Inside the O'Briens by Lisa Genova (2015)

Joe O'Brien is a cop. He lives in Boston in a house with his wife Rosie, his four children and his eldest son's wife. Lately, Joe hasn't been feeling well. His balance is off and his memory is not what it used to be. He has started to twitch in ways that make him feel uncomfortable and the whole family is made uncomfortable by the uncontrollable rage that bursts out of him at unexpected times. After avoiding the issue for too long, he goes to see his doctor, who refers him to a neurologist. The neurologist runs some tests and delivers Joe some awful, awful news - he has Huntingdon's disease, a terminal neurological condition that "is characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control and an increase in involuntary movements."

While that news is genuinely terrible, the neurologist follows it up with even worse information. Because Huntingdon's is an inherited condition, there is a 50% chance that each of Joe and Rosie's children will also have the disease. The book follows the O'Briens as they grapple with this news. Joe needs to get used to the idea that he has to stop work and will gradually lose control of his own body. Additionally, he realises that his mother, who was sent to an institution for a condition that noone every named, also died of Huntingdon's and no-one told him. Each of the children have to decide whether they want to take the test and find out whether or not they have the disease. Each of them has something at stake: JJ's wife is pregnant with their first child; Meghan is a ballet dancer; Katie is a yoga teacher and Patrick is still finding his place in the world.

This book is meticulously researched and it is one of Lisa Genova's greatest writing skills to be able to personalise debilitating neurological conditions. I learnt a lot about Huntingdon's while reading this book. However, unlike the previous Genova novel I read and really enjoyed, Still Alice, I always felt like the O'Brians were kept at a clinical distance from me. I don't know if it's the novel's Boston setting or that I thought the children should stop dilly-dallying and just make a decision (I'd take the test right away - knowledge is power) but I felt as if I was watching a story play out rather than being emotionally involved. It's a good book, just not as good as Still Alice. Three stars.

Lovesong by Alex Miller (2009)

Ken is a writer, who has retired and is a bit lost as to what to do to fill his time. Returning from a trip to Venice, he discovers that the inconsiderate adult daughter with whom he lives has not bought him milk to buy tea. Feeling despair, he walks out into the streets of Carlton to the local supermarket. These streets have changed so much over his lifetime he can hardly even recognise the suburb or his place in it. Just when I was starting to think "Oh no, not another story about a white male angsting over his place in the world," Ken is distracted by a new bakery that has opened in his street. (note to Franzen et al. - they key to avoiding the boring discussions of white men who have lost their way is clearly pastry). Smelling of sugar and sweetness, the shop is inviting and warm. The woman behind the counter is arrestingly beautiful but Ken is certain he can see sadness in her eyes. He is intrigued and once again feels a part of the suburb in which he lives.

The woman behind the shop counter is married to a man, John. Ken sees John all over the place - in the library, in the pool, playing with his daughter, always reading. One day Ken asks John to join him for a cup of coffee and, over the pool-flavoured beverage, John starts to tell the story of how the couple arrived in Melbourne and the sadness in his beautiful wife's eyes.

I have made no secret of the fact that I find stories about middle-aged white men dealing with the problems of life and their place in it incredibly boring but John's story is not about himself. He takes us back to the Paris of 30 years ago; not the City of Love depicted so often in movies by its outskirts,  the working class suburbs that drive the city. Houria and Dom run Cafe Dom, a small cafe that feeds the workers of the local abattoir their lunch. When Dom dies of a heart attack, Houria writes to her brother in El Djem. Her brother, understanding her deep and profound grief, send her his favourite daughter, Sabiha. Sabiha and Houria work together beautifully and Cafe Dom becomes a huge success. One wet and cold day, an Australian man seeks refuge from the weather in the Cafe. He and Sabiha fall in love.

I have just summarised the first 60-ish pages of the book. Despite the small amount of WMA (white male angst), it's a lovely story well told. The characters of Houria and Sabiha are well drawn and the foundation of their relationship is solid and feels true. However, after John meets Sabiha and they get married, the rest of the book is quite frankly stupid. The increasingly unlikable characters act in ridiculous and silly ways and, really, bored the crap out of me. Alex Miller is a beautiful writer and there are moments where the language in the novel is sublime but it wouldn't hurt him to actually chat to a woman or two, if only to realise it is possible that women can actually have more than one desire or skill just like men can. Two stars.

Clade by James Bradley (2015)

Clade opens during the solstice. Adam Leith, a scientist, is on an exploration to the Antarctic, trying to understand what happened to the earth during past periods of warming in order to help address present day global warming. He receives a call from his wife, Ellie, telling him that after two years of trying they are finally going to have a baby. According to Wikipedia, a clade is "a life-form group consisting of an ancestor and all its descendants." Clade the novel follows the tale of Adam's family over the next four generations as climate change triggers events that have catastrophic impacts for the human race.

I am finding it hard to describe the novel without giving too much away. Narratively, Clade  works like a spinning wheel turning through time that stops every now and again to show a brief moment in the life of one of its characters: Adam and Ellie's daughter Summer as a toddler then as a child then as a teenager; her son; his family. Due to this fragmentation, it's not the kind of book where one forms a close relationship with a character and follows their story to its end. Rather, we are offered moments in the lives of a number of characters who are part of the same clade and I found the effect of that on me was to care for a family rather than an individual, much like I did in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is beautiful written and exquisitely sad. It shows a future of sadness, hardship and death yet in which life continues; not life as we know it, but a remarkable and incredible persistence of being.

I really enjoyed this book. Five stars.

The Confectioner's Tale by Laura Madeleine (2015)

It's 1909 and Guillerme du Frere is leaving the provincial town of Bordeaux to travel to Paris to work on the railways. At the same time, in 1988 PhD candidate Padra Stevenson is struggling to cope with her grandfather's death. She is also gravely worried, because when clearing out his effects she found an old photo of her grandfather with two other people, with "Claremont" and "Forgive me" written on the back. What did her lovely, kind and brilliant grandfather do in early 20th Century Paris that he needed to ask for forgiveness so blankly?

Guillerme steps off the train from Bordeaux onto a crowed platform in Paris. He is swept away by the crowd and bumps into a beautiful wealthy woman, knocking them both to their feet. Before he can speak, she is pulled to her feet and away, but he remembers her ice-blue eyes. His new job soon dominates his everyday life but, after receiving his first pay packet, he and his workmates go out on the town. After (unknowingly) trying opium for the first time, Gui wakes up in a gutter, with his pockets completely empty. Trying to find help he wanders down an alley, bumping into delivery men delivering sugar and flour to one of the favourite locations of Paris' wealthy: Cremont's Patisserie. To his surprise, standing there with a clipboard monitoring the deliveries is none other than the beautiful woman from the train platform, Jeanne Clermont. The delivery men want to chase him away but seeing the state he is in, she allows him to sit quietly and drink chocolate chaud until he is feeling better. To show his thanks, he agrees to return the following weekend to help with deliveries. From there, his relationship with Jeanne and Clermont's develops.

Back in the 1980s, Padra is not having a good time. She is very behind on her PhD thesis and has been placed on academic probation. Even though she knows she should be working on her thesis, she can't stop thinking about her grandfather's life in Paris and what he did that he was so sorry for. To make matters worse, another scholar is writing a biography of her grandfather and has promised to expose his scandalous secret. Petra is terrified that her grandfather's reputation will be tarnished for the sake of a publishing success. Helped by her friends and supervisor, she starts an investigative race with the would-be biographer to find out her grandfather's secret before he does and, hopefully, also find her place in the world.

The book alternates chapters from Guillerme and Padra. This is the second book I've read with this structure in a month (the last one being The Girl in the Photograph) and, as with that book, I much preferred the story set in the past than the more recent one. Madeleine very effectively paints a picture of Paris just after the turn of the century: the poverty living alongside the wealth; the seediness of the brothels and dancing girls; and the feeling of falling in love. As a postgraduate student, I really understood how Padra feels - the vague sense of panic every time someone brings up your thesis and the constant feeling that you should always be writing. I also loved the 80s touches - typewriters and fax machines and rotary telephones. However, the 80s is just not as fun as fin-de-siecle France!

To me, The Confectioner's Tale felt like a movie. The plot was simple and direct, the secondary characters had no inner life of their own and existed only to help the protagonists and the resolution was obvious but very satisfying. This is not a problem - I love movies! But, although it is very well told and engaging, there is not a lot of depth to this story. I actually kind of hope someone does makes a film of this book because it would be gorgeous, sumptuous and lovely to behold. Three and a half stars.

Cookbook Friday: Good and Cheap by Leanne Brown (2015) POCKET REVIEW

I read a lot of cookbooks. I used to buy a lot of cookbooks, but then I mostly read them once or twice and then left them sitting on my shelf unused until, after a decent period of time, I donated them to the local op shop, so I put myself on a cookbook ban for a while. Then I discovered that my local library has an excellent cookbook selection and my cookbook fetish has continued unchecked every since!

I think a full review of a cookbook can only be accurate when a few of the recipes have been been tested, which I don't do unless a recipe really grabs me. Instead, here I give you my pocket cookbook reviews: basically, a description of the feelings invoked by the cookbook when I read it. I have a lot of opinions of a lot of cookbooks, so I can see this becoming a regular feature...

Good and Cheap by Leanne Brown

Having been a student for much of my life (a lot more than half of it!) I am a big fan cookbooks that investigate how to make healthy food cheaply, so when I saw this on Netgalley, I requested it immediately. On reading it, I realised that it is a printed version of a PDF that Leanne Brown, a food studies scholar, developed for people on low incomes (particularly those on SNAP and food stamps). Leanne's website is here and it sounds like she's done a lot of good - she did a kickstarter to fund the printing of this book and was able to distribute it to low-income families in America and Canada and the PDF is available for free. 

Now, about the cookbook itself. Basically, it does what it says on the cover - delivers good and cheap recipes. As well as the standard tips to save money (use your freezer, buy food that can be used for multiple meals to reduce food wastage), Brown's recipes work well together, and she highlights when leftovers can be used for other recipes (as a carboholic, I am familiar with her technique of "try this on toast" and I love it!). She plays around with flavours well (for example the eight different versions of oatmeal) and uses ingredients cleverly (like the corn soup which makes a broth from the corn cobs). I have only tried the one recipe - the chocolate zucchini breakfast muffins. They were delicious and I ate them every day for breakfast for a fortnight. I also liked that this book was very vegetable focused, which is healthy (for the planet and for the individuals eating the veggies). I have definitely scheduled some good and cheap cooking sessions in the future!

Good and Cheap is not as sophisticated as Sandra Reynolds' The $120 Food Challenge or Jamie Oliver's Save with Jamie but it delivers good, cheap and tasty food for those on a budget. I would recommend the PDF to anyone who needs to budget their food money and the printed book as a great gift for students who have just moved out of home.

What She Left by TR Richmond (2015)

Alice Salmon, 25, talented and beautiful, has drowned in the lake in her university town Southampton. Drunk and with cocaine in her blood, her story captures the imagination of the nation's media. Is she a cautionary tale of what happens when girls go wild in a binge-drinking culture? Or did something more sinister cause the inebriated Alice to fall into the freezing cold water in the middle of a dark winter's night?

In the aftermath of her death, Alice's former professor Jeremy Cooke, an anthropologist, starts a new research project. He decides to attempt to map Alice's life using her online footprint as well as information collected from those who knew her and loved her to, as he describes it, "put her back together again." But why is this fusty old professor, who still prefers to write longhand and cycles over campus on an ancient bike, so concerned with telling this story; putting this particular life back together again?

What She Left is the most modern of epistolary novels. It's chapters are made up of blog posts from Alice's best friend Meagan, online forums, Alice's own diary, letters from Alice's boyfriend, transcripts of police interviews, long, pompous longhand letters from Cooke to his best friend, another scientist whose work far outshone Cooke's own and assorted other forms of modern-day communication such as online news articles and Twitter postings. This is very cleverly done, with a complete picture of Alice and the web of relationships surrounding her slowly being built up, all working towards the answer of one question: how did Alice die?

This a really enjoyable, engaging book. Four and a half stars (I dropped half a star because Cooke was such a repulsive character. I don't need to like the characters in the books I read, but he was really icky.)

The Girl in the Photograph by Kate Riordan (2015)

Firecombe is a place of secrets. They fret among the uppermost branches of the beech trees and brood at the cold bottom of the stream that cleaves the valley in two. The past has seeped into the soil here, like spilt blood. If you listen closely enough you can almost hear what's gone before, particularly on the stillest days. Sometimes the very air seems to hum with anticipation. At other times it's as though a collective breath has been drawn in and held. It waits, or so it seems to me

The prologue of the book opens in 1936, in a strange and eerie place that the narrator, Alice, has been in for three years. This place, she tells us, has changed her in imaginable ways, and now, three years after her arrival, it is time for her to acknowledge the uhealed rifts in the valley by telling their story.

The novel then journeys back to London in 1932. Alice, unlike most women in her time, has graduated from grammar school. Educated and intelligent, she is bored in her job as a typist and disconnected from her working class parents (in particular her mother), who thinks she has ideas above herself and should quit her job and work in a shop where she can meet a man. On on "particularly silent, stultifying day", the handsome and charming James Elton walks into her office and Alice is in love. James is married but (in a tale as old as time) he is going to leave his wife...until he doesn't, leaving Alice pregnant and alone in a time where being a single mum is not an option. Alice's mum sends Alice to Fiercombe Manor in the countryside, where an old school friend of hers works as a housekeeper. Once Alice has her baby, she will return to London and put it up for adoption.

Fiercombe Manor is an unusual place, where unusual things happen. It's at the bottom of a valley and, as she descends in an old horse-and-carriage driven by the gardener, Ruck, her watch stops working. The motif time as stopped, stilled or moving in unusual ways continues throughout the novel. The housekeeper and her mother's friend, Mrs Jelphs. Mrs Jelphs is also an unusual character: alternately friendly, open, reserved, withdrawn and oddly over-protective. The house seems to have a life of its own, and at night while she sleeps Alice feels presences wandering around. She is convinced there is a secret to be found and, quietly, she starts to investigate the story of the family who own the house but who never, ever go there.

Once Alice arrives at Fiercombe, a new voice is introduced into the novel. Elizabeth was the mistress of Fiercombe 40 years before Alice arrived there, but a different Fiercombe. She lived in Stanton House, an imposing monstrosity built in the Italian style; a house that was so huge it changed the feel of the valley but now gone, leaving no trace. Like Alice, Elizabeth is pregnant and apprehensive about what will come after her baby leaves her body. Linked by the new lives within them and their strange connection to the place in which they live, The Girl in the Photograph tells Alice and Elizabeth's stories, culminating in a dramatic, shocking end.

The Girl in the Photograph has strongly gothic overtones. These are quite overt: Mrs Jelphs and Alice eat in the Red Room and at one stage Alice jokes about having Mr Rochester as a husband. It reminded me a lot of Rebecca, with an overwhelming sense of mystery and intrigue and hidden knowledge. Unfortunately, with this type of storytelling it's a problem if one of the stories is more interesting than the other one - I liked the Elizabeth storyline a lot better than the Alice one, mainly because the Alice one was all in her own head and she just wasn't as interesting as Elizabeth was! I found the book engaging and well-written but quite slow moving. The author really needed to either cut out about 100 pages or really beef up the secondary characters. Using Rebecca again as a model - it is much shorter than The Girl in the Photograph while covering the same sort of area and it therefore packs much more of a punch.

The Girl in the Photograph was interesting and engaging but ultimately too long and slow-moving book: three stars. I will definitely keep an eye out for this author's work in the future.