Books

Jake Arthur has dwelt in many universes, and in many guises. So says his poetry. A Lack of Good Sons transports us from the startling to the outwardly mundane, through the mythic and the biblical to the romantic. And he has a turn of phrase wondrously suited to his subjects.

Take the opening poem Jim Nevis. A vividly descriptive narrative about a neighbour’s behaviour from a young boy’s point of view captures curiosity, puzzlement, and eventual understanding in concrete everyday language. It’s impossible not to envisage the neighbour’s “sagging bottom, his hairy back” or “his chest hair that ran down like seaweed”.

Hair is about exactly that. It’s short – utterly unlike the unruly mane of the writer! I loved the metaphorical “My follicles had a condition / extra hard workers that don’t know when to quit”. The ending couplet comes as a wistful surprise.

Talking of wistfulness, Hand-eye coordination superbly captures an older woman’s longing for a young man’s body. “She wants him some time in the next now”. What economy of words to express such a sensation so perfectly! We fear for the young man’s virginity, but not to worry – a marvellous metaphor concludes with “and the boy over the road is safe again”.

Bare Choirs, though it may conjure up unintended visions, is a beautifully imagined nostalgic reflection on a ship mast’s former life as a tree. “But here it is, sawn and shorn, / grafted to these unnaturally arranged / woods from far-flung places”. We know that trees can’t feel – or can they?

I especially appreciate that Arthur provides an ending or a rounding off to most of his poems. I think a poem has to go somewhere, not just trail off inconclusively. An excellent example of this is Encounter. It’s a narrative, intriguing visually as well as verbally, and it ends with a philosophically wry reflection.

It’s a current fashion that poetry collections should centre on a particular theme. I am glad that this writer sees no reason to do so.

If there’s one thing that I think binds every human being together, it’s that we were all young at some point. We were all preteens taking our first steps into becoming independent adults and failing miserably at it.

The graphic novel Booked follows the story of 12-year-old Nick as he navigates the perils of preteen life, including bullies, a blossoming romance, and a personal life that’s seemingly falling apart. While the story might be aimed at younger audiences, older readers might still like to give it a chance, as it does touch on some adult themes.

The illustration at first glance could be interpreted as simple, but this simplicity is what makes Booked so appealing and such a great read. Its bold illustration, with its clean lines and sparing use of one colour (green), helps draw the eye and makes Nick and his friends really pop off the page and come to life. All of this is thanks to illustrator Dawud Anyabwile, whose style complements the book’s narrative and the characters within.

Speaking of the characters, I have to say I loved them and actually began caring for them like real people. It was the combination of Anyabwile’s illustrations and Alexander’s strong storytelling that evoked this emotional response in me.

As said in the introduction, Booked and Nick’s adventures will be something that everyone can relate to, and I found myself absentmindedly chuckling more than a few times at the situations he found himself in. I mean, who hasn’t had that one teacher they couldn’t stand, or found themselves nervously face to face with their first crush?

While I loved what was going on in Nick’s school, it’s his home life that will really hit home for many readers. This was the part of the story with the most emotional meat. It’s these layers that add to the story, making Booked, in my opinion, worth much more than just a casual glance.

I needed to overcome a tad of scepticism when starting to read Joanna Gaines’ The Stories We Tell. ‘Story’ has become a bit of an overused word, due largely to social media. Even Facebook urges us to add to our story. What kind of stories was our writer referring to?

Gaines, a New York Times bestseller, is Korean American, raised near Wichita, Kansas. As a person of mixed race, she experienced teasing at school and even years later, continued to find it difficult to fit in.

A career in journalism, a successful construction and renovation business in partnership with her husband Chip, and a happy home life do not seem to have stilled persistent inner voices of self-doubt, fear, and unworthiness, feelings many readers can relate to. Nearing the age of 44, “things had gotten blurry” is how she describes it. She had one go at writing 20 years earlier, but here she is “a couple of decades later, longing once again to write everything down”.

And boy, does she! All 240 pages worth. They’re interspersed with pink backgrounded mantras such as “Looking up grounds me in gratitude” and “Growth is where my heart is”.

Self-help books offer special challenges to the author – chiefly how to keep reader interest while relating deeply personal feelings. Greater conciseness would better suit the author’s purpose here. We read at length about her guilt, regret and pain. Such confessions are no doubt useful to the writer, by helping to purge those feelings, but are they as useful to the reader?

Gaines has had a successful career and even a TV programme, both of which, she says, developed her understanding of story as a tool for growth, describing as it can the breadth and diversity of human experiences. Fair enough. That said, the declaration “Chip and I have become story-obsessed” is predictable so comes as no surprise!

Gaines’ experience of setting her personal journey down on paper has clearly been a salutary and positive one for her. She urges us all to tell our own.

I must be one of few people who’ve not heard of Ant Middleton because when I selected this book to review, I thought I’d picked a book by Ant McPartlin from light entertainment duo Ant and Dec. How wrong I was.

Instead, I received a book with an intimidating cover photo of a muscled man with piercing blue eyes staring out at me looking like an old-school personal trainer who yells and swears to motivate you.

For those of you who are new to this author, Ant Middleton is a former British SAS soldier who presents a TV series called SAS Australia and has published a series of books about mental toughness.

His latest book covers a series of themes that stand in the way of us reaching our potential with advice on how to smash through these limiting thoughts or behaviours. There’s nothing new here – it’s simply packaged up differently to align to the hard man, ex-soldier brand that Ant Middleton has become known for and references later in the book.

If you can get past the references to Australian celebrities (who I hadn’t heard of), the swearing, and the initially male-dominated narrative then the advice is pretty good. And if you stick with it, the author softens a little in the second half of the book.

There are stories of contestants from the TV series and readers to help illustrate his advice, and they can be easier to relate to than the author. One story that stayed with me was the contestant who had to overcome her fear of being in a car submerged in water. Amazingly she completed the challenge of escaping the submerged car without panicking by making one commitment at a time and breaking the challenge down into small, clear, but simple steps. This chapter alone was worth the price of the book.

I wouldn’t normally read a book like this and I’m probably not the author’s target audience. But despite that, I’ve taken away some of the advice and started to put it into practice.

What better way to start the new year than with a book that may just help you achieve the ultimate goal of happiness?

Cracking the Happiness Code was not, at first, a particularly alluring book. Something about the cover and the subject matter felt overworn, i.e. another book on happiness, that oft-elusive emotion. However, it turned out to be an impressive and meaningful delve into the mechanisms of achieving happiness.

In Cracking the Happiness Code, author Pamela Stoodley, a medically trained doctor, neuropsychologist, and counsellor, is well placed to offer insights into happiness and how and why it might elude you.

The first half of the book is the why, highlighting the thoughts, behaviours, and circumstances that may be contributing to unhappiness. The second half details the how; the strategies and practical changes that can ultimately lead to a happier life.

The chapter titles can sound a little harsh: Victimisation, Infestation, Retribution, and Elimination, to give you an idea. Elimination got me thinking. As a large consumer of news, both good and bad (possibly more bad), I wondered could I ‘unconsume’, go on a ‘news diet’? Stoodley suggests liaising with an equally minded friend who also partakes heavily in a media-saturated environment, to update you with news truly relevant to you each week, and to do this with no emails, no forwards, and no screenshots. You will find that the news that’s actually important to you will significantly diminish. Stoodley says to connect with real humans and learn about their real stories first-hand.

Cracking the Happiness Code contains real-world strategies. There’s even a chapter called Consumption, which takes a look at how nutrition can affect our moods. With vast skill and experience, the author outlines what keeps us from happiness and ways to help us achieve the deep-set emotion most of us strive for, but do not always obtain.

The first step, says Stoodley, is action – it’s not about what has caused you to be unhappy all this time, it’s about taking charge and doing something about it.

I thought I knew some stuff about Gaylene Preston but I knew nothing! This book is a great insight into the way the world has moved on since the early days of filmmaking in New Zealand, especially when directed by a sheila. Gaylene was pretty resilient to get through some of the tough shoots and situations unscathed. She’s tenacious as nothing came easy, and boy did she fight for it.

It sounds like she had a lot of fun along the way and ‘faked it till she made it’. She did time in the UK, as is the Kiwi way, and worked in psychiatric wards putting on shows. I thought that was very brave but when you are young and fearless, you can do anything. She has worked with the best in New Zealand including Alun Bollinger, who she fondly refers to as AlBol (I always think of champagne). In those days you had to fill the cinemas across New Zealand and so she bought the Paramount for two weeks for $6000 to accomplish this. The Paramount, now sadly closed, used to show soft porn in the afternoons back then, but not when there was a Preston movie to screen.

Her family is her strength and she shares fond memories of her parents, even providing a sausage roll recipe from Tui (her late mum). The recipe starts: “Go down to the dairy and get frozen puff pastry, taking care to have a yarn with the shopkeeper about more than just the weather.” My kind of recipe and I will try it out.

As a storyteller, she has a great turn of phrase: “With the financial jersey not unravelling any further, we were sailing again.” “Tui was named after that dark metallic rainbow bird that swaggers and coughs through the New Zealand bush.”

I learned a lot about filmmaking and Gaylene’s successes from Gaylene’s Take. It took me back to a simpler time before tech got in the way. Happy days.

For someone who has never thrown a punch in their entire life, watching The Karate Kid for the first time in the 80s was pure wish fulfilment. And now with Ralph Macchio’s new book Waxing On, we get to see how all the stars aligned to create what many consider to be one of the best movies of 1984.

From his very first audition for the role of Daniel LaRusso, to meeting the late great Pat Morita for the first time, Waxing On goes in depth into what it was like making The Karate Kid trilogy and the impact it had on Macchio’s life and subsequent career.

His down-to-earth personality bleeds onto the page and is reflected in his writing style, which makes him a more relatable storyteller. There are no airs or graces that you might associate with a Hollywood celebrity here, nor are there the kind of outrageous stories about wrecking hotel suites or extramarital affairs that plague other memoirs. Instead, he’s humble about his achievements, honest about his mistakes, and thoroughly entertaining along the way.

Little anecdotes litter the entire book. I interpreted some as teachable moments, while others were fun little titbits that had me gasping for joy as a huge fan. One such story that caught and held my attention was the almost universal concern people had about Pat Morita’s match fitness for the role of Mr Miyagi. Even Macchio admitted to harbouring concerns about Arnold from Happy Days in one of the leading roles. Fortunately, Morita blew them all away with his audition and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s stories like these that make Waxing On such a pleasure to review.

And on that note, I always try to approach my reviews and give feedback in a balanced way, but I really can’t find any downsides to Waxing On. If you have the opportunity to pick this up, don’t hesitate – just do it. It is a must read for 2022.

The Rarkyn’s Familiar is the story of Lyss, a human bonded and inextricably entwined in a blood pact with Skaar, a creature, some say ‘monster’, from the Otherworld. Their unholy union borne from a fight-for-life encounter binds the Rarkyn to Terresmir, and to Lyss as her familiar.

In Nikky Lee’s fantasy novel lives a world where the horrors of creatures from the Otherworld threaten to breach the boundaries of Terresmir. Embroiled in a reluctant bond with a fearsome monster, Lyss experiences a symbiotic melding of powers and energies with Skaar, with the ever-present threat that “control will fall to whoever has the strongest magic”.

Each carries a secret burden as they travel to the Illredan Empire in a desperate quest to find a cure before the inevitable madness of their blood pact becomes all-consuming for Lyss. Otherworld beings, the elite soldiers of The Order, and wayward mancer Archer threaten to derail them along the way.

Skaar will fight for freedom in his bid to escape the clutches of Archer again, the cursed mancer who had once held him captive; driven to cruelty by guilt and despair, and a madness-filled quest to save someone long gone. Lyss will fight to avenge her father’s death.

The Rarkyn’s Familiar will have you questioning who is the monster – is it the one who fights for freedom? Or the one who fights for retribution?

In Skaar and Lyss, Lee has created impressive character arcs, fleshed out and splat out, where horror, fantasy, and magic collide.

Through their shared fight for survival, and as they hone their minds and magic across hugrokar (a telepathic sense) to share their thoughts, feelings, and attack plans with no need for spoken words, a reluctant regard for one another develops.

Though Lee says it took 16 painstaking years for this book to come to fruition, I got to the end of The Rarkyn’s Familiar feeling like the story and adventures of Lyss and Skaar are far from over.

If you want a page-turner, then look no further than No Less The Devil. But be warned: once you get into this book, you’ll be seriously hooked. I read it on the bus home and nearly missed my stop. Then I sat in my car parked by the bus stop and read for another 10 minutes before driving home because I got to such a tense part in the plot that I couldn’t put the book down.

This murder-mystery about catching a deranged serial killer is very different to my usual favourite cosy mysteries. When I first picked it up, I read a chapter and put it down, because this tartan noir novel was a bit too dark and gritty for me. I picked it up again a week later and once I got that it was dark Scottish humour and rolled with it, I loved it.

The characters are intriguing and well developed. Detective Sergeant Lucy McVeigh Lucy is fantastic and likeable even though you find yourself shocked to be rooting for her at times. I hope we see this detective heroine again. The scenes with and descriptions of her unfit lumbering partner DC Duncan Fraser, also known as the Dunk, made me smile. The most memorable scenes though are when DS Lucy meets her match with the calculating students and teachers at a posh but unnerving private school.

The plot is fast paced and not always predictable. At first, I thought I was reading a pretty standard police procedural novel or classic serial killer mystery but then the plot started to take some unexpected turns. The writing is excellent and builds tension effectively. The detailed character descriptions draw you in, even when you know you shouldn’t be liking some of them!

This mystery is different. It’s dark and a bit discombobulating but it’s strangely fun. I recommend it.

Chris Parker is charming, charismatic, and chaotic. Everything in Here For a Good Time is an absolute delight. Parker takes you on a journey through his life and current musings. He’s not afraid to make fun of himself and I hope that like humourist author David Sedaris, Parker can just keep publishing his thoughts and make our days a little brighter. One of my favourite sections is how, in meticulous detail, he describes how to eat different types of biscuits (all worthy of the page and absolutely the correct way to eat them), and introduced me to one of my new favourite things: ‘a lolly to go’.

When a comedian ventures off the stage and onto the page, there’s a thrilling sense of the unknown. Without an audience to bounce off and real-time delivery, how strong is their voice alone? Well, you don’t need to worry about that here. Parker hits it out of the park, down the road, and past the dairy, where he can charm two-day-old free pies from the owner. As someone familiar with his work, it’s easy to picture him performing each chapter with all long gangly limbs flailing about, an ever-cheeky glint in his eye executed with his infectious energy. The joy of Here For a Good Time is that when reading you can’t help but laugh out loud. It’s hard to picture what it would be like to read this book without seeing him perform or checking out his Instagram skits first, but his voice, pacing, and delivery take away the need to have any knowledge of Parker’s prior work. 

The summary reads, “Here For a Good Time allows you to take Chris home for a much-needed pick me up whenever you need”, and never has a book description so aptly described the experience of reading it. Every musing he includes is like discovering a really good meme. Somehow he is able to effortlessly describe the human experience and make you laugh at the same time. I absolutely recommend it.

What amazes me the most is that even over several entries, the In Death murder mystery series still has so much to give. Neither Nora Roberts nor her star character Detective Eve Dallas seem to have run out of steam yet, and in her latest title, Desperation in Death, they both seem to have more energy than ever before. I think that’s partly because of Roberts’ emotionally charged writing style, which sucks me into her world and makes me feel for the characters involved – even the villains made me feel something (albeit in a very negative way).

At the centre of the story is Dallas and her team of police officers, who Roberts manages to inject with some real heart; almost to the point where they seem genuinely alive. While that might come off as hyperbole, the truth is Roberts is just that darn good. Special mention has to go to Dallas and her millionaire boyfriend Roarke, who cement their status as the unofficial power couple of their futuristic New York city.

One negative for me is that this might be one of the more disturbing adventures that Roberts has tackled. While I won’t spoil anything for you here, I will say that some of the subject matter gets quite dark, and it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. There were times when I had to take a break from the story before coming back to it, simply because I found it so unsettling. However, I have to point out that this was more of a ‘me’ problem and you might not have any issue with the story at all.

Even if you are a bit on the sensitive side like me, if you stick with it, I think you will be rewarded with an amazing story that tugs on every emotion until the very end. Here’s hoping that Nora Roberts (aka J. D. Robb) and Eve Dallas return sometime soon in 2023.

Lost Possessions, a novella, is written in the style of a journal – a collection of pages of a notebook in which we learn about the writer, the character, via their self-expression. Author Keri Hulme captures the reader’s curiosity cleverly and instantly with an immediate mystery:
“They have left me.
The door is locked.
The room is entirely bare.”

Where the writer is, or why they have taken him, or indeed who they are, remains entirely a mystery for the rest of the journal. However, we are given hints. As the writer begins using the notepad to track the passage of time and the details of his experience as best he can, we learn that he is Harrod Wittie, a university lecturer. He only recalls a sack over his head and something like a belt around his neck before waking in a featureless room, alone, naked, with a bucket for company.

As days – or perhaps hours – pass and Harrod realises his state of mind depends entirely on whether he is given any food, he becomes a fabulous example of an unreliable narrator. We only see his surroundings through his description of them, and memories of his childhood, his family, his past relationships, swim to the surface while Harrod slowly starves.

A curious repeating theme of ‘rites of passage’ comes to the forefront of his musings. A bizarre obsession with race and skin colour is also impossible to ignore. As Harrod begins to focus on the fact that the people holding him hostage are Black, as far as he can tell, he reminisces about the last relationship he had, with a Black woman named Jaban, drawing tenuous connections between her and his current plight. They discussed differing cultures and their traditions around how and when one becomes a man. Is pain involved? Is there a real test? Just as he seems to be finally closing in on the possibility that he brought this situation upon himself, it ends in utter uncertainty.

A quick read, and a slow digest; Lost Possessions made me think for a long time.