Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa.

                        

- It’s a tough read this. Vanessa is an innocent fifteen year old schoolgirl, and her English teacher a predatory forty-two year old male. We witness the intricate dynamics of grooming. She believed that ‘to be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing’.

- The sexual abuse of the young girl is described in detail and it's horrific, despite her complicity. ‘I’m lucky to have this, to be so loved..he worshipped me. I was lucky’. He introduces her to Nabokov’s Lolita. It becomes her favourite novel.

- Her childhood was lonely and friendless in an isolated small town in Maine. She barely tolerates her mother. She’s smart and mature, with huge potential and talent. In her early twenties she’s darker, more difficult and confronting, and still seeing the groomer. She’s had no other sexual relationships. 

- Other students in school can see it, and offer support, but Vanessa denies it. She is committed to protecting the teacher. She enjoys the special relationship she shares with him. She lies time and time again to other students, to the Principal, to her parents. She’s a willing recipient of his affection, a participant in her seduction. He builds up her self-esteem. 

- It's not until she reaches her early thirties that she finally twigs, when other girls he molested come forward. 

- She sees a therapist who enables her to articulate that ‘I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that’. 

- A brilliant, gripping read and a perceptive, enlightening novel for our times. 

Ronnie Scott, The Adversary.

  

- The unnamed narrator of this novel set in inner-city Melbourne is a self-conscious young man who is completely unsure of himself, is as boring as batshit, and a frivolous jerk. He never engages with other people, including friends, on any meaningful level. Never talks about books, movies, TV shows, politics, sport, food or anything but his own tedious insecurities. That's when he does talk at all. He admits at one point: ‘...I’d thought I could out-nobody the best of them’. 

- His friend Dan is the only remotely interesting character in the story. He is confident and has opinions - about marriage, the evil supermarket duo, cooking and other things. 

- Yet, and this takes time to creep up on you because the author, Ronnie Scott, unravels this little tapestry of a story slowly, our narrator is also fairly and slyly wise and insightful: ‘Life was in the business of closing doors..’; ‘I’d behaved inconsistently in the stony name of justice, and behaved ineffectively in the human name of love...’

- And he loves strange words, because he ‘...liked the way different language sounded...I definitely liked sounding smart’.  Words like janky, liddedly, mooching, chittering, grade-grubbing, sheeny, gamely, skullduggerous, bronzer, blipped, twink, skeeze/skeezily, scooched, mentossy, gruts, capacious, glommed, a smear of influence, munted, ouroborosing. God knows what most of these mean. And faux-poetic expressions: I thought wonderingly; Lachlan kept his bike, and all things, serviced to a noiseless state of unsqueaking zoom. 

- We spend twelve weeks with this narrator and his four friends, three of them new, wandering around Brunswick, Fitzroy, and Richmond. The inconsequentialness, the existential meaninglessness, the smallness, the emptiness of it all, whether they be at a party, at a pool, in the kitchen, in a bedroom, in a street. '‘Am I meant to go up there?’ I asked. But I was asking nobody; Vivian was gone.’ 

- Halfway through though, I began to find these friends very likeable - their fragility, their obsessions, their sensitivity and their supportive and loving surface interactions. A heightened intensity starts to imbue the quotidian smallness of it all, and inconsequential details become significant.

- And the novel ends very satisfyingly. 

Patrick Allington, Rise & Shine

- This little sci-fi adventure ticks a lot of boxes.

- It's an intriguing, cheeky, highly imaginative and enjoyable read, seemingly offering a new vision of society and leadership built on kindness and respect. But very lightly and gently it's doing a lot more than that. 

- We’re taken to a very strange world where screens dominate individual lives and social interactions, even to the extent of delivering digital food. Nature has been replaced by screen views of it. The screens are watched by the citizens of two cities: Rise and Shine. They are the only places left after the sudden deaths of the world's eight billion people. There was a natural catastrophe brought on by 'the slow grind of excess...The earth, pushed past its limits, began to eat its own.'

- These two cities are, or decide to be, ‘honourable enemies’. The authoritarian, but nice, leaders manufacture videos and fake news, and fool the citizens into celebrating war. 'Our bodies need regular fresh footage'. And for some unstated reason, clear plastic, now a dominant building block, covers everything.

- The was Old Time. Now there is New Time, whose citizens love watching battle scenes in front of their face on ‘autoscreens’. They have a human ‘right so watch war’. They all possess ‘wearables’, presumably a smart phone/home speaker combo. Unfortunately however, most leaders and citizens are all diseased, for reasons that gradually become clear.

- A small group of dissenters, or 'terrorists', who secretly grow and eat plants, are closely monitored, arrested and taken to a prison where the guards and police are polite and courteous, because that is the new social order. Bread, vegetables and animals, even fresh water, are also forbidden, as they were poisoned by the Old Time and the New Time is wary. Fenced and patrolled precincts in both cities are populated by diseased and starving people, whom the dissenters try in vain to help. 

- Allington is suggesting a lot here about power and control and submissiveness. Even the capture and isolation of science and truth. 

- It's a novel that will stay with you and haunt you. And a prescient one for our times.

Robbie Arnott, The Rain Heron.

    

- This second novel from Robbie Arnott is engrossing from the start. The story is highly original and tense, and the writing beautiful.

- There's been a military coup in this unnamed country. Ren has fled her coastal town and is surviving in a cave on a mountain on her own. She knows where the fabled 'Rain Heron' is to be found. The heron is believed to influence weather events like floods and droughts that frequently devastate the local communities.

- I’m not a great fan of magical realism in serious literature but here it is integrated into real life drama very effectively. 

- Zoe Harker is a cruel army Lieutenant, under orders from the coup leaders to find the magical heron if it exists. She pressures Ren to help her. 

- Unlike in Arnott's first novel Flames, there is a narrative discipline here. The stories are linked in a satisfying, coherent way. And Arnott can really tell a story. He has a masterly control of pace and tension, making for a thrilling and absorbing read. 

- There are strange elements in the tales of course, but they are fascinating in themselves and add a spicy flavour of mystery and intrigue. Fantasy and reality mesh in a very satisfying way.

- The nature descriptions are sublime, like nothing I’ve ever read. The natural world in all its variety, mystery, dynamism, cruelty, comfort and spiritual beauty is a major player in this novel. But Arnott's essential focus is on the human connections between his characters, particularly family and mother/child relationships. There is death and unbearable suffering. But it is this personal pain that makes us who we are, and makes us yearn for redemption and forgiveness.

- I was reminded of Jock Serong's novels at times. They have a similar feel - a mix of action, adventure, politics and personal stresses and strains. 

- The Rain Heron is well worth reading. It's a major achievement.

Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air

- Swallow the Air is Tara June Winch's first novel and was written when she was just 21. It was published in 2006 and won numerous literary awards. After reading and reviewing her latest novel The Yield, I felt compelled to read it.

- Simply put, it's a magnificent achievement. Besides being beautifully written, virtually every sentence arrested me and demanded a re-read. It's about a proud people persecuted, imprisoned, stranded and forgotten, and a young Indigenous woman’s journey to her spiritual home, the Wiradjuri nation in central NSW. 

- Winch has written a powerful hand grenade of a novel, lobbed at colonial ignorance and complacency, and clothed in thrilling, poetic prose.

- The ugliness of young May Gibson's home life is confronting - her father was a violent abuser, and her mother dies young. May and her brother Billy are offered a new home by her Aunt, whose boyfriend Craig is also violent. Billy suffers severely and leaves. 

- May leaves too, months later, and catches up with Billy who has become a druggie and a  dealer. 

- She ends up in the Redfern Block in Sydney for a year, and finds a friend in Johnny. But life on the margin is hard. The racist police pigs were always after them. ‘I knew I had to leave this place...I needed to listen to the dreams...I’m going to country, I’m going to find family’. 

- She hitchhikes her way to reconnect with her ancestral community in central NSW and to find her family the Gibson’s, and her mob. On a Mission she meets Uncle Graham who laments the plight of the Indigenous people: ‘They still tryin to do it, kill off us fellas, that always been they plan, now they do it quiet, crush em, slow....us fellas still seen as second-rate person, still treated like they don’t matter’. 

- At Lake Cargelligo, May comes to Country and is told by a Gibson cousin: ‘There is a big missing hole between this place and the place you’re looking for. That place, that people. That something you’re looking for. It’s gone. It was taken away. We weren’t told, love; we weren’t allowed to be Aboriginal.’ She realises she can't stay.

- On her return to the coast she learns Johnny has died in a police chase. 

- One of the final chapters is called The Jacaranda Tree, which is just sublime. Beautiful, poetic, unlocking memories of her mother. 

- I find it hard to believe that this glorious gem of a book was written by an author so young.

- It's a stunning achievement that will be read and re-read for generations to come.