The Vicar's Wife by Katharine Swartz (2013)

Jane Hatton is happily married with three kids. At the request of her English husband, Andrew, she gives up her life in New York, including her gorgeous apartment in Manhattan, exciting lifestyle and demanding but rewarding job, and moves to a house that was previously a Vicarage in a remote village in England, Gosford, where the weather is cold and the wind always blows. Hating her lifestyle and resenting her husband for asking her to move, Jane lethargically floats around their new spacious house, acting like a teenager and wallowing in her misery. One day, while lethargically and ineffectively attempting to paint the second pantry, she uncovers a shopping list that says:

Beef joint for Weltons, 2lb, 2/3d

Potatoes, 5lb, 6d

Tea, ¼ lb, 4d

Mint Humbugs for David, 1d.

This shopping list sparks an interest in the people who had previous lived in her house and Jane soon discovers that the list was most likely written by Alice James, a vicar’s wife who lived in her house before the war. Jane feels a connection to Alice that she doesn’t feel to any other part of her new life and slowly starts to investigate Alice’s quiet story.

The book then moves back in time to tell the story of Alice, the daughter of a Cambridge scholar who falls in love with one of her father’s former students, David James, who has become a vicar in the remote English town of (you guessed it) Gosford. The book then takes turns following Jane and Alice’s stories as they try to find their place in their families and the town to which they both somewhat reluctantly moved.

Over the course of the novel, Jane discovers the lifestyle she loved had had an unexpected impact on her family and her place within it. While Jane is becoming more self-aware, the lovely Alice is growing up and developing her own strength and identity. My main criticism of this book is that Jane is such a sook and a complainer! She goes on and on about how bad her life is without taking any sort of responsibility for her own decisions and role in her predicament. Fortunately, Alice’s story provides a respite from Jane’s unrelenting whinging and, in the end, Jane’s sourness works well in comparison to Alice’s sweetness. The feminist in me did object to the overarching message that it is the role of the mother to create a home but that was balanced by a realistic depiction of the drudgery that is involved in being the primary homemaker.

The Vicar’s Wife is not a particularly deep or complex story but I did enjoy reading it very much. It is a very relaxing, easy read that is perfect to take on holiday or to use to help you unwind at the end of a rough day. Three stars.

A copy of the book was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley but the opinions in this review are my own.

The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan (2012)

I started reading this book after being intrigued a Salon piece written by a journalist (Tracie McMillan) who goes undercover to investigate the field-to-plate journey of food in America. I enjoyed Nickel and Dimed and I found the article well written and intriguing, so I was looking forward to this deeper picture of America’s relationship with food this book would provide.

However, I wish I had not wasted my time. White female privileged smug middle-class journalist Tracie McMillan decides to go investigate three aspects of the food industry – agriculture, distribution and preparation – by pretending to be a poor person and working as a labourer, at Walmart and in the kitchen at Applebees. This is similar to  what Barbara Ehrenreich did in Nickel and Dimed. The difference between Ehrenreich and McMillan’s books is that Ehrenreich acknowledges her privilege and states on a number of occasions that she understands that what she is doing is at best an imitation of the life of an actual poor person. McMillan not only doesn’t seen to understand her privilege, her poverty tourism actually causes harm to the very people her book seeks to give a voice to.

For example, McMillan’s first job is working in the fields in California. She concocts a not-very-believable reason for why an educated, well-spoken white woman is looking for manual labour and then proceeds to find a job, aiming to live on the money she earns from her own labour. The first problem with this is that the first two places she lives in are owned by friends or acquaintances of hers and she doesn’t have to pay rent. Her privilege, as evidenced by her strong social network, is already providing an (unacknowledged by her) benefit to her that the people whose lives she is investigating do not have. Through her neighbour, who lives with six other people in a two-bedroom trailer that she pays rent for, she finds a a job picking grapes. In this job, pickers work in groups of three and are paid on the number of boxes (cajas) of grapes the group can pick. Due to her inexperience, McMillan can only fill nine boxes, meaning her group members earned over 30% less than they normally would. Even though she did picked fewer grapes than others, the payment is divided three ways equally. She says: “There’s only one word to define what just happened: charity. And I know I am in no position to refuse it.” YES YOU ARE! You have an education and a strong social network and a well-paying job and an apartment that you live in on your own in New York City. It is reprehensible that your little games of poverty tourism literally took food out of the mouths of people who need it much, much more than you do. Tracie McMillan, you should be ashamed of yourself.

It doesn’t get any better. To study the distribution of food, McMillan gets a job at Walmart. She manages to find a place to rent where the landlord provides her with food staples – more free stuff. She comes up short on her rent because she has been going out for sushi, so she puts the difference on her credit card. Heads up, Tracie, the reason you were able to go out for sushi is because you are able to do things like put the rent on your credit card and then pay your credit card using your regular job. Actual poor people don’t do things like that, because if they did they would actually get evicted and not be able to call on their extensive social network for free housing or to just, you know, return to their NY apartment. When McMillan’s sister gets cross at her when Tracie says she “can’t afford” to go to a Christmas party which involves baking two dozen cookies, I had to stop reading for a while until I calmed down in order to prevent me throwing the book at the wall. McMillan’s sisters are a lot more refrained with her than I am with mine – if either of them had pulled that crap with me I would have sat them down and had a serious conversation with them about privilege and being an obnoxious dick. After the cookie party, McMillan decides she’s had enough of playing poor and quits her job and I quit reading the book.

Investigative journalists are important. They can provide a window into another way of life and expose, like Ehrenreich did, the appalling conditions some people work under and the human cost of the first-world consumer life we live. Tracie McMillan is a talented writer and the research in this book was excellent. But her particular type of privileged poverty tourism that caused harm to those she was aiming to write about is appalling. I give this book one star.

Into My Arms by Kylie Ladd (2013)

There has been a bit of buzz around Kylie Ladd's new book Into My Arms, so I was excited to pick it up from the library yesterday. I love a book where you can really sink your teeth into the ideas and characters featured and I thought this book club darling was going to be the next dinner-party must-read. Into My Arms opens strongly, when the impetuous headstrong Skye, who is dating Hamish, meets teacher Ben Cunningham at a school. Skye falls in love with Ben and leaves Hamish. However, problems arise when Skye introduces Ben to her mother Nora and her gay brother Arran, who has just broken up with Mark, who cheated on him, and Nora realises that Ben and Skye are actually brother and sister - Ben was conceived using fertilised eggs left over after Nora and her husband Charlie, who just died of dementia, used IVF to have Arran and Skye. Ben didn't know he wasn't his parents' genetic child and becomes estranged from his mother Mary, although he stays in touch with his sister Kirra.

Sound complicated? That summary sums up just about every single problem with this very average book. After its strong beginning, the story just goes nowhere. The characters lack any depth at all, do not develop over the course of the novel and there are so many different characters with a stake in this story it's overwhelming, especially since their narrative voices are exactly the same.

On top of the laundry list of characters, this book is not afraid to acknowledge multiple ideas. As well as the incest storyline, there is a dementia storyline, a gay storyline, a cheating storyline, a squatting/freegan storyline, an asylum seeker storyline, a widow storyline and, just so nothing gets left out, a religious storyline as well. On top of that there are the broader overarching themes of family, motherhood, home and belonging. Simply put, that's too many storylines! Ladd would have been much better served to strip back the unnecessary stuff and focus on the important characters and stories so we care about the people she is writing about. Instead, she makes something a big deal - like Charlie having dementia - that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. This is Basic Writing 101 - if it doesn't add to the story, take it out. What's even worse is that Ladd's metaphors are so laboured it's almost painful to read - for example, after finding out that Skye is his sister, Ben has explosive diarrhoea and the only thing he had to wipe his arse on is the letter from the genetics company telling him the results of the sibling test. You have seriously got to be kidding.

There are interesting ideas in this book. The consequences of IVF and sperm/egg donation are real - there are concerns about genetic siblings hooking up because they don't realise they are related. The integration of asylum seekers into Australian society and the processing of refugee visas is a big problem. It is horrible to lose a family member to dementia and it must be awful to discover that your partner is cheating on you. However, you get absolutely nothing from reading this book that you wouldn't get from reading a really detailed plot summary, so read a couple of reviews of Into My Arms that contain spoilers so you know enough about it to get by at dinner parties and spend your time reading another better book instead.

The Book of Secrets by Elizabeth Joy Arnold (2013)

I must have been in a bookish frame of mind when I was browsing Netgalley last time, because the next book on my reading list is also about books and set in a book store – The Book of Secrets, by Elizabeth Joy Arnold. The story opens with Chloe in her rare and used bookshop, a converted Victorian mansion that seems to suit perfectly the type of books they sell – the very old and delicate first editions that need to be stored in temperature-controlled boxes and only handled while wearing gloves as well as pulpy paperback thrillers. It soon becomes clear that this charming bookspace has some very dark undertows – Chloe arrives home one day to find a note from her husband, who has left without warning and without explaining when he will be back. We soon find out that Chloe and Nate’s relationship is damaged and complicated and she has been sleeping with a friend of her and Nate’s, Daniel. While trying to find out where money in the company account has gone, Chloe discovers a secret notebook that contains a series of letters written in a code that she and Nate developed when she was a child. You see, on her eight birthday (which her mother forgot) Chloe wagged school and went exploring. She stumbled on to what seemed to her a magical land – the household of the Sinclairs (Grace, Nate and Cecilia), a homeschooled religious family who lived down the street from her. The Sinclairs introduced the young unhappy Chloe to the magical world of Narnia and she and they became involved in an intense forbidden friendship based around a love of books and each other. The novel follows these two strands: one in the present day where Chloe tries to find her husband and address the problems with the shop and her relationships and one in the past, where Chloe deciphering Nate’s coded book brings back memories of past pleasures and explains the horrors of the abuse the Sinclair children dealt with at the hands of their parents.

This is a dead baby novel. I apologise for the bluntness of that statement but the dead-baby trope is one of my least favourite of all the tropes. It is so inherently sad (dead baby!) that lazy authors use it instead of decent writing and storytelling to generate feeling (like this book, which I hated hated hated). The murder of a baby is so horrifying that reading about it can make a reader feel literally sick (Sonya Hartnett and your baby-murdering ways, I’m looking at you) and a baby who dies from neglect represents the worst parts of society (Sonya Hartnett, again. I would not let this author babysit my children). Like with the Holocaust, if you’re going to write a dead baby novel, it needs to offer something new other than just horror or a lazy way to evoke emotion. Fortunately, Arnold manages this, with the sadness and grief associated with a lost child working as an everpresent hum in the background of the book: not the point of the novel but adding another level of meaning, sadness and grief.

What I think this novel is really about is fatherhood and the ongoing consequences of absent or abusive fathers. It asks us to evaluate what being a good or bad father really means. The book also draws our attention to how fragile and unreliable memory is and how what can seem true can, in fact, just be a different way of remembering. I found the role of reading in this book really beautiful – books speak to the characters in the novel, providing an escape from their everyday existence and explaining life and love. Books, in The Book of Secrets, are friends - not inanimate objects covered with printed words but real, living, breathing forces of life. How the author wrote about books and reading was one the things I enjoyed about this novel.

However, the book is not perfect. Arnold uses foreshadowing to introduce the present day story to the past story (like ‘And little did I know or understand what Grace had experienced when her relationship ended’. End chapter. Start new chapter. ‘Grace was in love….’). That’s fine and it means the book flows well but at times I felt the storyline set in the past dragged a little bit because, well, you already told me what happened. I also felt that the closer that I got to the end of the book (and I got to the end of the book very quickly because this is a very engrossing read!) the story got more and more unrealistic – my suspension of disbelief was stretched close to breaking a few times. The other odd thing that jarred a little bit for me was the name of the main character, Chloe. I date her at around about 45 years old, which means she would have been born in the ‘70s and I don’t know any Chloes that age. It felt like the name was too young for her. I don’t know, since I had the same quibble with the last book I reviewed, maybe I’m just being a bit fussy or it's a regional difference.

I would definitely recommend this book, especially for a plane ride or a holiday – it’s that kind of story. The Book of Secrets reminded me a lot of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn or Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson, so if you liked those, definitely look this one up. I give it 3 stars.

This book was supplied to me by the publisher via Netgalley but these thoughts and views are my own.

The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler (2013)

The Bookstore is the debut novel from Deborah Meyler. In it, 23-year-old Esme Garland, an Englishwoman who is doing her PhD in Art History at Columbia University, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. When she tries to talk to her boyfriend, the handsome old-money Mitchell van Leuvin, he breaks up with her before she has a chance to tell him about the pregnancy. Alone and largely friendless, she take a job in the quirky used bookstore The Owl.

This is a really smart novel. It is written in the first person, and despite Esme’s very old-fashioned name (she has been called after her great-grandmother), her voice is modern, young and interesting. She tells her story through a framework of modern artists and literary references which are very evocative of colours, feelings and time. Meyler’s writing style reminded me a little bit of Lily Brett without the tragedy – an articulate and knowledgable woman wandering around the streets of a much-loved New York, with lightning quick thoughts and ideas darting everywhere inside a fertile intelligence and imagination but with very little showing on the outside. As a postgraduate student writing a thesis myself, I loved how Esme talked about her PhD – the way that studying was an omnipresent task and the library a constant destination but also how other non-research parts of life become drawn into the PhD process – visiting galleries, attending lectures on topics not your own. The mindset of writing a thesis and being a graduate student is perfectly captured in this book.

That said, I did feel the novel lost its way in its final section. Because the premise of the book is so slight, not a lot really happens – and certainly nothing unexpected. The charm of the book is Esme’s voice and the loving characterisations of New York and the people she spends time with. I just didn’t buy that someone who had such intelligence and perception would be involved for such a long time with a rotter like Mitchell. She’s just too smart to miss the clues to his character that are provided along the way!

Those quibbles aside, this is a charming novel that I would not hesitate to recommend. I will definitely keep an eye out for future work from this very promising novelist. 3.5 stars.

How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore (2013)

A recurring cultural myth is that of Pygmalian, an artist who sculpted a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her. After praying to the goddess Venus, he came home one day to his sculpture, Galatea, brought to life. He had literally created his own perfect woman. Contemporary audiences are probably most familiar with the My Fair Lady version of the story, where Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) bets a friend that he can train the common flower seller Eliza Dolittle (Audrey Hepburn) to pass in high society as a duchess. In How to Create the Perfect Wife, historian Wendy Moore looks at the 18^th century attempt of wealthy Georgian landowner Thomas Day to create his own perfect wife by effectively abducting two pre-pubescent girls from a foundling home and subjecting them to a training and education program based on the novel and educational framework Emile by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

How to Create the Perfect Wife is not very well written. Moore repeats my least favourite historical writer’s flaw of attributing feelings to historical figures based on what the author imagines the figure felt without any actual evidence. For example, one of the orphans (Ann) and Thomas Day travel from the orphanage in the English countryside from which he kidnapped her to London. Moore states: “After the simple formality of institutional life in rural Shropshire, the chaotic clamour of Georgian London must have struck Ann Kingston with a resounding shock” (p. 52). However, she could equally have written “After the simple formality of institutional life in rural Shropshire, the chaotic clamour of Georgian London must have seemed full of life and possibilities to Ann” or “After travelling for many days with a man such as Day, Ann must have been longing for a soft bed and a friendly face.” Any of those could be equally true, so why speculate at all? All historical biographers, please stick with the facts and spare us useless conjecture.

That said, one of the best thing about this book is its meticulous detailed research. Moore, using archival records, existing histories, contemporaneous novels and many first-hand sources paints an excellent picture of Georgian London. Thomas Day’s ‘wife project’ is very different to the other wife project I wrote about recently but, even in his time where single and married women could not hold property or other assets, it was highly unorthodox for a single man to live unchaperoned with two young women. While one of the pair is deemed unsuitable for marriage very soon into the project and is ‘given away’ (urgh I hate this guy so very much), Day is involved with the second girl, who he renames Sabrina, until she is in her late teens and his actions affect both her ability to marry, as her reputation is sullied by her unusual living conditions and her ability to live well, as he provides her with only a small stipend yet his education of her has lead to her being almost completely unemployable. I found it fascinating the extent to which Day’s friends and acquaintances allowed him to continue with his practices, which they seemed to acknowledge as horrible and harmful, because of suspect practices of their own such as keeping a mistress or being involved in an extramarital affair.

The narrative is a bit fractured, with figures just dropping in and out of the main story, but that’s how real life works. I found this a truly fascinating story of power, abuse and historical experiences of being female. It illustrates that domestic violence transcends not just wealth and class but has occurred across time and is closely intertwined with power. I hope that one day as a society we will move past thinking violence and control against women is acceptable, although recent events suggest that time is a long way away.

I give How to Create the Perfect Wife three stars.