Many years ago, a character popped into my mind and never left. He was a loner—obese, disfigured, quiet and full of self-doubt—but he had an inner well of strength that he almost knew was there. His name was Coyote Jones and for years, maybe even a decade, I tried to put him into various situations because I knew he belonged in a book.

Nothing worked and I decided to put it away. Sometimes, a great character just doesn’t have a story and that’s the end of it.

Fast forward to November of 2017. I’ve gone through the excellent MA in Creative Writing program at Southern New Hampshire University, I’ve had five of my books published by a wonderful small press called Sapphire Books Publishing. I had just finished a book and wasn’t ready to start the next. But someone asked me if I wanted to do NaNoWriMo and I said…

Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis)

The unfurling of fern fiddleheads in spring is one of the things I look forward to every year. To me, each one is a work of art. Above is a lovely reddish-bronze Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis) named for its quick demise when touched by frost.

Fiddleheads are perfect examples of a Fibonacci spiral, a mathematical sequence that builds from 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each number is the total of the previous two. The whole Universe can be defined mathematically, the way plants grow, our body works, everything, which I find pretty fascinating. But I digress… Above are several examples of Interrupted Fern (Osmunda claytoniana), that start out quite wooly, unfolding into rough, chartreuse clusters of beaded mini-ferns before opening their fronds completely. The name comes from the fertile pinnae that occur about halfway up the stem, which mature and fall…

It’s only three weeks since I posted about my reading of Karenlee Thompson’s new book, Flame Tip, a collection of short fictions loosely themed around the catastrophic Black Tuesday Bushfires in Tasmania in 1967.  The 50th anniversary of those fires was February 7th 2017 but already this fire season has claimed its victims, making me wonder why more Australian authors haven’t tackled this theme.  Fellow Tasmanian Amanda Lohrey did, in her novella Vertigo (see my review), Roger McDonald wrote about a young arsonist in The Slap (see my review) and Delys Bird edited a collection called Fire (see Karenlee’s guest review).  But for a natural disaster which looms so large in our national consciousness, it’s strange that I don’t know of any others except a brilliant children’s story called Ash Road by Ivan Southall.

Anyway…

In my previous post about this book, I explained that I’d only read four…

It seems to me that there are two kinds of historical fiction…

Firstly, there is the genuinely escapist read in the Jean Plaidy tradition, i.e. aristocrats and the serving class in a long-ago world, with the star-crossed lovers and political intrigues that belong there.  The egalitarian nature of Australian society makes this a tricky genre for Australian authors, because they have to draw on hierarchical societies remote from our own, but Elisabeth Storrs has done so successfully with her Tales of Ancient Rome trilogy.

Though I enjoy escapist reading occasionally, more interesting to me is the historical novel which aims to shine a light on some aspect of past life,  (including a sub-genre based on a real life which I’ve tagged Rescue A Woman from Oblivion).  Australian examples of these from my recent reading include The Birdman’s Wife by Melissa Ashley about the forgotten wife of John Gould (see my review); Jill Blee’s…

It sounds daft, I know, but I can’t read Richard Flanagan’s new novel First Person in bed because it’s a hardback.  It’s also deliciously thought-provoking, which is not ideal for bedtime reading, so I decided to take a look at a paperback that’s been languishing in my box of ‘maybes’ since July…

Stars Across the Ocean is badged as commercial women’s fiction on the blurb, and Kimberley Freeman is the pseudonym of Kim Wilkins, a prolific and award winning author across many genres who is also a teacher of creative writing at the University of Queensland.  She is very popular at Goodreads, where this and her other novels have pages and pages of 5 star ratings.

In an academic paper called ‘Popular genres and the Australian literary community: the case of fantasy fiction (2008), Wilkins analyses the way the literary community fails to pay attention to fiction outside the ‘genre’ of ‘Australian literary realism’.  Amongst…

What a pleasure it is to read Chaconne, the debut novel of Canberra author Diana Blackwood!  There’s a serious coming-of-age story here, but the book is laced with delicious puns and droll set pieces and I loved the way Blackwood has subverted the clichés of the Romantic Paris genre.

She dressed neatly enough for Café Obertor and put on her walking shoes.  While she was tying the laces, it occurred to her that any Parisian veneer she might have acquired was already slipping away.  She no longer felt compelled to expend thought on her appearance if she wasn’t so inclined. In Paris she had almost always made some kind of effort because the city itself seemed to demand it: the scarf knotted just so, the jaunty accent of colour that showed you hadn’t thrown on your clothes in the half-dark but had put together a look in front of the…

The Mother-in-Law is local Melbourne author Sally Hepworth’s fifth novel.  I’ve previously read The Things We Keep (still her best novel IMO) and The Family Next Door and once again I approached her novel as light reading with an ‘issue’ (to balance the challenge of reading The Atheist by Indonesian author Achdiat K. Mihardja, about which more later).

The blurb for the Mother-in-Law goes like this:

Someone once told me that you have two families in your life – the one you are born into and the one you choose. Yes, you may get to choose your partner, but you don’t choose your mother-in-law. The cackling mercenaries of fate determine it all.
From the moment Lucy met Diana, she was kept at arm’s length. Diana is exquisitely polite, but Lucy knows, even after marrying Oliver, that they’ll never have the closeness she’d been hoping for. But who could fault…

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others” 

The best selling book of 2018. A million and one people, including myself, made their way through this book over the holidays. A memoir of the former First Lady, Michelle tells us her story in 3 parts – her childhood, meeting and “becoming us” with Barrack and her time in the White House.

If you read our “Best of” post, you will recall that this was one of my favorite books of 2018. The #1 thing a memoir requires is openness and honesty and Michelle gave us that. You could tell that Michelle has been holding back and being PC because she sure had a lot to say. Every stage of her life was laid out in great detail in a way that lets the reader into her mind and understand what made…