Books that take you there: YA literary tourism

My new Kill Your Darlings column - 

Books that take you there: 

YA literary tourism

From Prince Edward Island to Forks, Washington! 

‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ by Karen Joy Fowler

From the BLURB:

Rosemary’s young, just at college, and she’s decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we’re not going to tell you too much either: you’ll have to find out for yourselves what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.

Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life. There’s something unique about Rosemary’s sister, Fern. So now she’s telling her story; a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice. It’s funny, clever, intimate, honest, analytical and swirling with ideas that will come back to bite you.

2014 has been a very good year for me discovering favourite books … albeit, a few years after initial publication. ‘Tell the Wolves I’m Home’ by Carol Rifka Brunt, 'The Borrower' by Rebecca Makkai, ‘Us’ by David Nicholls (actually, this one was a rarity because I read it as soon as it hit shelves!) and now ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ by Karen Joy Fowler.

Karen Joy Fowler’s eighth novel was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. But (and I mean this in the kindest possible way to all those literati snobs) – don’t let all those accolades put you off.

When I first started hearing about ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ and noticing the gorgeous sunshiny cover popping up everywhere, I was a bit hesitant – the blurb didn’t give much of the story away, and I don’t actually put much stock in literary fiction awards … until David Nicholls’ ‘Us’ was longlisted for the Man Booker (surprising everyone). I told myself to stop being so snobby about literary snobbery, and then I read a big WINK-WINK review that let slip what ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ is actually about, and I was intrigued. For that reason, I’m going to write my own review being very upfront about the sort-of-big reveal in the book (even though hints are dropped throughout, the reveal comes a little before midway and I’ve even noticed a few international book covers that have made the “secret” blatantly obvious in the cover artwork).

So – here goes – if you don’t want to know the kinda-secret storyline of ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ then please stop reading. Just know that I loved the book, highly recommend it and count it as one of my all-time favourites. 
But stop reading as of … NOW!

For those of you still willing to read on – ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ is the story of 22-year-old Rosemary Cooke, whom we meet in 1996 when she’s a college student. Her brother ran away from home when she was younger, her father drinks like a fish and her mother is always seemingly on the edge of another nervous breakdown … and all of this stems from her missing sister, Fern, who was in fact a chimpanzee.

Yes, much like Nim Chimpsky, The Kelloggs and Gua – the Cooke family, with their psychology professor father, enter into a not entirely uncommon behavioural/language experiment of the 1970s – raising a chimpanzee as human. Fern arrives in the Cooke household at three months of age, and only one month after Rosemary is born. The two girls are raised together, along with older brother Lowell. But when Rose is five-years-old something happens, and Fern is taken away to live on a farm – an event the repercussions of which are still being felt in 1996 and beyond, as Rosemary recounts her childhood memories and triggering events of 96’ that force her to re-examine her upbringing and emotional scars left by Fern’s disappearance and, later, Lowell’s running away from home to live the life of an activist.

My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family.

This book absolutely broke my heart. At one point, Rose comments that Fern was her fun-house mirror twin:

She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. It’s important to note that I was also all those things to her. I would say that, like Lowell, I loved her as a sister, but she was the only sister I ever had, so I can’t be sure; it’s an experiment with no control. Still, when I first read ‘Little Women’, it seemed to me I’d loved Fern as much as Jo loved Amy if not as much as Jo loved Beth.

That struck me (as did the ‘Little Women’ understanding of sisterly bonds) and I kept thinking that the experiment – indeed, all animal experiments – can be held up as a fun-house mirror to our own humanity. At one point, Lowell comments to Rose that such cruel experiments say more about the scientist than the science – and that is also true, and perhaps a theme of the book. What do these animals tell us about ourselves, and what does the suffering we inflict upon them say about us?

The story has a somewhat wonky timeline that makes perfect sense once you understand how many memories and emotions Rose has been suppressing, and cannot tap into at a whim. She admits to starting her story in the middle – 1996, aged 22 – and she is narrating from somewhere in the future, while going back into her childlike mind to remember the years growing up with Fern, and immediately after losing her. The plot feels more like it’s mapped by emotion that any sort of narrative pattern, and that too makes perfect sense – particularly when I started wondering if the Cooke family experienced an experiment-within-an-experiment, that some Big Brother entity was observing them after loss, in the absence of the one they loved.

Because it’s set in 1996, the point from which Rose decides to start her tale – we do get a bit of information about her college life that feels irrelevant, but is of course offering us a glimpse into her neutral self – when she’s still numb to the loss of Fern, unquestioning of the events surrounding her disappearance and choosing not to pry too hard. The arrival of a drama student called Harlow throws Rose for a loop – and brings out the “monkey girl” in her, that she’s been suppressing since she lost her sister.

While reading this book I kept thinking “how has nobody thought to write about this before?!” Because it is a story-trigger ripe with possibilities and heartbreak, human examination and disgrace. But, of course, Karen Joy Fowler makes it very clear in the book where she drew on her wealth of inspiration – name-checking the many chimpanzee experiments of the last few decades and interweaving the fictional story of the Cooke family experiment with real events quit seamlessly, until by the end of the book fact and fiction run together.

There were whole sentences, paragraphs and ideas that I just wanted to eat up because they were so delicious. Like Rose reflecting on the first time she saw ‘Star Wars’, and was disappointed that her brother, when he’d originally recounted the story to her and Fern, had skewed one minor plot detail:

Unfairness bothers children greatly. When I did finally get to see Star Wars, the whole movie was ruined for me by the fact that Luke and Han got a medal at the end and Chewbacca didn’t.

I adored this book, and as I said – I’ll now count it as an all-time favourite. I experienced savage emotions of sadness, disgust and joy while reading – and by the last page my whole body felt tender as a bruise, such was the emotional impact of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel.

5/5  

Mean girls, bullies and private school privilege: Alice Pung’s Laurinda

My latest column for Kill Your Darlings is an interview with the wonderful Alice Pung

Mean girls, bullies and private school privilege: 

Alice Pung’s Laurinda

P.S. - Laurinda is amazing, and everyone should read it! 

‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’ by Rebecca James

 Received from the Publisher 

From the BLURB:

Cooper Bartholomew's body is found at the foot of a cliff.

Suicide.

That's the official finding, that's what everyone believes. Cooper's girlfriend, Libby, has her doubts. They'd been happy, in love. Why would he take his own life?

As Libby searches for answers, and probes more deeply into what really happened the day Cooper died, she and her friends unravel a web of deception and betrayal. Are those friends - and enemies - what they seem? Who is hiding a dangerous secret? And will the truth set them all free?

‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’ is the new YA novel from Australian author Rebecca James.

I’ve been excited for this novel since 2010. That’s when I read James’s debut ‘Beautiful Malice’ and first saw the title of her work-in-progress, ‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’. No synopsis or release date, let alone information on if the book had even been sold to a publisher … just that title, and I was hooked. Four years later and ‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’ is Rebecca James’s third book – after loving ‘Beautiful Malice’ and making herself an automatic-buy author with ‘Sweet Damage’, her third book lives up to that initial intrigue and is going down as a 2014 favourite.

‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’ is split between THEN and NOW. In the now, Cooper Bartholomew is indeed dead (sorry, the spoiler in the title is true) having committed suicide – his friends Sebastian and Claire are reeling, and his girlfriend Libby is numb. In THEN, we read how Libby and Cooper bumped into one another at a bottle shop – they were part of the same graduating high school class, and even worked on an assignment together once, but Cooper’s ex-girlfriend Claire warned him off striking up a friendship with ‘the backstabber’ Libby. When they meet again there’s tension and hesitation, but an unmistakable ‘something’ has both of them wanting to reconnect …

In the NOW, Libby is becoming less and less convinced of Cooper’s committing suicide. Something is not adding up: they’d made plans to move to Sydney together, and Cooper loved her – they had a future together.

The novel’s timeline flips, as does narrative POV, and we hear from Libby, Cooper, Seb and Claire – we wade through their memories of Cooper and hidden agendas since his passing as well as Cooper’s own accounts leading up to his death and pivotal relationship with Libby. Rebecca James really needs to be commended for the pacing of this plot – especially since there’s a give-away in the title that could have hindered the suspense. It’s teased out beautifully to feel like YA-noir and the short, sharp chapters leading to the denouement are wonderful.

But the real strength of this book lies in the central character of Cooper himself. Maybe it’s because I started reading this when the whole ‘Twin Peaks’ second season talk started, but I couldn’t help but think of Cooper Bartholomew having hints of Laura Palmer to him, and Rebecca James’s latest novel as a head-nod to David Lynch in exposing the seedy underbelly of a perfect life. It takes a special character to be dearly departed for a good portion of a book, and still come across so charismatic and downright loveable, that readers mourn his loss along with the characters:

I dream of Cooper. I dream that he climbs through my window while I’m sleeping and slips into my bed. I wake up and find him next to me – warm and very much alive – and cry with joy. He laughs and tells me that his death was all a stupid joke. I hug him tight and am so overjoyed, so glad to see him, I don’t even care that he played such a cruel trick. 

But a police siren screeches through my open window and I’m pulled from my dream with a vicious jolt. I’m awake, alone in my bed, feeling as though Cooper has been ripped away from me. And the shock of this reality – Cooper is dead and gone and I will never see or speak to or touch him again – is like a kick to the stomach. The pain takes my breath away.

Libby and Cooper’s romance is teased out in parallel to Libby’s investigation into Cooper’s death – almost making the romance as much of a mystery as the mystery itself. And that romance is so gorgeously realised that when the inevitable happens, it does hurt.

‘Cooper Bartholomew is Dead’ is another fabulous novel from one of Australia’s favourite YA authors. It’s a slice of ‘Twin Peaks’ noir for young readers to get wrapped up in – and that it hurts so much is part of the novel’s charm and Rebecca James’s talent.

5 /5

'The Hook Up' Game On #1 by Kristen Callihan

From the BLURB:

The rules: no kissing on the mouth, no staying the night, no telling anyone, and above all…

No falling in love. Anna Jones just wants to finish college and figure out her life. Falling for star quarterback Drew Baylor is certainly not on her to do list. Confident and charming, he lives in the limelight and is way too gorgeous for his own good. If only she could ignore his heated stares and stop thinking about doing hot and dirty things with him. Easy right?

Too bad he’s committed to making her break every rule… Football has been good to Drew. It’s given him recognition, two National Championships, and the Heisman. But what he really craves is sexy yet prickly Anna Jones. Her cutting humor and blatant disregard for his fame turns him on like nothing else. But there’s one problem: she's shut him down. Completely.

That is until a chance encounter leads to the hottest sex of their lives, along with the possibility of something great. Unfortunately, Anna wants it to remain a hook up. Now it’s up to Drew to tempt her with more: more sex, more satisfaction, more time with him. Until she’s truly hooked. It's a good thing Drew knows all about winning.

All’s fair in love and football… Game on

Drew ‘Battle’ Baylor is star quarterback on his college football team, winner of a Heisman Trophy and frequent topic of conversation on ESPN for future draft picks. There is no reason for him to fall so fast and hard for Anna Jones – buxom redhead, former high school wallflower now one half of the most gossiped about hook-up at their college.

‘The Hook Up’ is the first book in a new contemporary romance series (do I have to say ‘new adult?’) from Kristen Callihan – author of the wonderful fantasy/paranormal romance series ‘Darkest London’.

So, I was a huge fan of ‘Friday Night Lights’. On occasion, I get totally bummed that it’s not on anymore (and hasn’t been since 2011 – where has the time gone?). I miss not being able to return for new stories with my favourite characters in Dillon, Texas – and sometimes not even re-watching the box-set always appeases me (though having Connie Britton’s hair return in ‘Nashville’ helped a little). Point being: I miss stories around the small town mythology of school football. I miss stories about young demi-football-gods and how playing the game they love sometimes creates moral and ethical conundrums for them – and all this without me knowing jack-all about American football! I just love the stories, and have done since ‘Varsity Blues’ – but ‘Friday Night Lights’ was really just the ultimate for me. But I have found that what the box is lacking in providing me football stories as gritty and romantic as ‘Friday Night Lights’, contemporary romance books more than make up for. Case in point: Kristen Callihan’s new series ‘Game On’ and this first book in particular.

In this football story, our female protagonist is Anna Jones – a young woman who is still haunted by the emotional bullying she experienced in high school, particularly concerning her appearance. When Anna bumps, quite literally, into Drew Baylor in their philosophy class, sparks fly – but Anna has a hard time believing that infamous ‘Battle Baylor’ (star QB, local hero) would be interested in her and is determined to keep their relationship casual, despite Drew’s protestations.

Drew knows that he wants Anna – and not just as a one-time only hook-up. The trouble will be in convincing her that he’s in it for the long-haul: despite what may be coming his way with a promising football career. Because Drew knows a thing or two about going after what you want – his parents dying when he was 18 gave him some serious perspective on not taking anything for granted, and going after what you want. 

My mother once told me that the most important moment in my life wouldn’t be when I won the National Championship or even the Super Bowl. It would be when I fell in love. 

Life, she insisted, is how you live it and who you live it with, not what you do to make a living. Given that she told me this when I was sixteen, I basically rolled my eyes and worked on practicing my pass fakes. 

But my mother was insistent. 

“You’ll see, Drew. One day, love will creep up and smack you upside the head. Then you’ll understand.”

Yes, this is total fantasy contemporary romance – a really intriguing flip in which the female protagonist wants casual, while the male yearns for forever. This, even though Drew admits that young women are constantly throwing themselves at him and his teammates. But Callihan gives Drew enough dark back-story to actually make this dynamic seem halfway credible – losing his parents at a young age, an ex-girlfriend who told relationship lies to the media … it all adds up to Drew getting quite serious about Anna very early on and liking the idea of starting something serious and long-haul with her.

I also really liked Anna as a protagonist (the story actually flips between both their POVs) – she’s a curvaceous young woman who has only just recently started embracing her feminie body, but still struggles with a lack of confidence because of her particularly hellish high school years. I loved that Callihan doesn’t actually write Anna body-shaming herself (no endless diatribes about fat thighs, or bulging tummy) – we read Anna disbelieve or brush aside Drew’s comments about her physical beauty, but that’s really it. On the flipside, readers get Drew’s interiority about how much he appreciates Anna’s body – and it’s for all the reasons we can imagine she’d consider flaws.

This book is H-O-T. Callihan, as she did in ‘Darkest London’, writes really beautiful sensual scenes – in this contemporary romance there’s a lot more sex on the page, but Callihan never lets it get tiresome or repetitive. And she integrates Anna and Drew’s physical intimacy with their emotional really, really well.

I was about two chapters into this book when I started recommending it to my romance reader friends – it was that good! (and they concurred). I’m going to call this a favourite book of 2014, which is kind of great considering I bought it on a whim based on the strength of Callihan’s totally different paranormal romanceseries, and because I was having ‘Friday Night Lights’ withdrawals. This was a wonderful romance and I can’t wait for the next two books in the ‘Game On’ series.

5/5

Nepotism, bullying and stalking: When online reviews go bad

New column up on Kill Your Darlings today:

Nepotism, bullying and stalking: 

When online reviews go bad

Yes, it's about Kathleen Hale's Guardian piece. 

Sorry. 

Full disclosure: I am a book blogger and Goodreads member - the latter I admit in the piece, the former is in my byline.  

And another great post on this topic is 'Hale vs Harris and the breach of online ethics' by Alex Hurst - which came out after I'd submitted this for edits but is well worth a read! 

'Leaving Time' by Jodi Picoult

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife and accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants. Yet it's been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband, and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs point to abandonment - or worse. 

Still Jenna - now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by a father maddened by grief - steadfastly refuses to believe in her mother's desertion. So she decides to approach the two people who might still be able to help her find Alice: a disgraced psychic named Serenity Jones, and Virgil Stanhope, the cynical detective who first investigated her mother's disappearance and the strange, possibly linked death of one of her mother's coworkers. 

Together these three lonely souls will discover truths destined to forever change their lives. Deeply moving and suspenseful, Jodi Picoult's 21st novel is a radiant exploration of the enduring love between mothers and daughters.

Jenna Metcalf’s life should have been very different. She should have been raised at the Elephant Sanctuary that her father, Thomas, started and ran alongside her mother, Alice Metcalf; a brilliant scientist whose seminal work was on grief among elephants. Jenna should have been raised by the village behind the sanctuary, fellow keepers Nevvie, Grace and Gideon. Jenna should have been raised to be her mother’s shadow, the little miniature of her with pink Converse shoes and a bright mane of red hair.

Instead Jenna’s childhood was railroaded when she was just a baby, and never got back on course. At thirteen she now lives with her guardian grandmother because her father is institutionalised and her mother disappeared a decade ago after the trampling death of a fellow keeper at her parent’s sanctuary. But Jenna has never stopped hoping that her mother is alive, and that her cold case will lead to a missing person who has either forgotten about her past life or has been searching as desperately for Jenna as she has for her mother. 

So Jenna is employing the help of two unlikely people – once internationally renowned television psychic (with a high success rate) Serenity Jones has been out of the public eye for a number of years, ever since her psychic abilities dried up after a disastrous child abduction case. Then there’s Virgil Stanhope, the detective who worked the elephant sanctuary death case and still feels partly responsible for Alice Metcalf’s disappearance. 

This unlikely trio will set out to answer Jenna’s most burning question once and for all – what happened to her mother?

‘Leaving Time’ is the new novel from Jodi Picoult.

I had so been looking forward to this novel – I am a huge Jodi Picoult fan, and proudly display her backlist on my bookshelf. I’d count ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ and ‘The Pact’ among my most enjoyable reads of the last decade, and last year I thoroughly enjoyed her novel ‘The Storyteller’. I classify Jodi Picoult as one of my ‘tried and true’ authors – I know I’m going to get suckered into her novels, and I rarely care how outlandish the storylines are because I enjoy the journey so very much. So I’m a little bit heavy-hearted to report that ‘Leaving Time’ wasn’t the steadfast read I’d been hoping for …

The story is told from four perspectives. Jenna Metcalf is the precocious thirteen-year-old narrator, admittedly too smart for her own good and so unlike the other kids in her class that she’s often labelled a freak. Jenna’s voice does feel out of touch with her age, but we can assume that the traumatic history around losing her mother (and, in many ways, her father) has left her a wise and scarred old soul in the body of this adolescent;

I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was strawberry blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless notes about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her age and too smart for her own good. And yet as impressive as I am with scientific statistics, I fail miserably when it comes to real-life facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and now a hot new band. It eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human adolescent (and to my mother, it certainly would have been), then reciting fifty named elephant herds in the Tuli Block of Botswana cannot compete with identifying all the members of One Direction.

Jenna pours over her mother’s old scientific research on elephants, and it’s in these segues that we also get first-person narration from Alice Metcalf explaining her life’s work – studying grief among elephants, how she came to this thesis working in Botswana where she met Thomas Metcalf and made the journey with him back to America to work at his sanctuary and marry him, after discovering she was pregnant after a one-night stand in Africa. Alice is narrating the events and circumstances leading up to her disappearance, all of her chapters are set in the past and hurtling towards a terrible night that Jenna is still reeling from the repercussions of.

“Ten years isn’t a cold case, it’s an ice trail. There’s nothing still here now that existed back when your mother disappeared.” 

“I’m here,” I say. 

Then we have Virgil and Serenity – each carrying their own demons and personal reasons for helping young Jenna sift through the sands of the past to get to the truth. 

“I used to think I saw my mom all the time,” I say softly. “I’d be in a crowded place and I’d let go of my grandma’s hand and start running toward her, but I was never able to catch up.” 

Serenity is staring at me with a strange look on her face. “Maybe you are psychic.”  

“Or maybe missing someone and finding someone have the same symptoms,” I say. 

There’s a lot going on in ‘Leaving Time’, but that’s not unusual for Picoult who prefers multiple narrators and stringing loose threads together to make an intricate pattern. The pattern of ‘Leaving Time’ is not hard to discern either; elephants, memory and grieving, with heady doses of the matriarchy/ allmothering aspects of elephant life – the mother/child connection. And that’s what worked the most for me – the research into elephant memory, particularly relating to traumatic events.

Picoult, through Alice, does write beautifully and tenderly about elephants – from their grieving process to a mother’s patience for her calf and the way a herd plays together. These descriptions are gorgeous, and even without reading Picoult’s acknowledgements at the back of the book (where she cites the work of people like ‘Elephant Whisperer’ Lawrence Anthony) and speaks about ivory trade, I’d know how deeply moved she was in the process of researching these animals for this book. 

It was the human connections that were harder for me to enjoy. Indeed, it wasn’t until halfway through this book that I even felt I was semi-hooked, interested in Jenna’s story and how it would all end. Where Picoult in the past has drawn readers in with moralistic “what would you do?” premises, ‘Leaving Time’ felt murkier for leaving readers out of such conundrums – we’re very much along for the Alice/Jenna ride, and little is asked of what we’d do in their shoes – which is so often how Picoult’s books work.

**MAJOR SPOILER – do not read until you’ve finished the book – but I can’t write a review without saying it** highlight to read 

[I guessed the ‘twist’ about 100 pages out from the end. And I was guessing in a “oh, I hope that isn’t what she’s been doing here…” kind of way. Because, let’s be honest, M. Night Shyamalan and ‘The Sixth Sense’ have spoiled that twist for everyone – I think it will cross a lot of people’s minds because by now it’s not really a twist at all. It’s been played, and it felt that way in ‘Leaving Time’ I’m sorry to say.]

I felt a disconnection in this book, and maybe that’s me missing some of my favourite Picoult staples: heart-warming (though complicated) romance, courtroom drama and moral grey-area. ‘Leaving Time’ was okay, but I’m used to being consumed by a Jodi Picoult book instead of the limp-along way I read her latest.

3/5