Child of My Heart

Many years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. Now, many years later, I have read Child of My Heart. So you don't have to.

I'm not a big fan of sweetness and sentimentality. And I had an immediate antipathy to this book. But in despite of that, I plugged on.

The story isn't bad; children in the off-season in the Hamptons, the main character, the older girl, budding into adolescence.

But the problem with this book - and it is a large & ultimately insurmountable one - is that the narrator "I" character should have been the observed "she" character. In other words, if the writer wants to have a pretty, charming, beloved character, it's far better to have her observed by another ("she was pretty, charming and beloved") rather than be the narrator ("I am pretty, charming and beloved. Everybody thinks so.") Unless, of course, the narrator turns out to be unreliable, or their smug self-satisfaction is to be devastated by a rude awakening. How I longed for a very rude awakening. But the book continued sweet, sentimental & self-satisfied to the end.

Oh, and a kid dies in the book. Cheap.

Really lovely cover, though.

Wigfield

Oh happy happy joy joy. Read this immediately, it's a romp. Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert & Paul Dinello serve up a souffle of crack cracks. Come to Wigfield, with its three mayors, nine titty bars, and mysterious fires and gruesome deaths too numerous to enumerate. Our guide to Wigfield, Russell Hokes, races to write 50,000 words (as required by his reluctant publisher) before the damn Dam explodes in a shower of concrete and well-placed fireworks.

Thanks to Colonel Colonel for pointing us in the direction of Wigfield, the Can-Do Town that Just May Not.

Due Preparations For The Plague

Here is an uneasy meld of a thriller with the drama of the abandoned child, or in this case, children. A plane is highjacked and all the hostages eventually killed, excepting the children who are offloaded*.

With this one, I really don't know what I think. I would relish hearing the views of any of you who have read it.

Jeanette Turner Hospital is such a great writer, that the strength of the prose alone carried me along. It's a good story, while disturbing. The thriller aspect works only to a certain degree. But I found I didn't really connect with or care for any of the characters - maybe that is deliberate & we are supposed to regard the events dispassionately. Maybe. I like the idea of interconnectedness, and so I enjoyed that aspect of the book. There is a set piece in an underground bunker filled with nerve gas. This section I found poignant and genuinely thrilling, & the part where I was emotionally involved. However, when I finished reading I laid the book down with a "meh".

Anyone else read it?

*This is not a spoiler as we discover this in the first chapter.

Atonement

I came late to Ian McEwan. I read Enduring Love last year & was enraptured. I bought The Innocent (paying retail price!) and was left gasping for breath (in a good way.) Each McEwan I read become my favourite, and so it is with Atonement. The story is involved and the characters complex, yet he writes with such utter simplicity. This is a superb book on the nature of ourselves as flawed human beings. I cried at the end - not only for the lives of these imaginary people (ain't it strange?) but also because the book was finished & I would never again read it for the first time.

After finishing Atonement, I picked up and put aside four books after reading a page or two. I was restless & hungry for more transporting writing. Luckily I've landed on Blndsight by Maurice Gee, a delicious follow-on.

Lost For Words

Today, our lesson is from the Book of Hugh Lunn, chapter 8 "Domestic Science", verse 2 "Making Do". I often swear I am going to economise. Here are some superb suggestions from an Australia gone by.

Because people had to be frugal there were many recipes for imitation meals. Such food was prefaced with the word mock. There was:

mock crab: cheese, Worcestershire sauce, mustard and tomato sauce mixed into a sandwich paste
mock chicken: minced tripe* with herbs in a white sauce, popped into vol-au-vents
mock duck: rump or bladebone steak rolled in a mixture of breadcrumbs and butter, then baked
mock goose: alternate layers of lamb's fry# and potato and onions, baked.

When you couldn't even afford the cheapest offal, there was:

mock brains: rissoles made from leftover porridge, beaten egg, and onion
mock tripe: onions and butter boiled in milk and thickened with flour

Bet you can't wait for your mock dessert:

mock cream: milk, cornflour, butter, sugar
mock ginger: vegetable marrow, sugar, ginger powder, lemons
mock pears: sweetened, boiled choko**

*from the stomach of an ox
#lamb's liver, fried up
**Hugh says "Everybody grew a choko vine over the dunny (outside toilet) or the back fence. It produced bountiful crops of pear-shaped chokoes. Chokoes were boiled, then split length wise, and the seeds removed. Your mother might say chokoes had a delicate flavour. They were almost tasteless, but not tasteless enough."

Hugh is right. I once made my mother cry when I refused to eat the chokoes she served up. We were broke & she had nothing else to give us. I still remember the disgusting slimey vegetables more than 40 years later. There used to be a rumour that Cherry Ripe bars were made with chokoes, not cherries. Bleaughhhh.

I made this

Yes, dear readers, not content with just reading books, I've made one.
I love that there are many parts of the book-binder's art that are invisible in the finished work. But they are essential.













I tore these pages.





















Oh how pretty.







These are my remarkable French Lace binding stitches. Hand done, you know.









And a gorgeous corner to finish it off.

The Lighthouse

Phyllis Dorothy is an old favourite of mine, a very reliable procedural writer. My crime fiction taste runs as much to this Restrained English style as to Hardboiled American or Tartan Noir (via Larrikan Aussie, naturally). But somehow I found The Lighthouse, though well plotted & apparently imaginative, did not grab me, grip me or even pluck at my sleeve. I don't want to put you off this book, or indeed any of P.D.James' wonderful canon, but for me this one was bland. We love a great crime novel, and The Lighthouse is, perhaps, simply predictably good.