This will hurt me...

Camp Falls, Tasman National Park, the Tasman Peninsula. October 2013. A Greyhound of a Girl , Roddy Doyle: This is the first of Roddy Dolye’s books that I’ve read that he’s written for younger readers. In many respects it is ‘typical Doyle’, but with a distinctly softer edge in terms of language and overall ambiance. That said, the narrative voice is distinctly Irish and I didn’t find the change undermined my enjoyment of the novel. Given the central themes of death, ageing and regret, the author does a great job of communicating a sense of tenderness and understanding without resorting to condescension or the hackneyed metaphors often seen in this kind of thing. Essentially a tale of love and death across four generations of women in one family, the blurb sums it up nicely: "One of them is dead, one of them is dying, one of them is driving, and one of them is just starting out". I enjoyed it, you might too. Recommended. C+.

Boat alone. The Tasman National Park, Tasmania. October 2013. We Have Always Lived in the Castle , Shirley Jackson: This is a dark little book that – like a lot of Shirley Jackson’s work – explores the idea of persecution of people who are ‘different’. It is a tricky read full of strangeness and goings on where the moral lines are not clear and the narrator clearly unreliable and quite a bit unstable. Despite a multiplying sense of unease and malevolence, the book also explores concepts of love and devotion. Immensely macabre elements are treated as unremarkable; the sense of agoraphobia is virtually unrelenting. Yet the language is deceptively simple, and the almost dreamlike ‘otherness’ both real and imagined. Together, social class and actions in the past divide the family at the centre of the book and the narrow-minded townsfolk, but just how strange and different the sisters are is beyond them. Of course, we the reader have an insight that they do not, and the type of horro...