Category Archives: Book Reviews

Review: Kim Liggett – The Grace Year

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The Grace Year
Kim Liggett

Tierney James has always bucked the trends. She’s not content to be married off and spend her life producing babies. She wants to just survive her Grace year, lose the ‘magic’ she possesses and be able to go to farming. But as the Grace year begins, she realises that real magic could be afoot, and that it’s going to take more than common sense to get the girls working together.

I received this novel in early September, and it shouldn’t have taken me more than a month to review. I found myself almost equally repulsed and enjoying the novel, and equally believing and disbelieving at the girls’ behaviour. There were plenty of twists, and magic going on, so many that to review the book in full would spoil them. That being said…

Arg! The protagonist at times made me want to hit my head against the wall. I was somewhat disappointed in the ending. Tierney gave up her freedom for that? I can’t believe that she did. To discuss this more would be too much of a spoiler. But still! One of the things she says she’ll never do, she does.

What I would have liked to know was why they didn’t leave one girl behind each time to try to improve things for the next group. Surely not all the girls just want to be married? Or they know they have no man to go back to? I just find it impossible that they would let these things happen time and time again, even if that’s the culture. Not everyone has siblings to be thrown out after all.

I don’t think I would reread this, but I’m going to recommend it to a friend. 4 stars from me. Creepy, and so good and so bad at the same time.

Penguin Random House | 15th October 2019 | AU$32.99 | paperback

Review: Rainbow Rowell – Wayward Son

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Wayward Son
Rainbow Rowell

Simon’s defeated the enemy and found true love. So why can’t he make it off the couch? Bunce and Baz are going to college and experiencing life, but Simon just can’t face it. What’s the point when you’ve achieved your life aim? Bunce stages an intervention – a road trip across America is just what they need.

Rainbow Rowell’s novels are usually a 100% love from me (Fangirl and Eleanor and Park). In fact, I often feel urged to reread Fangirl (has it been 5 years since I reviewed it already? wow!). When I saw this one in the publicity catalog I even told the publisher that I’d possibly kill to get my hands on it. With hype like this, and the avid fan following Rowell has, I had high expectations.

Somehow the nature of this novel is that you don’t become too attached to any of them, and unfortunately that’s what made Rowell’s other novels speak to me so deeply in the past. At one point a character was introduced and I wondered how they could possibly be relevant if they get mindwiped! Overwhelmingly I felt like there were too many characters that I needed to care about, and so I felt myself caring less about them overall.

You wonder at first what the main plot point of this novel is going to be. Surely it can’t just be following two magicians, a werewolf and a demon across America in a convertible? Nope! It’s not! But Simon, Bunce and Baz unpacking their feelings around having overcome the enemy from Carry On could have had more air time. If child soldiers are a theme that Rowell wanted to address, and PTSD, I wanted more of it. Less ‘fluff’ somehow. There’s being lighthearted, and then there’s just blatantly brushing off problems.

I found myself underwhelmed by this novel. I don’t know whether it’s because I hadn’t read the first book (oops) or that there was something inherently lacking in it. I don’t really understand why Simon is so confused about his relationship with Baz all of a sudden. I do want to go back and read the first book to see what I missed, and maybe identify what I really needed to know to enjoy this novel to its fullest.

Personally, I’d keep the wings. There are some other issues that are left unaddressed, such as Baz’s inevitable non-aging compared to his friends and how he’ll deal with that in the future. And Bunce’s overwhelming nature of, well, being Bunce. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, but I’m just not that excited for the third. 3 stars from me.

Pan Macmillan | 24th September 2019 | AU$17.99 | paperback

Review: Saundra Mitchell – The Prom

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The Prom
Saundra Mitchell

Emma Nolan wants to go to Prom like every other girl, and dance. The only problem is that in small town Indiana there’s no chance she’ll be able to take her girlfriend the way she dreams of. Alyssa isn’t ready to get out of the closet, and her mom certainly doesn’t want to hear even a hint of her dating a girl. Alyssa’s in charge of organising the prom, so everything will be fine, right?

I found myself disappointed in the level of depth in this novel. Ok, the prom is cancelled because the protagonist wants to take a same-sex partner. Then it’s not cancelled, because Broadway stars come to save the day (they are of course pushing their own agenda). Maybe it’s because I’ve seen this concept basically done before by Julie Anne Peters It’s our Prom (so deal with it).

Emma gives up far too easily, and also forgives too easily! Emma living with her grandmother because her parents kicked her out is just written off as normal and hardly upsetting at all – which I doubt. And then the bad guys magically just reform from being told off. Likely? No.

It’s based on a ‘Hit Broadway Musical’. Why does it have to be a musical before it’s a novel? Why can’t they just write a decent book? Maybe it works better with singing and dancing, and having that playing in my head at the same time might have bumped up the reading experience for me.

I’m really happy to see big publishing houses like Penguin getting into queer fiction, I’m just sad that there isn’t an original novel here. 3 stars from me for an underwhelming read.

Penguin Random House | 17th September 2019 | AU$16.99 | paperback

Review: NDF novels #2

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These are some short reviews of novels that I started and couldn’t finish. I’ll probably pass them onto a friend or attempt to sell them to a local bookstore. Sing out if you want them!

Meaghan Wilson Anastasios – The Honourable Thief / The Emerald Tablet

I started The Honourable Thief, and then abandoned it because it was so slow to get started and I couldn’t respect the aging male protagonist. I went in expecting Indiana Jones style action and tension, and got painstaking, painful details of Benedict’s surroundings (and honestly I wasn’t that interested in them).

Fast forward a year, and I found myself on an aeroplane trapped with only The Emerald Tablet to read (I’d completely forgotten about even reading the first novel). Sadly, I found that it had many of the same problems as the first. I hated Benedict Hitchens and his bumbling self-assuredness, and I detested Eris, his love interest. One of the earliest scenes is Eris pleasuring herself while she thinks about Benedict, and the whole thing made me twitch awkwardly on my seat. There was no need to go there!

Pan Macmillan | 31st July 2018 | $29.99 | paperback
Pan Macmillan | 25th June 2019 | $29.99 | paperback

Peter James – Absolute Proof

I put off reading this novel for a long time because the blurb about proving God’s exisitance and reporting it in the news didn’t sound appealing to me. Then I realised that I had enjoyed Peter James’ novel Love You Dead. So I thought I would try out Absolute Proof. Unfortunately it was just as bad as I expected. It had too many characters, too many conflicting and confusing storylines and an unconvincing protagonist (who I assume was the journalist).

Pan Macmillan 25th September 2018 | AU$29.99 | paperback

Corey Ann Haydu – OCD Love Story

I picked this up for a lighthearted holiday read, but sadly found myself irritated at the protagonist’s stupid thoughts. Obsessed by two or three guys at once? It felt like the author was making light of what is actually a very serious obsession. Bea even already has a restraining order against her! And her best friend is useless. No. Don’t touch this one. Maybe the bright pink cover should have given it away for me…

Review: Claire Merle – The Glimpse

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The Glimpse
Claire Merle

A simple test can tell you whether you’re going to develop one of the BIG3 – Schizophrenia, Depression, or Anxiety. Ariana’s DNA test labelled her as a Pure – designed to marry a Pure boy and have Pure offspring. However it turns out that her DNA result was faked, and now she’s relying on Jasper to keep her safe in the Community. When he disappears, Ana has to find him before it’s too late for her as well.

I grabbed this from the library this school holidays and it was a light, quick read that was strangely compelling. I say strangely, because the plotting was really quite thin, and half the time Ana didn’t act in a sensible manner at all. Her being able to hold her breath under the water for a long period of time was somehow an important plot point that was used more than once.

I was drawn to this novel because I’m keen on both genetics and mental health. A future where we have identified some of the genes responsible for people developing mental illnesses is really likely, and is probably sooner than most people realise. And I fully expect that it could cause a divide between ‘crazy’ people and ‘normal’ people. But the fact that they just expect having a gene to cause a mental illness? That’s a total fraud – there’s lots of other factors that are important such as epigenetics, Barr bodies and environmental triggers. Depression and Anxiety are huge, but I wouldn’t consider Schizophrenia that common (although it is one of the most debilitating mental illnesses out there).

I didn’t get why Ana was so special. She’s way too excited about !boys! and not enough about, I don’t know, actually saving other people? She’s so shallow and irritating, and her thought processes totally don’t make sense. What put me off as well was a four year old being so suicidal that they would jump in a river. I guess that should come with a spoiler alert. And then the fact that someone claims to see the future? That took it from barely plausible to hopeless.

I didn’t understand why the Mental Clinics even existed. If people go into them, and don’t ever come out, why don’t they just kill those inside? Harsh of me, but honestly. If it’s all about the money, why bother even testing anything out on them, especially if really poor records are kept? Everyone knows science doesn’t work like that!

Ultimately it’s just another dystopian novel where people have been relatively arbitrarily sorted into the City and the Community to create an elite. If you’re looking for a weaker version of: The Wind Singer, Uglies, or Disruption, this is the right novel for you. I finished it, but I became less and less involved in it as I went along. 3 stars from me.

Review: David Yoon – Frankly in Love

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Frankly in Love
David Yoon

Frank Li needs to get date a nice Korean girl, bond with his father and get into The Harvard. What he doesn’t foresee is falling for a white girl and missing out on his father’s life. When Frank and Joy cook up the plan to fake date one another to be with the people they love, will more get broken than their hearts?

What I really liked about this novel was that it didn’t end at the predictable point of boy-loves-girl-loves-boy. The plot keeps going, and Frank finds himself still continuing on and considering issues he hadn’t thought about. To me it felt like quite a long novel, although I didn’t have a chance to sit down and read it in a single sitting.

Did the romance feel real to me? Sort of I suppose. I didn’t really get a proper picture of Brit and Joy, besides that Frank liked them. I liked how it wasn’t really insta-love as they had at least noticed one another before. I would have liked to see a little more characterisation of people other than Frank – but what can you do when it’s a first person narrative? Well, you can employ funny jokes and casual swearing in a way that makes you feel like you’re inside a teenage boy’s mind.

Apparently fake dating is a common trope? I’ve not seen it in my recent reading, so I can’t comment on it. For me, I found it very believable that Frank and Joy would set things up like this! Yes, I suppose the next step was inevitable but really? Couldn’t there be any other option? I’m also not sure I liked the ending with Q. I don’t think it was necessary, and it didn’t really make sense with the rest of the novel.

I can’t really say much about whether this is a typical depiction of American-Korean life and expectations. At my high school, everyone was European-Australian, and at university the number of people of Asian decent outnumbered ‘Australians’. Some reviewers have complained that this novel shows old-fashioned views of immigrants that speak poor English, but have high hopes for their children. However the people I personally know from similar backgrounds actually have similar expectations placed on them.

David Yoon is the husband of Nicola Yoon – Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star. If you like fiction that has racial impact I’d recommend this novel, or the others. Just remember that it is written to a very American (USA) point of view. 4 stars from me.

Penguin Random House | 12th September 2019 | AU$12.99 | paperback

Review: Bill Bennett – Palace of Fires

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Palace of Fires
Bill Bennett

Lily and her mom have been on the run since Lily’s dad was killed in a hit-and-run four years ago. Lily has enjoyed living on the farm, and gentle gardening with her mom. But then a regular trip to the Farmer’s Market ends with tragedy – Lily’s mom is missing, and Lily thinks a scary biker is at fault.

I was initially sent the second book in this trilogy to review (Unholy) back in 2018. I hadn’t read the first book, so I put it on my shelf to be read when I could get it from the library. Then this month Penguin generously sent me all three books to read! Sadly, I couldn’t get past the first one.

The most promising part of this novel was the prologue! Lily’s ancestor is trying to keep her family alive, but the potato fields are blighted so she signs her name in blood with Satan. Then the book segues awkwardly into an elite hunter witch and her two familiars that feed on toe-nipples (no, you didn’t read that incorrectly!).

Details that should have simply been implied are spelled out and then spelled out again. The book jumps between perspectives of the witches, the hunter, the hag, Lily, Lily’s love interest etc etc. to the point that you don’t actually know which character you should care about. Of course we should care the most about Lily, but honestly I found her irritating and all too predictable. She really works hard to make herself different from everyone else, and she doesn’t even bother trying to do social niceties when they might benefit her.

I haven’t read a book that I detested as much as this one for quite a while! I mean, I hated I Always Find You, but I at least finished it. Bill Bennett’s Unholy wasn’t even tolerable for 100 pages. 1 star. I’d give 0 stars if I could.

Penguin Random House | 3rd September 2019 | AU$19.99 | paperback

Review: Sonia Henry – Going Under

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Going Under
Sonia Henry

Kitty has survived medical school and is looking forward to being a junior doctor learning the ways of surgery. But instead of a supportive learning environment, she finds herself bullied by her superiors and fantasizing about a life outside the medical profession. Kitty will survive the year – but will she survive with her personality intact?

From the first chapter this novel grabbed me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Kitty was a playful protagonist who allowed me to feel empathy, pity and horror all at once. I knew that surely she would be ok, but I felt like I was fighting it out in the trenches with her. I felt like I was the one being bullied, and the one being in a hospital.

I’m not sure this is really a sexy novel. Yes, there are some fantasies that Kitty plays out in her head, but at the same time most of the novel is about her work life and her life with her friends. The Australian culture is to lean towards a good beer or several glasses of wine as a way to cope with life and Kitty and her friends certainty lean into that. Having read novels about lawyers behaving badly as regarding drug use, I can’t say I was surprised by it in this novel either. Doctors are humans too!

It’s horrifying to think of all those doctors out there being bullied and feeling so uncertain of themselves that they commit or attempt suicide. I teach medical students, and pre-medical students, and I know how stressed they are just at the university stage. Being in charge of someone’s life is a huge responsibility, and I don’t think that there is enough support. I feel worried about the students that have become my friends.

I am hoping from more from this author ASAP. I’d prefer if they weren’t another Kitty story, but I’ll take what I can get. I haven’t enjoyed a medical novel so much since Cherry Ames (my mom collects nursing fiction novels). If you’d like to read more by this author, she also penned an anonymous post about the truths of this novel. Fiction, or Non-Fiction? 4 stars from me.

Allen & Unwin | 3rd September 2019 | AU$29.99 | paperback

Review: CN Lester – Trans Like Me

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Trans Like Me
CN Lester

“What does it mean to be transgender? How do we discuss the subject? In this eye-opening book, CN Lester, academic and activist, takes us on a journey through some of the most pressing issues concerning the trans debate”

This is likely to be an alienating book. What self-respecting straight cis-gendered person would want to be caught reading it? Well, they should want to be caught reading it, because it’s a good book with plenty of helpful information and insights. The publicizing of ‘Call me Caitlin’ and the like should hopefully bring this book to the fore as a ‘real’ or ‘regular’ person’s journey in being trans* (rather than someone with unlimited money and resources).

I feel slightly ambivalent about this book – because I’m not trans* and I’m guilty of some of those oversights of non-gender-queer people. I work with students who might be gender diverse, and I try to take care with my pronouns, but sometimes I make mistakes. I wear my Ally badge with pride at work, and I’m not shy about the fact I’m married to a woman. But I do feel a little awkward at the thought of asking someone what pronouns they prefer.

I once enjoyed following George.Jessie.Love where the mother of Jessie (once George) talked about some of the problems and joys of life of having a child who is transgender. I can’t imagine having a child who doesn’t identify as either gender and how hard that could be for the parents and the child. Another blogger that I respect quietly transitioned the pronouns she used for her two sons into a daughter and a son. Whether you shout about being trans* and proud of it, or you quietly get on with life, there are unique challenges that come with it that are discussed in some depth in this book.

I’m not sure that this is ‘a journey for all of us’. I’m not sure that this book is even going to be looked at twice by cis-people that haven’t ever thought about non-binary genders. I think that within the Queer community this book would find readers, but not necessarily outside of it.

Hachette Australia | 20th June 2017 | AU$22.99 | paperback

Review: Lauren James – The Starlight Watchmaker

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The Starlight Watchmaker
Lauren James

Hugo is good at his job as a watchmaker to the elite students of the Academy. He’s quiet and undemanding, and just trying to keep his job. When Dorian busts into his workshop to demand his watch repaired, Hugo’s little world will be overturned by a potential terrorist plot.

This cute, delicate little novella is a very quick read for an adult. In fact, it’s so short that I struggled to form an opinion on it at all. Hugo is endearing, far more so than the last ‘poor android’ novel I attempted. Dorian is demanding and clueless, but not in a vindictive manner. I only wish I got to hear more from the baby planet!

It turns some ideas on its head – what if a library needed watering instead of staying dry? What if planets started out as babies that had to go to school before they grew up? I loved the author’s imagination and how it came to light in front of my eyes.

The plot is a very simple one, and there’s no sense of underlying menace – it’s not scary at all. It says that this is aimed at middle-grade to junior YA but I’d put it in the under 10 bracket. I’m pretty sure the 10 year old reader in my family would turn up her nose at such a simple story! I think it would be suitable for a child still learning to read confidently, where the adult and child take turns reading.

Allen & Unwin | 5th August 2019 | AU$14.99 | paperback