing. And there’s the fact that I tend to avoid stories that could safely be classified as romances. I do love romance; I just think it represents a part of life, not all of life itself, and it sometimes makes me squirmy reading about the love stories of the very young. Add to that the fact that I really don’t get online gaming. I just … don’t get it. And I’m far, far too wimpy for horror films.

Life in Outer Space has all of these strikes against it – and I loved it to bits. 

It’s a funny, sweet, intelligent, and truly delightful story, focussing on a group of misfits brought together by their lack of cool and their goal of surviving high school – achieved, for the most part, by flying as far under the radar as possible. The narrator, Sam, deals with his parents’ failing relationship by silently hating his dad and almost-as-silently being there for his mum, offering distraction and anti-depressant relief in the only form he knows how: movie marathons. His friends, Mike, Adrian, and Allison, have their own battles to fight, but there’s a sort of unbroken code where life’s messes are concerned: they have each other’s backs, but no details are required.

Into this little defensive huddle of geekery waltzes Camilla, fresh from an international nomadic life and in the care of her rockstar music-journalist dad. Camilla so obviously doesn’t fit in anywhere and yet somehow this means she fits in everywhere. She manages to break into Sam’s intensely-invisible friend circle – and possibly even his heart. 

Sam is freaking out. Life was uncomplicated before. Sam knew his position at the bottom of the food chain. Camilla is pulling him out of the only zone he knows, and it’s uncomfortable. Plus, he grows ever more increasingly aware that his heart is about to be broken.

Life in Outer Space deals with some serious topics – divorce, depression, broken families, teenage sexuality, and bullying – yet manages to stay sunny. It revels in classic tropes but somehow avoids feeling cliché. The individual chapter headings are a delight (“Why Princess Leia hair is always a bad idea,” for example, or “When the theme music from Jaws is completely inadequate”), and the pop culture references are seriously on point. The writing style is warm, engaging, and meaningful without getting sappy. But the best thing about Life in Outer Space is its characters. Melissa Keil has crafted an adorable and genuinely endearing group of friends. They may make mistakes, get caught up in their own thoughts, or miss social cues but they are also loving, authentic, and kind young adults who care about the people in their worlds. 

So. Life in Outer Space started off as a book I felt I’d enjoy in spite of the nerdy teenage boy elements, and it ended up being one I loved because of those very things. Well done, Melissa Keil, you sly author-person. You won me over.

Bonus prize for: ridiculously gorgeous and vibrant cover art.

Life in Outer Space

Melissa Keil

Hardie Grant Egmont, 305 pages

8/10

What I loved and didn't love about I Was Here:

I have read or partially read five of Gayle Forman’s books, and her writing is a bit of a fascinating contradiction for me. On the one hand, her stories tend to be romances that stick close to cliché. From the first meet-cute (or meet-awkward), we know who the leading lady and the leading man are meant to be. A broken girl gets healed by a possibly broken boy. Or a broken boy gets healed by a possibly broken girl. Love is magical, you know how it goes.

On the other hand, Forman’s writing itself is good. Although the underlying structure isn’t always unique, I think her voice itself is. I think Forman writes sometimes weak stories in strong ways. On a compare-and-contrast system that boils characters down to their attributes, Forman's characters might come out looking remarkably similar to other teen romance characters. Within the novels themselves, though, they tend to have strong voices -- and their stories are compelling.

As well, Forman’s settings shine. The European backdrops of her Just One Day and Just One Year read like delightful travelogues, while her latest, I Was Here, is a combined celebration/lamentation of small-town life.

If I had to pick, I’d say I Was Here is Forman’s most powerful novel so far. It’s certainly the one with the most mature subject matter. But it might also be her most unsettling. From the book’s summary:

When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything – so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg’s college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there’s a lot that Meg never told her. About her roommates, the sort of people Cody would never have met in her dead-end small town in Washington. About Ben McAllister, the boy with a guitar and a sneer who broke Meg’s heart. And about an encrypted computer file that Cody can’t open – until she does, and suddenly everything Cody thought she knew about her best friend’s death gets thrown into question.

As Cody attempts to trace Meg’s path to such a devastating and final decision, I Was Here reads like a psychological thriller. But the mystery, though Cody doesn’t realise it herself, is really just the skeleton that she hangs her heavy grief upon. Cody is trying to heal herself – or perhaps absolve herself – while finding a reason, something on which to pin the blame for her best friend’s death. It’s as though the light of Cody’s world went out with Meg’s death, and everywhere she goes in her small town, the darkness lingers.

Here’s what I liked about I Was Here:

1) I appreciated the sharp pacing and the sometimes chilling tone. Here is a book that doesn’t joke about dark things – or if it does, the humour is dry and bleak, all thinly-veiled desperation and grief. Sometimes that maybe errs on the side of melodrama, but the adjective that comes most to mind is raw. In I Was Here, Cody’s grief, Meg’s parents’ grief, Ben’s grief, all of it is raw, and that comes through in the text.

2) Similarly, it’s honest about depression and its messiness, about the confusion and desperation it brings for those who don’t struggle with it but are trying to understand it for the ones they love.

3) Two shining characters stand out for me: one of Meg’s former roommates, Harry Kang, and Cody’s fairly messed-up mother. Harry is an adorable, nerdy Christian guy who helps Cody out, in spite of her prickly attitude and outright scary vibes. He’s genuinely pleased to use his tech skills to uncover some of the mystery behind Meg’s suicide, but he’s also kind, and cares about Cody’s welfare. Basically, everyone needs a Harry Kang in their lives. Then there’s Cody’s mom, whose child-raising technique up to this point has been to leave Cody to her own devices and focus instead on whoever the latest boyfriend is. But a few moments prove that maybe she sees more than she lets on. In one of my favourite lines from the book, she tells Cody, ‘You had a pile of rocks, and you cleaned them up pretty and made a necklace. Meg got jewels, and she hung herself with them.’ The second part may prove to be a lie, but the first part is definitely true.

Here’s what I didn’t like so much about I Was Here:

1) It seems like every strength can also be turned into a weakness on its flip side, and for me one of those weaknesses was the fact that I Was Here could perhaps be too dark. Since the book starts in the aftermath of Meg’s death, there is a hopelessness to the story that can be quite heavy. We know that, no matter what Cody uncovers, Meg is still going to be dead at the end of the book, and nothing can quite change that. We know, as well, that there are no shortcuts to grief. Time takes time, and that makes this book a fairly heavy one.

2) It could be incredibly triggering. I Was Here delves in-depth into Meg’s approach to suicide, the community that she surrounded herself with to encourage that, and her actual process of taking her own life. On one hand, this could be a really helpful for those struggling to understand a loved one’s depression or even suicide. On the other hand, for someone wrestling with those very things, this book could be unhelpfully triggering. At times I cringed as I read certain lines, thinking of how that might ring in the ears of those struggling with their own darkness.

3) Call me a prude (‘PRUDE!’), but there was too much swearing for me. There can be a jarring sort of violence to profanity that rattles around noisily in your head. I think this is especially so when the words are used with the full force of their literality – which is the case in several instances in I Was Here. My preference for cleaner texts is based on my own personal tastes and, largely, my faith. I understand that a well-chosen curse-word can communicate volumes – and I totally get that even if I don’t choose to use those words, the majority of the world around me does. I simply think that if they have to be there, they should be fewer – and, as a result, more powerful.

I Was Here is a road trip story, a coming-of-age story, a mystery, a romance. However, to be honest, the romance could’ve been done away with for me and the story would still have been powerful. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sexual healing that this book suggests, that two grieving teenagers can ‘fix’ one another just by being together. Two broken people coming together in a broken way doesn’t magically make everything right. And although I was won over in a small way by the love interest in the end, I felt slightly manipulated, as though he was one type of person at the beginning of the story and another type of person at the end, but not as a result of character development -- just because. So I could have quite happily enjoyed the story without the romance at all.

After all, the ultimate love story of I Was Here is actually the love story of one friend for another, which is incredibly important, but far more rare in YA fiction.

Get married: not really an order but an exhortation

It seems to take me forever to read non-fiction these days. Mostly it's because I read in the evenings before switching out my light, and sometimes all I can manage is light fiction. But I do slowly attack the meatier books and always find myself thankful that I've attempted it. There's so much good stuff to learn.

When Get Married, by Candice Watters, first started popping up around the internet and Christian book circles about last year, I was scornful.

The title alone seemed to take all of God's sovereignty out of the concept of meeting someone and instead place the responsibility firmly on the woman alone. That idea scared me. I didn't want to be told that the reason I am single now is because I haven't done enough. The not pretty enough, not smart enough, not outgoing enough, not skinny enough voices are rampant (enough) already.

Also, I'd had enough of women taking the initiative with regards to relationships. The church doesn't need any more of loud feminist agendas, and this new book's bold subtitle, What women can do to help it happen, seemed like the description of a power manual for relationship-savvy girls who want results and want them now.

But the new book became not so new and I found myself in a more comfortable place to finally give the controversial (at least, to me) book a go. It proved to be a case of judging a book not by its cover but by my own preconceptions, and I was delightfully surprised.

What I found in Get Married was a refreshingly unfeministic attitude stemming from a firm grasp of Scripture's complementarian picture of men's and women's roles. Instead of being a how-to manual for scoring the hottest, smartest, wealthiest (oh, and don't forget most godly) guy, Get Married proved to be an encouraging look at Christian marriage and how the postmodern generation has fallen from traditional marriage concepts to embrace independence and freedom -- in spite of the fact that no one seems to be enjoying the results.

Candice Watters' advice is back-to-the-basics, Scriptural stuff. No step-by-step "how to flirt" (I've actually seen this in Christian bookstores) or "interpreting his signals", but simple, healthy discussions on femininity, masculinity, purity, faithfulness, and community. However, those who are looking for help finding a mate won't be disappointed. Watters talks of the value of being part of a Christian community, of placing yourself under the guidance of godly mentors, of evaluating the essential qualities of a marriage partner, of living intentionally with the future goal of marriage in mind, and of defining your relationships to avoid wasted time and foolishly thrown-away pieces of your heart.

Some suggestions offered -- particularly in the chapters 'Living like you're planning to marry' and 'Pray boldly' -- may be taken to extreme and tempt the reader with the idea that she's only single because she hasn't done enough yet to earn or win marriage. This throws away God's grace and suggests He will never give good gifts until we are righteous enough to deserve them. Thankfully, we don't serve that kind of a god. We serve a lavishly-loving, fatherly God who showers us with blessings when we deserve curses, and who pours out good things again and again. A thoughtful reading of this book, along with a balanced idea of God's sovereignty and grace, should avoid that confusion however.

I learnt lots of things from Get Married. I was encouraged in my conviction not to have intimate guy buddies just for the sake of buddydom, and I was convicted of my tendency -- which arose quite possibly in defence of my own singleness -- to think of marriage as inferior to singleness instead of esteeming it as the rich covenant picture the Lord ordained for most of humankind to enjoy.

Get Married: what women can do to help it happen
Candice Watters
Moody Publishers, 2008
Rating: 8/10

Blink, and maybe you should miss it.

In a world composed entirely of kittens and rainbows, my first actual book review post wouldn't be of a book I didn't particularly like.

However, I set out to document my reading, and document I will -- the good, the bad, and the ugly (well, maybe not so much the ugly).

Ted Dekker's Blink of an Eye seems to have all the right ingredients: an international chase, a beautiful woman in danger, an intriguing genius surfer with charmingly scruffy blonde hair (apparently some people do have it all), and the painful challenge of melding east with west.

Miriam, a beautiful Muslim princess, is on the run to escape an arranged marriage with a cruel and evil man. The marriage is entirely a political move, an attempt for one man to gain power through the bloodline. Seth lives in a completely different world -- a world where a cute guy with an IQ of over 180 can blow people's minds but still finds nothing exciting enough to make life interesting.

Of course, their stories collide -- just as Seth begins to see stuff before it actually happens. Prophet, psychic, or just really, really gifted? The book never explicitly answers that question, choosing to leave it in the realm of the artistic ambiguous but hinting that what Seth experiences may be a form of miracle.

Which is funny, considering that Seth doesn't even believe in God when the story begins. In fact, at one point he explains that his strange psychic gift is proof that there is no God. After all, if God is who He says He is, He must be sovereign. And if God is sovereign, He must know the future. And if God knows the future, then there must only be one future. And if there is only one future, then how come Seth can see ten or twenty or a hundred possible futures that will change depending on whatever action he chooses to take?

His reasoning makes sense, and, though Seth eventually comes around to maybe acknowledging that there must be a higher power somewhere, he never again addresses his seemingly flawless no-God logic. This is a confusing enough issue for any author to leave unresolved, but from a Christian author who seems to be trying to get a point across, it's even stranger.

In fact, the point of the story is something I failed to see. I understand that some books have no point but to tell a story and tell it well. However, if you are going to write a book that proclaims a Christian message, perhaps it's best not to couch it in obscurity. Then again, is Dekker actually trying to proclaim a Christian message, or simply a message of tolerance? Miriam, a Muslim, and Seth, a kid from Christian USA, believe they can create a future together and that all they need is love. After all, love changes everything, says Dekker in his afterword.

For me, this isn't enough of a premise for a Christian book. A thrilling chase with an American hero and a Muslim damsel in distress may make for an interesting story, but if there is to be a message about God woven in through it all, at least it ought to make sense.

The only love that truly changes everything is God's love. Otherwise, it's pointless.

Blink of an Eye
Ted Dekker
Thomas Nelson, 2007
Rating: 5/10