'Outlander' TV debut - August 9th, 2014.

I interrupt regularly scheduled blogging to have a fan-girl moment. 

The TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series now has a US premiere date - 

August 9th, 2014. 

I am so freakin' excited and shall be reviewing the show when it debuts. 

In the meantime, if you're someone who has never read the Outlander books (or tried and gave up because - 870 PAGES!?!?!) then I heartily suggest you get ready to buy or borrow because judging from the previews, this looks like a worthy adaptation .... Also, Sam Heughan.

Where are all the great young adult TV shows?

New Kill Your Darlings column is up: 

"Where are all the great young adult TV shows?"

I talk about My Mad Fat Diary (best show, like, ever!) and wonder why, when Australian YA is so strong, it's not reflected in what's on offer for teen TV-viewers? 

'Shotgun Lovesongs' by Nickolas Butler

From the BLURB:

Henry, Lee, Kip and Ronnie grew up together in rural Wisconsin, but their lives have since taken different paths. Henry stayed home and married his first love, whilst the others left in search of something more. Ronnie became a rodeo star, Kip made his fortune in the city, and musician Lee found fame - but heartbreak, too. Now all four are reunited for a wedding, but amid happiness and celebration, old rivalries resurface and a wife's secret threatens to tear both a marriage and a friendship apart . . . This is a novel about the things that matter - love and loyalty, the power of music and the beauty of nature - told in a uniquely beautiful, warm-hearted and profound way.

Sometimes the reading-Gods answer our prayers, and for me they delivered Nickolas Butler’s debut novel, ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’. 

For the last couple of years I have been a little bit obsessed with TV show ‘Nashville’ which, in it’s most basic tagline on IMDB is described as being about – “A fading country music star comes into conflict with a rising teen star.” Which does the show no justice at all. ‘Nashville’ follows the lives of famous country music stars and the complicated histories that helped write their most famous songs. We also see up-and-coming, stars-in-their-eyes singers as they start learning the same lessons as their idols when it comes to heartache being a solid muse. Connie Britton as Rayna Jaymes (her hair is my spirit animal) Hayden Panettiere as Juliette Barnes and the delicious Charles Esten as Deacon Claybourne. I freakin’ love this show! But because I am a reader first and foremost, I often think after nearly every episode how much I wish there was a book like ‘Nashville’ … and then ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’ came along.

Set in Little Wing, Wisconsin – ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’ is told from the alternating perspectives of life-long friends Henry, Lee, Kip and Ronnie and Henry’s wife, Beth. Henry is a farmer, real salt-of-the-earth type who married his highschool sweetheart (who he’d known since kindergarten) and has three beautiful children with her. Kip left Little Wing and made it big in Chicago, working numbers – but he’s recently returned and poured all his money into a run-down mill and silos that he envisions turning into a landmark that will revitalize his old, beloved town. Ronnie was big on the rodeo circuit, a real heartthrob with a little fanbase – until drinking fried his brain, and now while he gets along just fine, people feel the need to keep an eye on him. Lee is ‘Corvus’ – a big country music star whose first album “Shotgun Lovesongs” sky-rocketed him to fame. But Little Wing has always been his home-base, the place he comes to unwind after the world tours and press gigs, studio sessions and failed relationships splashed all over the tabloids.

Everyone is returning to Little Wing to see Kip get married – but what happens at the wedding sets off a domino-effect amongst these friends who suddenly find themselves tied up in secrets and confessions, frayed relationships and drifting apart.

I so loved that the pivot-point of this novel is the friendship of these four men. It’s something very rarely represented outside of YA and children’s novels – men whose histories are entwined with one another, who feel a deep bond of brotherhood and need each other’s presence in their lives to feel right and orientated in this world. 

When I reviewed the book ‘Just Between Us: Australian writers tell the truth about female friendship’ last year, I expressed a wish for a male-equivalent short story collection … and I think I got it in ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’. Lee, in particular, relies on his Little Wing friends to be his calm after the storm of fame. Coming home for him is less about the house he owns and bed he sleeps in, but rather getting invited round to Henry and Beth’s place for dinner. Lee speaks so eloquently (if, internally) about what Henry means to him, even a phone call from his best friend;

Henry’s voice – the voice of an old friend – like finding a wall to orient you in some strange, dark hotel room. The world is still out there. Henry is still out there. Real as a fencepost.

And these men have a complicated friendship. In the beginning Kip is seemingly cruel for the way he tries to distance himself from Ronnie, clearly embarrassed and unsure of how to treat his friend who isn’t quite the guy he used to be. Henry and Lee, meanwhile, are more open and physically affectionate with Ronnie (whether that’s something that changed since Ronnie’s hospitalization, I was never sure) happy to hug him, place a hand on the back of his neck for reassurance. And as a result, Henry and Lee’s relationship with Kip is frosty – but this is something he muses on while looking over Little Wing from his silo, something all four did as boys growing up; 

The sun is rising. Soon, the day’s first customers will begin to trickle in. Lee used to hear music in sunsets – jazz. I don’t know about that. And the sunrise? I don’t think sunrise has a musical sound. To me, it’s like a beautiful woman yawning as she first wakes up, or maybe, I don’t know, a baby. A baby opening her eyes. Maybe both. Either way, I feel less and less that I deserve another day, another dawn like this one. 

A lot of what we learn about these men is internal and kept from other characters’ knowledge– only readers know that Henry has started painting again (after being encouraged by his high school art teacher) only to burn the canvases and hide the evidence. Kip, seemingly so cruel, has a private story about once sharing a close resemblance to an elderly couple’s deceased son, who died while in Afghanistan … characters open up to readers in their narrated sections, beautiful vignettes that are pulled out like campfire stories while the bigger arc of the plot plays out around them. 

But the focus in this book is on Lee. Many of the characters muse throughout how proud they are of his success, and how much of his album ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’ is based on their childhood and shared history with the great Lee Corvus. Even Lee acknowledges the role Little Wing has played as his muse and key to his success;

Sing like you’ve got no audience, sing like you don’t know what a critic is, sing about your hometown, sing about your prom, sing about deer, sing about the seasons, sing about your mother, sing about chainsaws, sing about the thaw, sing about the rivers, sing about forests, sing about the prairies. But whatever you do, start signing early in the morning, if only just to keep warm. And if you happen to live in a warm beautiful place …  

Move to Wisconsin. Buy a woodstove, and spend a week splitting wood. It worked for me.

And as life-changing events unfold (not always dramatically, but in little increments as they do – drunken secrets admitted, the silence that grows in a marriage) we, as readers, start to see that there is inspiration coming Lee’s way – maybe for a new album? We may be privy, as his friends once were, to the groundwork that’s being laid for Lee’s next creative endeavour. 

I loved this book. Nickolas Butler writes with such a steady, assured voice that is at once tough and lyrical. He doesn’t sound like a debut author, but a rather accomplished storyteller.

… and sometimes that is what forgiveness is anyway – a deep sigh. 

I loved that this book, first and foremost, is about the love between four grown male friends and the fractures and fights that would threaten to tear them apart if they weren’t so damn dedicated to one another. I want to read anything and everything else that Nickolas Butler puts his name to. 

5/5  

'The Assembler of Parts: A Novel' by Raoul Wientzen

From the BLURB:

From the start of this extraordinary first novel, eight-year-old Jess finds herself in heaven reviewing her short life. She is guided in this by a being she calls the Assembler of Parts, and her task, as she understands it, is to glean her life’s meaning. From birth, it was obvious that she was unlike other children: she was born without thumbs. The Assembler left out other parts too, for she suffers from a syndrome of birth defects that leaves her flawed. But soon it becomes apparent that by her very imperfections she has a unique ability to draw love from—and heal—those around her, from the team of doctors who rally to her care, to the parents who come together over her, to the grandmother whose guilt she assuages, to the family friend whom she helps reconcile with an angry past. With a voice full of wisdom and humor, she tells their stories too. Yet, only when she dies suddenly and her parents are suspected of neglect, unleashing a chain of events beyond her healing, does the meaning of her life come into full focus. And only then does the Assembler’s purpose become clear.

This is the story of Jess in heaven, as she reviews her short eight years of life via film footage The Assembler provides.

Jess was born without thumbs, missing bones, an incomplete heart and half-formed ears.

We see how dearly loved Jess was, and how marvellous her childhood. A mother who loved her fiercely from the first, her father who took a while to come around, and their friend Joe Cassidy who saw in Jess his own child who was also taken too young. Then there were the doctors who played such an important part in Jess’s short – and sometimes painful – life.

Down on earth and unbeknownst to Jess, her family turn their missing and grieving to a wrongful death lawsuit that takes them down a dark path – particularly when fame and money-hungry lawyers distort Jess’s memory.

‘The Assembler of Parts’ was the 2013 debut novel by Raoul Wientzen.

I read and loved this novel last year, and even included it in my end-of-year favouriteslist. But I couldn’t write a review until now – partly because I insisted on passing the book on to my nearest and dearest first – and also to collect my thoughts and feelings on this beauty.

The best way I can think to describe Wientzen’s impressive, heartfelt debut is as an adult equivalent to R.J. Palacio’s ‘Wonder’, with a heaven-bent similar to Alice Sebold’s ‘The Lovely Bones’. But, having made those comparisons, I must stress that ‘The Assembler of Parts’ is unlike anything else I’ve ever read and Raoul Wientzen’s lyrical voice is utterly unique.

Our narrator is eight-year-old Jess, reflecting on her life as she resides in heaven. And though she doesn’t sound like any typical eight-year-old, it can be debated that she didn’t have a typical life. If anything, as she reflects on her complicated life before death, I came to believe in this young woman’s wise and tender words, her astute observations and extraordinary leniencies as she observes herself from day dot;

Father took a picture of us that morning just before we left to go home. The room was festooned with flowers and balloons. Mother was holding me cradled in the crook of one arm, and in the other rested a bouquet of red and white roses. Her head was inclined toward me and she was smiling, with sunlight on her neck. It became our family’s Christmas card ten months later. I studied it many times as I grew older. I was five before I understood its powerful message. The sleeves of my sweater are pulled up to the mid-portion of my forearms. My baby-pink skin shines against the bright red silk. The looking eye notes that contrast immediately. The eye is drawn also to the hands, the four-fingered hands, the thumbless hands. There are two bouquets in Mother’s arms, her message to the world.

The first half of the novel is a the story of a childhood – mostly wonderful, sometimes painful – and these feelings seemingly magnified by the knowledge that Jess’s is too short, and lived with so much pain amidst so much love. This is distilled in the two most important men in her life; father, Ford, who initially struggles with all the obstacles his daughter has to overcome and family friend Joe Cassidy whose own wife and child were taken from him in a tragic accident, and who turned to drink as a way to cope. Cassidy in particular, Wientzen uses to really distil this idea that there is beauty in the heartbreak, and something to be learnt from tragedy. Cassidy loves Jess wholeheartedly right from the beginning, and is probably her first real friend who instils important lessons and outlooks in her early on;

He took my hand in his. “These are good hands. Good as any, Jess. The Assembler made ‘em, and He don’t make junk. You got enough fingers for two kids. Enough voice for ten. He makes everything just to please Himself. The bones and the skin, the meat and the sap, just the way it suits Him.” He let go of my hand and tweaked me on the arm. “Bones and sap.” 

I nodded. “He makes things like I make cookies?” I studded cookies with raisins – three eyes, or two, or one and as many noses as I wished – just for my own pleasure, and then gave them to Mother or Nana to admire. Then I’d get to bake them and eat them. 

“He got everything together in one place and glued you all together and there you were, and you made Him happy,” he said nodding. 

“Nails, screws, glue and whatnot,” I added casually. “The Assembler did it.”

The novel takes a bit of a sharp turn as we catch-up in real time to Jess’s death, and how her family cope (unbeknownst to her) in the aftermath. It becomes painful lawsuits and malpractice suits, accusations of parental neglect and the distortion of their daughter’s memory by misguided lawyers. This second-half feels more like a whodunit unfolding, and after reading about Jess’s childhood that helped shape our inquisitive and lovable narrator, it is quite jarring to read such misery.

But this novel mimics life in the up’s and down’s – and lessons to be learnt in even the darkest of times. And, always, there is Raoul Wientzen’s stunning prose to buoy the reader;

There were so many worlds in my mother’s face, a dozen at least in her round brown eyes, a hundred in her smiles.

I adored this novel. I think it’s one that adults and young adults can enjoy, because everyone can learn something from Jess’s well-lived life, no matter it was too short and full of seeming obstacles.

5/5  

Movie Review: 'Vampire Academy'

So, I finally watched the movie adaptation of ‘Vampire Academy’. And in a year of so many YA books coming to the big screen (The Fault in Our Stars, Maze Runner, The Giver, Mockingjay … the list goes on) the adaptation of Richelle Mead’s hugely popular urban fantasy series will probably be quickly forgotten … which is probably for the best.

Issues for me started with the sickly pink/green movie poster. It proudly proclaimed the movie was; “from the director of Mean Girls, and the writer of Heathers” (no mention of Richelle Mead, oddly enough?) Both are really, really good teen movies … but my hesitation was proven right because the overall tone of the film was one of humour. This is a real shame, because Mead did such a great job of mixing horror, comedy, romance and action in the book series. The movie probably hits two of those four notes – and it’s no wonder, because that’s also true of ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘Heathers’. It was like the director and writer couldn’t fathom a multi-dimensional teen movie, when that is the very strength of the book series.

In the first few minutes of ‘Vampire Academy’ Lissa (Lucy Fry) and Rose (Zoey Deutch) feed each other lines to quickly and sloppily catch viewers up on what’s happening; “I’m still adjusting, Rose. It has been less than a year since we ran away from the academy. Two years since the crash. Do you really think the academy is still trying to track us down?” These awkward conversations run throughout the film; you could probably play a pretty decent drinking game for every supremely awkward line – although once you get to “You were fornicating, weren’t you?” it’s time to chug, chug, chug! and then you’re down for the count.

The next major disappointment comes with Dimitri Belikov – who probably has more fan-girls than Edward Cullen and a mighty expectation placed on him for that very reason. And, look, the casting director clearly tried because the actor Danila Kozlovsky is actually Russian – so they’ve ticked the authenticity box (although, I don’t think they ever gave Danila a chance to actually speak in Russian? So, what was the point?) But they had a seriously hard task before them, because nearly every single fan-made trailer cast Ben Barnes in the role. You guys; Danila Kozlovsky is no Ben Barnes, I’m just sayin’. He seemed a little too old (like, creepy old) for Zoey Deutch’s Rose, and he did not rock the male-ponytail at all. The main issue though is that Danila Kozlovsky and Zoey Deutch had none of the chemistry that Rose and Dimitri have in the books – which practically smoulders the page.

While we’re on the topic of casting – Lucy Fry as Lissa Dragomir was another serious miss. I will say this was another problematic casting because (as I’ve mentioned in every ‘Vampire Academy’ book review) I feel like Lissa is a very hard character to like, mostly because I thought she had too much power in her and Rose’s friendship. Lucy Fry is fine, just a little too bland for a character who is already pretty boring in the books. And what was up with her mouth? Did the director make her wear false vampire-teeth the whole time, because her lips looked painfully stung and sometimes it was like she struggled to talk. Not to mention the fact that Lissa and Rose’s being shadow-kissed translated horribly in the movie, when it’s pretty much the only thing that connected them in the book. It didn’t help that the director chose to use a fish-eye lens sporadically to convey when Rose was in Lissa’s head – and then change to the camera as a voyeur looking on. It was just sloppy, and confusing when the fish-eye technique was also used when Lissa was hypnotising people.

The one bright spot in the whole movie is Zoey Deutch. I know when she was cast people grumbled about her not being voluptuous enough to play Rose Hathaway – but, trust me, in a whole movie of pretty awful, she is an absolute marvel. I 100% agree with the Huff Post entertainment reviewer Mike Ryan, who said; ‘This movie would have been better if it was just Zoey Deutch, sitting on a stool, reading the book to the audience. I’m being serious." At one point she throws her arms wide and asks, “Are you not entertained?” and, gosh darnit, I was! She’s fabulous, and I hope she’s in more (better) things.

The movie has a 104-minute run-time. They tried to cram all 332-pages into those 104 minutes, and it just didn’t work. If anything, it highlighted for me how much ‘Vampire Academy’ would make a better TV series than movie – because all the subplots and flashbacks, foreshadowing and Lissa and Rose’s love lives do not work in a single movie. It’s a real shame, because Richelle Mead’s ‘Vampire Academy’ is ripe for adaptation – just not by the director of 'Mean Girls' and writer of 'Heathers', and not necessarily in a movie. Though Zoey Deutch tried damn hard with what she was given, and has a new fan in me.

Magabala Books and the importance of Indigenous YA literature

New post up on Kill Your Darlings

Magabala Books and the importance of Indigenous YA literature

And to celebrate the release of Jared Thomas's Calyspso Summer (review coming soon!)

'All Our Pretty Songs' by Sarah McCarry

From the BLURB:

The first book in an exciting YA trilogy, this is the story of two best friends on the verge of a terrifying divide when they begin to encounter a cast of strange and mythical characters.

Set against the lush, magical backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, two inseparable best friends who have grown up like sisters—the charismatic, mercurial, and beautiful Aurora and the devoted, soulful, watchful narrator—find their bond challenged for the first time ever when a mysterious and gifted musician named Jack comes between them. Suddenly, each girl must decide what matters most: friendship, or love. What both girls don’t know is that the stakes are even higher than either of them could have imagined. They’re not the only ones who have noticed Jack’s gift; his music has awakened an ancient evil—and a world both above and below which may not be mythical at all. The real and the mystical; the romantic and the heartbreaking all begin to swirl together, carrying the two on journey that is both enthralling and terrifying.

And it’s up to the narrator to protect the people she loves—if she can.

‘Aurora and I live in a world without fathers,’ – so begins this tale by an unnamed narrator, about her and Aurora living on the edge until one of them falls in.

Aurora is the daughter of a famous and deceased rockstar; a Cobain-esque legend who left behind a wild daughter and her junkie mother, Maia, in a too big house with plenty of cash but no moorings. Our anonymous narrator is the daughter of Cass, once Maia’s best friend who was there in the rockstar hey-days and saw her best friend decay into grief and addiction, until deciding to take herself and her daughter away from that world and into a cramped studio apartment.

Cass is a macrobiotic witch, narrator tells us, and knowing the powerful connection she and Aurora have, Cass let the girls run rampant but always offers them safe harbour.

Our narrator and Aurora are the best of friends – one is the super-ego saviour the other her reckless id. Until the day our narrator meets Jack, a handsome and talented struggling musician who burns her up inside and threatens Aurora’s hold on her.

And then Aurora meets Minos, and everything threatens to come crashing down.

‘All Our Pretty Songs’ was the 2013 young adult novel by Sarah McCarry.

I remember being really excited for this book last year; I salivated over the cover and blurb, pre-ordered my copy and then … nothing. I expected to read rumblings of praise and recommendation, but instead I got radio-silence on the review front. I didn’t really get it, until I read for myself.

‘All Our Pretty Songs’ is a really good example of how story is King, and all the pretty words in the world can’t make up for a book that’s lacking story momentum. It’s sort of like a magic trick: at first you’re dazzled, but then the wire strings start glinting and you can’t help but notice all the deliberate distractions intended to make you believe in something that’s just not there.

Sarah McCarry is a beautiful, lyrical writer. Truly, I wanted to breathe her words in and roll around in their sumptuousness. For the first 20 or so pages I was absolutely captivated – I’m talking jaw-on-the-floor, tingles down my back in awe of her writing;

Guitar so loud we can feel it in our chests. Someone else’s hair in our faces and someone else’s knuckle in our teeth and sometimes, when it’s really good, a current charges from body to body and everyone around us is part of it, part of us, part of the drumbeat thundering through so hard our breathing shifts to follow its pulse. Music turns us inside out with hunger, the need to hurt ourselves, get drunk, fuck, punch strangers, the need to take off all our clothes and run around in the grass screaming, the need to get in a car and drive off in the middle of the night with a pack of strangers. We let the music shake us loose from the moorings of our bodies and hearts and brains, until we are nothing but sex and sweat and fists and hot hot light.

And I loved the set-up of Aurora as this Frances Bean Cobain daughter of a dead legend, with a junkie mother in a mansion house and her poor best friend, our unknown narrator, constantly keeping her from going too far into the abyss. I was interested, and I was invested. Here are two girls with lives destined to break, and I wanted to be there when it happened.

Things get interesting when our narrator (whom I should say, while reading, I didn’t even notice was nameless because McCarry’s writing is so distractingly beautiful) meets Jack – a real deal, talented musician. Here, I thought, was interesting conflict when Aurora is the one everyone falls for, but the narrator is the girl Jack wants. Jealousy creeps in, green-eyed and lurking and I thought, surely, things are going to get interesting.

No. Instead, things get paranormal-mystical and it just doesn’t work.

With Jack comes Minos, a frightening man with an even scarier boss who is interested in Aurora’s charisma and beauty, and craves Jack’s talent. Then the story of ‘All Our Pretty Songs’ veers into mythology territory and a retelling of ‘The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus’ about selling one’s soul to the devil. There’s also a head-nod to the Orpheus myth, about crossing the threshold to the underworld with a song.

Look, I knew the paranormal twist was coming because it’s in the blurb, but I didn’t bank on it being so jarring and feeling so disconnected from what this story start out as (namely, a contemporary tale of friendship and love, jealousy and grief).

Where McCarry’s writing so beautifully suits the contemporary tale, when I felt so connected to our narrator as she observes her life with Aurora and the past that plagues them both, I didn’t want to leave their world and enter into the underworld of paranormal mythology.

McCarry has a real gift for contemporary. It was in our narrator observing her mother’s love life;

Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing.

And viewing herself as an outsider looking in, comparing herself to Aurora while still loving her;

I am to Aurora what a gift-store postcard print is to a Klimt hanging on the museum wall. I do not love her any less for it; I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it.

This sort of writing suits contemporary YA, and I wish it was what McCarry had stuck to. Unfortunately her style is less suited to flights-of-fancy and fantasy, to the point where she had to actually start name-checking Greek myths because the second-half of the story had gotten so convoluted and lost.

To be sure, Sarah McCarry has echoes of Francesca Lia Block and her ‘Weetzie Bat’ series (which McCarry name-checks, so she must be a fan) but where Lia Block can pull off the magical realism, McCarry and ‘All Our Pretty Songs’ is far less successful. I think it comes from the disconnection between the contemporary-feel first-half, which suddenly changes gears to include mythology and devils in the second.

I see that a second book is due for release in July this year. Called ‘Dirty Wings’, it’s touted as a sort of prequel and tells the story of young Cass and Maia in a “gorgeous retelling of the Persephone myth”. I’m not sure about this book mostly because, we know how Cass and Maia’s story end sup – it’s pretty damn sad when ‘All Our Pretty Songs’ begins with Maia a full-blown junkie and Cass not having seen her best friend for years. Do I really want to read the story of how they got to that point? It’s not exactly hopeful, is it?

I would definitely read another Sarah McCarry book, for her gorgeous prose alone … but I will hope that in the future she either sticks to contemporary or fantasy, not this awkward mashing of both. ‘All Our Pretty Songs’ starts out (contemporary) and strong, but a muddled second-half loses the story entirely and all the pretty writing in the world can’t quite make up for it.

2/5