Closer Than You Know
Brad Parks
Melanie aged out of the Foster Care system and is determined to never be like her parents for her own son. When she arrives to pick up her son from childcare, she finds herself being reported and jailed for domestic disturbance and an unknown drug charge. In the pages that follow, Melanie cannot defend her innocence,
This novel is told from the perspectives of Melanie (the accused ‘Drug Mom’) and Amy (the prosecutor), with interjections from the whispering rapist. The perspectives felt noticeably different while I was reading them, and their interactions felt real. I would have liked to be able to identify the rapist myself, as in other novels (Before Your Eyes), but that is a minor complaint. I could feel Melanie’s anguish at the same time as I saw things from Amy’s frustrated perspective.
I didn’t pick up this novel for almost a year because I thought it would be focused on the problems with the Foster Care system. Instead, despite the blurb, I found this to be a fast-paced thriller, even if it wasn’t totally psychological – it was more about how some disasters can’t be prevented, and that sometimes you just have to trust other people to have your back. I also learnt an interesting fact that prisons will let you keep your underwear (at least in Virginia), so if you’re going to be arrested, make sure you are wearing plenty of pairs so that you can use your own underwear. YMMV (pun intended)
When I was 3/4 of my way into this novel, I thought to myself that the ending would either make or break it. Thankfully the ending was really quite satisfactory, if not quite creepy enough for me. I felt that the ending really wrapped up a bit too quickly for me, as I wanted a little more information about Marcus (ew). How did the reader not see that coming? Or was it just me in the dark… 4 stars from me.
Allen & Unwin | 28th March 2018 | AU$29.99 | paperback
I was excited for this novel because I hadn’t read a good adult fantasy in quite a while and anything with dragons is bound to take my fancy. Sadly, the dragons (wyverns) were on the evil side of things most of the time, and the good dragon riders hardly figured in the picture with their dragons. It was inevitable that the Nameless One would be freed – everything was just a quibble about how long it would take and who would be responsible for its death.
This is a sex-positive novel that doesn’t shy away from the fact that young women feel like sex just as much as young men are often depicted as doing so! It’s ok for Vanessa to feel like having sex, and it’s ok for her to have feelings for someone and touch herself. I think that this should probably be categorized as a young adult novel, but honestly teenagers the age of Vanessa (15 years) are probably going to be having similar feelings.
This book will leave you feeling breathless and raw. The author’s honesty is breathtaking and painful, and will make inroads on your heart. What Michelle has written will resonate with other people who have been or are depressed, and hopefully make people feel less alone. Her descriptions of how she felt when deeply depressed may feel familiar, equally so the pages on her social anxiety.
I went from being really excited about this novel to being really disappointed in it rapidly. The writing style irked me. I read the first two chapters desperately hoping that the writing style was just an introduction. I didn’t find Layla a believable character. At times it seemed like the novel was just intended to explain some parts of Muslim culture, such as that women don’t need to pray at the mosque when it’s ‘that time of the month’. This detail was included in a way that just didn’t feel natural.
A quick reminder: The premise that babies born in the year 2000 are humanity’s glitch is interesting and gets more of an explanation in this novel. However, not all babies suffer from the glitch, and not all suffer in the same way. I love the way Crash reacts to meeting more Crashes! However, apparently if these guys are the ‘zeroes’ there are also going to be the ‘ones’. Where do they come from? It’s pretty unclear.
This was a torturous book to read. For a very slim book that could have taken an hour or so to zoom through, it took me literally months to get to the end. The writing style left me wondering why there were so many words used to describe simple situations. Too many things are spelled out and the passive voice of Lola is irritating and wishy-washy. The book seems as if it has come out of the author’s head in one piece, and then hasn’t been checked for its ability to connect with a reader.
Anne’s an interesting alternative heroine mainly because her story has already been determined by history. It takes any anticipation out of the story and leaves us with Anne and her strong personality. For the time, the way she is written is as a superstitious but practical woman who is determined to live her life her way. Of course we can’t know what she was like in real life, but we’d like to hope that she wasn’t a completely passive observer of her life – and that she was lucky enough to get a bit of romance apart from her arranged marriages.
Where should I begin? While this is billed as a memoir that Neill has written documenting his journey to recovery from being ready to kill himself to finding a path forwards, this is far more than that. I actually found that quite a minor part of the book – instead I was equally entranced and horrified by the stories of the African orphans living in Rainbow who live with being HIV+. Ted’s time there included the introduction of antiretrovirals (ART) and the lengthening of the children’s lives – so that they could live into adulthood. That of course is a very positive outcome, but not available for all children because it is so expensive and there are so many affected by this insidious disease.