This will hurt me...

  Zinc work, East Risdon Bay. August 2021. That Deadman Dance   by Kim Scott A masterpiece. In Bobby Wabalanginy, an intelligent and optimistic soul, Scott conjures up a narrator who will live long in the memory. Bobby, whose real name remains unpronounceable to the invaders throughout the novel, means "all of us playing together", a bitter irony given the course of events. Bobby is a marvel. Bright and eager for knowledge, he is a natural showman. These capacities allow him to shine in both his indigenous world and the newcomers to his land. Part clown, part shaman, the book does a magnificent job of naturally showing the reader the centrality of songs, music, and dance to the Noongar people of southwestern Western Australia. Bobby learns to speak, read and write in the white man's language, but a reoccurring motif throughout is the fundamental disconnect in understanding between the two cultures. His native culture is just as complex but more physical, present and eleme...

  Pole in the sky, Geilston Bay. August 2021. You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here   by Frances Macken You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here  strikes me as a book that is something of a fusion of  Derry Girls  and  Normal People , with a jarring murder/ disappearance side plot that is left unreconciled. As such, it did not quite hit the mark for me. In our narrator, the drifting Katie, along with best (!) friends, the toxic Evelyn and meek Maeve, we follow the unlikely trio. as they try to adjust from childhood to life in adulthood. For a story that centres on this cramped friendship, it is striking the extent to which these girls don't really like each other. I note that some reviewers took issue with the lack of resolution to the Katie and Evelyn dynamic, but the lacklustre death of their relationship seemed a natural course to me. What bothered me more was the seeming abandonment of the disappearance of Pamela Cooney. A number of clues/ red herr...

  Samurai, Hobart. August 2021. All Our Shimmering Skies   by Trent Dalton I have no problem with a protagonist being a precocious child, but there is a point where precociousness becomes aggravating, and young Molly Hook hit that point for me early on. In part, this is because I did not believe in her. Given the trauma and neglect of her upbringing - told in unyieldingly graphic detail - she is remarkably erudite and thoughtful. There is a difference between "taking a strength-based approach" to building a character and "taking the piss". In terms of other characters, Greta and Yukio were fine, albeit thinly sketched. My main issue concerns the construction of Aubrey. Dalton wants to have his cake and eat it when it comes to Molly's cruel uncle. Dalton frames Aubrey as evil personified, making some effort to explain how he came to be this way. We have many (many) pages expended on how the traumatising childhood of young Aubrey has programmed him with hate. Hate...

Setting sun, Geilston Bay. August 2021.   Lucky's   by Andrew Pippos Another book that chooses to advance its story irregularly. Dynamically shifting timelines are so typical these days that I am unsure whether the word irregular fits anymore! We primarily dwell in 2002, where the unmoored Emily leaves her failing marriage in the UK to set about researching and writing a  New Yorker  article about the rise and fall of a now-defunct Australian chain of family restaurants, one that ended in a mass shooting. Shadowing this journey is the mystery of her long-dead father's interest in what seems to be nothing more than a little bit of trivia on the other side of the world. From here, we jump back first to 1944 for a while, then back twenty years previously as we get our heads around the Greek diaspora. Between zipping back and forth to 2002, we spend a bit of time in the 1940s and 1950s on the emergence of the  Lucky's  empire and dissolution of a marriage. More...

Starlings, Lindisfarne. August 2021. All the Birds, Singing   by Evie Wyld As an oddly structured novel, the book features alternating chapters from the perspective of our narrator's present (told in the past tense) and her past (told in the present tense). Those chapters set in the present progress in an even and linear fashion. Those chapters set in the past hop and leap backwards in a disconnected and disjointed way. While this is an innovative way to capture our protagonist's haphazard and traumatic past, the fragmented nature of the telling is confusing at times. There is some evocative writing here, with those sections set on the remote sheep station and in the present particularly resonant. Other sections failed to convince, with the strange relationship with the withered Otto and the period of sex work in a port town in the Pilbara striking a bit of a dull note to my ear. We know very little about our central character, as Wyld lets the past emerge in fragments and half...

Pipes, Geilston Bay. August 2021. The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf Despite the arduous and grim lives of the characters within, The Tie That Binds is an extremely gentle novel. There is an ease with which Haruf's prose emerges on the page, a plain-speaking directness that carries significant emotional heft. Covering 80 years, the novel is a slow burner that starts at the ending, whips back around to the beginning and meanders across a lifetime of (largely) sadness, missed opportunity and resignation to a life suffocated by a hateful and bitter man. Told in snippets of memories and assumed events, the book bears an elegant sense of time and place rarely seen. The town of Holt, Colorado, is a small but exquisitely realised world. It saddens me to think that Haruf's oeuvre only stretched to six novels, but I am looking forward to reading the four that I haven't read. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

  Droplets on a leaf, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Exploded View   by Carrie Tiffany Hmmm. Perhaps the fact that cars are quite possibly the least interesting things that I can imagine explains my coolness to this one. It's a bleak and sombre book, but I never quite believed it. The novel progresses through what is essentially one unbroken stream of consciousness from the mind of a young girl. Our narrator - dealing with significant neglect and abuse - struck me as too uneven to fully accept as authentic. This may well be due to her use of a Holden car manual to process her trauma. Still, there is an incongruity to her singular prescience, acumen and utter lack of agency that struck me as unconvincing. There is an implausibility to the car journey that serves as the centre point of the story, which is not helped by the feeling that the author gave up on it a third of the way through. I found the entire thing uneven and frustrating, which is disappointing as there are moments of ...