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After the Woods
Kim Savage
(Youth Fiction)
This had some cool ideas, adequately executed...
Julia and her friend Liv went running through the woods. A man attacked Liv; Julia saved her, Liv ran away, and Julia was abducted for two days. Now, a year later, Julia is doing okay, though she has blanks. She copes by endlessly studying the case. Liv, meanwhile, is desperately shoving the incident behind them while spiralling through bad decisions.
The characters are well-drawn, and it's all female-driven. Julia's smart and science-y and doesn't really have a hook on how other people see her. I like the book as a reflection on how girls/women cope with troubles and expectations (a theme which carries through to all sorts of secondary characters, and particularly all the mothers involved). But structurally it's a bit... There's a boy, but he's just shoved in occasionally when it's convenient without a real character arc (a bit like the girlfriend character in a male-driven book, actually), and the story is wrapped up with a slab of very unlikely exposition. (Goddamn exposition.) There seemed to be quite a few threads that didn't get wrapped up.
I liked it, but it could have been a really outstanding book if she'd had an editor that pushed her.
Seven Days of You
Cecelia Vinesse
(Youth Fiction)
Sophia is an ex-pat in Japan, with no real home: most of her life has been in Tokyo but she's never mastered the language; she lived a few years in New Jersey; spent time each year in her father's home in France. Now she has one week left with her friends in Tokyo before she moves back to New Jersey, and she's determined to wring every bit of Japan and her friends out of this week before it's all gone.
It's a nice but unremarkable plot of straining teenage friendships and romance, but it does a stunning job of capturing feelings of being anchorless, of being utterly at home and still a foreigner, of desperately gripping on to the last days, of the exhausting urgency of needing every single second to matter, of knowing that everyone you love is going to move on and the specialness of right now will fade. It feels like the last week of school, the days before getting on a plane, the final night of summer camp.
And if you've spent time in Japan, particularly, I think this will wrap you up like a lovely blanket of nostalgia.
Honest History
(eds) David Stephens and Alison Broinowski
(Aus History)
Hmmm. This was very thought-provoking. This is a collection of essays from historians, put together to make the point that the Anzac landing at Gallipoli in 1915 has been mythologised, and blown out of proportion to the rest of Australian history. I had some niggles with some of the essays, but if you like history that is messy, and if you like having your perspective tumbled around, there's a lot of good stuff in here.
For context, my non-Aus friends: Australia's first military expedition as an independent country (sort of, we still thought of ourselves as a British outpost) was as part of an Allied beach (bottom-of-cliff, really) landing at Gallipoli (Turkey) in 1915. They stayed there for nine months, hardly made any progress, lots of men died, and then they mounted a spectacularly successful withdrawal in which no one died. If you take the cultural importance that the US puts on the War of Independence, the Civil War and Pearl Harbor, and roll it all together, you have what Gallipoli is for Australia. Australia had its own Pearl Harbors - in WWII Japan flew almost a hundred raids on northern Australia, and a couple of submarines made it into Sydney Harbour - and I never heard either mentioned even once in all my years of schooling (as opposed to Gallipoli, which we covered every year of primary school). Australians fought at the Somme and Ypres and on the Kokoda Track and in Korea and Vietnam (and actually, all the wars, we go to all of them). But I knew Gallipoli inside out. Gallipoli is seen as the defining moment, the birth of our nation.
What's most fascinating in this book is the meta-discussion of history. It's the reminder that all history is constructed. Even when we are talking entirely in the realm of facts, we choose which events are most important, and we choose which specifics of those events to focus on, and these are political choices. More to the point, politicians, the media, the people who write the school curriculums choose, and this becomes history as we assume it always has been. Numerous essays in this book peel this back by examining how our commemoration of Anzac has changed over the years.
( This is a long one. )
Kim Savage
(Youth Fiction)
This had some cool ideas, adequately executed...
Julia and her friend Liv went running through the woods. A man attacked Liv; Julia saved her, Liv ran away, and Julia was abducted for two days. Now, a year later, Julia is doing okay, though she has blanks. She copes by endlessly studying the case. Liv, meanwhile, is desperately shoving the incident behind them while spiralling through bad decisions.
The characters are well-drawn, and it's all female-driven. Julia's smart and science-y and doesn't really have a hook on how other people see her. I like the book as a reflection on how girls/women cope with troubles and expectations (a theme which carries through to all sorts of secondary characters, and particularly all the mothers involved). But structurally it's a bit... There's a boy, but he's just shoved in occasionally when it's convenient without a real character arc (a bit like the girlfriend character in a male-driven book, actually), and the story is wrapped up with a slab of very unlikely exposition. (Goddamn exposition.) There seemed to be quite a few threads that didn't get wrapped up.
I liked it, but it could have been a really outstanding book if she'd had an editor that pushed her.
Seven Days of You
Cecelia Vinesse
(Youth Fiction)
Sophia is an ex-pat in Japan, with no real home: most of her life has been in Tokyo but she's never mastered the language; she lived a few years in New Jersey; spent time each year in her father's home in France. Now she has one week left with her friends in Tokyo before she moves back to New Jersey, and she's determined to wring every bit of Japan and her friends out of this week before it's all gone.
It's a nice but unremarkable plot of straining teenage friendships and romance, but it does a stunning job of capturing feelings of being anchorless, of being utterly at home and still a foreigner, of desperately gripping on to the last days, of the exhausting urgency of needing every single second to matter, of knowing that everyone you love is going to move on and the specialness of right now will fade. It feels like the last week of school, the days before getting on a plane, the final night of summer camp.
And if you've spent time in Japan, particularly, I think this will wrap you up like a lovely blanket of nostalgia.
Honest History
(eds) David Stephens and Alison Broinowski
(Aus History)
Hmmm. This was very thought-provoking. This is a collection of essays from historians, put together to make the point that the Anzac landing at Gallipoli in 1915 has been mythologised, and blown out of proportion to the rest of Australian history. I had some niggles with some of the essays, but if you like history that is messy, and if you like having your perspective tumbled around, there's a lot of good stuff in here.
For context, my non-Aus friends: Australia's first military expedition as an independent country (sort of, we still thought of ourselves as a British outpost) was as part of an Allied beach (bottom-of-cliff, really) landing at Gallipoli (Turkey) in 1915. They stayed there for nine months, hardly made any progress, lots of men died, and then they mounted a spectacularly successful withdrawal in which no one died. If you take the cultural importance that the US puts on the War of Independence, the Civil War and Pearl Harbor, and roll it all together, you have what Gallipoli is for Australia. Australia had its own Pearl Harbors - in WWII Japan flew almost a hundred raids on northern Australia, and a couple of submarines made it into Sydney Harbour - and I never heard either mentioned even once in all my years of schooling (as opposed to Gallipoli, which we covered every year of primary school). Australians fought at the Somme and Ypres and on the Kokoda Track and in Korea and Vietnam (and actually, all the wars, we go to all of them). But I knew Gallipoli inside out. Gallipoli is seen as the defining moment, the birth of our nation.
What's most fascinating in this book is the meta-discussion of history. It's the reminder that all history is constructed. Even when we are talking entirely in the realm of facts, we choose which events are most important, and we choose which specifics of those events to focus on, and these are political choices. More to the point, politicians, the media, the people who write the school curriculums choose, and this becomes history as we assume it always has been. Numerous essays in this book peel this back by examining how our commemoration of Anzac has changed over the years.
( This is a long one. )
