Book Review: Stillwater Creek by Alison Booth

Book of the Month: March 2010. It is 1957, recently widowed Ilona Talivaldis and her young daughter Zidra move to the small fictional town of Jingera on the south coast of New South Wales. Ilona is a pianist and her love of music is now shared with a growing number of Jingera residents, the “Jingeroids”, as she establishes herself as a piano teacher and finds a place in her new community. For Zidra the challenge is to find her way through the minefield of playground culture in her small school with its tightly knit groups. She finds her greatest communion with Lorna Hunter, an Aboriginal girl of her own age; and with Jim Cadwaller the slightly older butcher’s son. He has a brilliant academic future ahead of him if his mother will only let him leave Jingera.

Stillwater Creek is told from the perspective of six of the districts residents, including Elona and Zidra. The others are Cherry Bates the publican’s wife, George Cadwaller the butcher, Jim Cadwaller his son, and Peter Elliot, a local farmer. Their stories weave in and out of the narrative and all become intertwined as the book reaches a tumultuous climax.

It is a book crammed with many underlying themes. All the characters have secrets and the issues of unhappy childhood and of displacement are particularly explored. Read more

Book of the Month: The Women in Black by Madeleine St John

Our Book of the Month for February 2010 is ‘The Women in Black’ by Madeleine St John. Join our Book Club moderator, Barbara Sungaila, when we discuss this book at the Book Club forum at AWO Connect, from mid-February 2010. To participate in the discussion, you will be required to open a FREE account at AWO Connect, where you can also join in our book club discussions and blog about your favourite books and authors.

Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme…

By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies’ Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black is a great novel and a lost Australian classic. Read more

Book Review: Wonders of a Godless World

Finally, a book that isn’t afraid to take ugly and make it beautiful.

From the opening pages of Andrew McGahan’s latest fictional offering, we are bombarded with the dichotomy - and parallels – between ugly and beauty, whether it be aesthetic, figurative, primal, tangible, archetypal, human or metaphysical - it’s there, peeping from every placid or tumultous corner.

From the four corners of the earth to the very corners of its characters minds, Wonders of a Godless World takes its reader on a journey along the very edge of a precipitous chasm – one that plummets and rises and skirts into the morass of madness, only to soar free, high and clear into the calming plains of sanity. Readers certainly take a trip that challenges the very concept of conscious awareness – not only via the clutches of madness but via the confines of the mortal body – of physical trappings and spiritual fluidity.

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Book Review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Book of the Month: September  2009 – Join the discussion online at the Book Club http://www.australianwomenonline.com/awobookclub/

It’s always a little dangerous to read something that’s been lauded by the press and even more dangerous when the author has been pegged as the next big thing in contemporary fiction. It’s dangerous because expectations are high.

I tried to go into The Slap with low expectations and also with as little media-induced hype as possible. Sure, this novel had everyone gossiping around the ubiquitous water cooler but other than the contentious central theme of the facial slapping of a minor, I didn’t want to know what else I was in for. I wanted it to be a surprise.

Was I surprised? Perhaps. But not in a contentious sense. I guess I was surprised that this lengthy novel is simply a running account of everyday life in urban and suburban Melbourne – a graphic snapshot of the lives of an extended family and friends, from wee ones through to grandparents.

This may sound pedestrian but it’s not. It goes much deeper than that. Supping hungrily on the multi-cultural melting pot that is modern day Australia, Tsiolkas’ urban saga is fascinating in that it delves deeply into the minds and vulnerabilities of its characters, taking cuttings from a wide cross-section of immigrant culture, peppered with the odd white Australian skippy.

With a large Greek family as his anchor point, Tsiolkas clearly writes what he knows. His main character Hector and Indian wife Aisha are the types anyone would like to know more about – they are most certainly the neighbours whose tall fence you would like to take a peek over. You might even like to be invited into their house, just to check them out and catch a glimpse of a life perhaps far removed from your own. Attractive, successful – they appear to have it all. So much so, you might even delight in the possibility of watching them fall. Read more

Book of the Month: Vintage Alice by Jessica Adams

It was interesting reading a chic lit novel written by an Australian living in London. Author Jessica Adams has a clear love for her homeland yet an insatiability for England that’s still apparent, despite the light-hearted bagging she gives Old Blighty in this tale about a young woman on the verge of a major sea change.

Lead character Alice Templeton is the creative type – a Jill-of-all-trades with a passion for fashion and all things vintage, and a keen desire to begin her own clothing label – Vintage Alice – a whimsical aspiration that has kept her in shoddy jobs (and in the poor house) her entire working life.

When her boyfriend Nash secures a well-paying music teaching role at a private school in Sydney, Alice is beyond delighted. Sick of London’s sodding ways and her pauper-like status, she joyously piggybacks on her boyfriend’s emigration, despite her misgivings on the future of their relationship.

Prior to the couple’s departure, things begin to sour with Nash. With the help of Heidi (the couple’s Australian emigration officer in London) and her cousin in Sydney, Alice applies for a job at a dog kennel in Byron Bay and quietly sets up a loose Plan B that will secure her great Aussie dream, even if things go pear-shaped with Nash – which they quickly do. The couple split shortly before their flight to Sydney. Read more

Book Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The first thing that happened when I started reading The Help was that a teensy bit of voice escaped from my lips. A vocal gasp. The second thing that happened was an ear-to-ear grin, followed closely by a batch of freshly sprung tears. And all this within the first two pages.

The ensuing saga wrapped in the pages of this stunning debut novel by American writer Kathryn Stockett, had me as breathlessly captivated as the latest enthralling TV mini-series – one that’s totally addictive and causes little peeps of glee just before showtime.

I desperately wanted to get back to this book the very moment I reluctantly closed its pages to attend to real life. Such was the intensity of The Help – it made me want to escape to an alternate reality – the world of Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s.

Stockett’s enormously addictive novel follows the journey of two ‘coloured’ maids and one young white writer who is desperate to pen something of substance during an incredibly turbulent time in history, where segregation is the rule, and ignorant housewives are caught up in the falsehood that coloureds are sub-society. The most extreme of these teachings is that coloureds are too diseased to even share a toilet with whites – an absurd notion that is followed most irreverently and deliciously through the book. Read more

Book of the Month: Breath by Tim Winton

Tim Winton’s latest novel, Breath, takes its first gasping breath in a fast-moving scene, flush with speed and emotion, and loaded with question marks. Written in the first-person, present-tense – which gives rapid movement to any written work – this first glimpse into Breath is… well, breathtaking. From there, the story rapidly slows into retro mode – slipping gently into past-tense, and dipping back into the late sixties to a hidden past of languid and leisurely boyhood.

Bruce Pike, or Pikelet to those who knew him well, is a good kid teetering on the edge of many a regular Aussie boyhood – that delicate precipice between general teen survival and pushing the boundaries of life. Pikelet’s journey takes us on a mashed-up voyage into a world of desire and innocent bravado – to taste life at its most provocative, to push the limits of physical endurance, to understand the world, to feel a sense of belonging, to balance on morality, to feel and even stalk danger.
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Book of the Month: Hopetoun Wives by Fran Cusworth

For her second novel, Melbourne based author Fran Cusworth revisited the year she followed her husband to a mining town on the south west coast of Australia. Although a work of fiction, the story of three very different women who follow their husbands to Hopetoun, was inspired by Cusworth’s personal experience of a small community in the grip of a mining boom.

Hopetoun Wives follows the story of the unlikely friendship that develops between Jasmine, Miranda and Brigid – three very different women from three very different worlds. Melbourne girl Jasmine is desperately unhappy in her marriage and is hoping a change of scenery will help repair the damage done to her relationship with Tom. Read more

Book of the Month: The Marriage Club by Kate Legge

Multi-award winning Australian journalist Kate Legge was in her mid-40’s when she took a year off to pen her first work of fiction. In 2007 Legge’s dedication to the task was rewarded when The Unexpected Elements of Love was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

For her second novel, Legge again took a year off from the demands of professional journalism to write The Marriage Club, a thought-provoking tale that begs the question: How well do we really know the person who shares our bed and the people who share our lives? Read more

Lisa Heidke delivers MummyLit at its best with Lucy Springer

Book of the Month: February 2009
The public’s appetite for ChicLit may have peaked somewhere around 2004, but the genre that gave us the flawed but much loved heroine of the 1990’s, continues to influence the work of both new and established authors of popular fiction.

In her debut novel, Australia’s Lisa Heidke (pictured) serves up some hilarious scenes with suburban mum style justice in Lucy Springer Gets Even. So forget Bridget Jones, the new heroine of women’s fiction is the suburban soccer mum!

Lisa Heidke told Australian Women Online, “Some people call it MummyLit because the character is married or has been in a relationship, and has children – so they’ve moved on from the ‘Bridget Jones’ where the main character is single and looking for a man.” Read more

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