Review: Starling by Virginia Taylor

2 stars

This is a case where my reading experience and thoughts about the book differ greatly. I read Starling obsessively over the course of a single night, caught up in the crazy-sauce plot and the plucky heroine fighting for a better future. However, even as I did so, I was aware that the whole thing was steeped in toxic masculinity and the Madonna/whore complex. If Starling had been the old-school romance it so much resembles, I probably could have given it a bit of leeway, but it's not and my rating had to reflect the fact that this is a book - published in the Year of Our Lord 2015 - with some serious unchallenged on-page misogyny. 

So, the crazysauce plot is this: Starling Smith is fired from her new job at Seymour's Emporium because her male supervisor - who doesn't believe he needs female employees - tells the owner, Alisdair Seymour, that she is "annoying the customers". However Alisdair offers her another position: posing as his wife. He's had word from his sister that she will be visiting, with a mystery woman in tow. Desperate to avoid her matchmaking, he offers Starling 40 pounds for two weeks of pretending to be his newly-wedded wife, only to have his plan misfire when it turns out that the mystery woman is Lavender, the childhood love who left him to marry another man. As Alisdair's new plan - to use Starling to make Lavender, his real wife-of-choice jealous - also unravels, he realises that neither woman is what he thought, and that he feels much more for Starling than he anticipated. 

The whole thing was set up so that the women were continually played off against one another: Lavender against Starling, but also Lavender against one of Alasdair's maids, because Lavender is your classic immoral, manipulative slut who has to steal everyone's man, even if that man is a gardener. In contrast, Starling is such a shining beacon of pure and good white womanhood she could have stepped right out of a Victorian morality tale. She's orphaned, inexplicably graceful and ladylike despite her rough upbringing, and martyrs herself in silence, declining to defend herself when Alasdair repeatedly lays false accusations at her feet. 

Taylor makes it explicitly clear that Alasdair means to let Starling "set the limits" of  their physical relationship and would never "take her" without her consent, and yet there were several scenes that bordered on rape-y. Since he believes Starling to be an ex-prostitute, there's a lot of "I could have her, she's a whore, she wouldn't stop me"-type thoughts, and times where Starling says 'no', but Alasdair takes a while to respond, or reflects afterwards that she didn't really mean it:

Her fist thumped his shoulder and she tightened her face. He leaned forward and trued to take her mouth, but she turned her head away. "Stop. Let me go."The uncaring beast angled his hips and teased partway into the woman he didn't give a shake of his head for, while outside in the hall, separated from him only by a door, his family and his beloved Lavender made their way to their respective bedrooms.  Starling gasped. Using a whisper of repressed rage, she said, "Any further and I'll charge you five sh...pounds." His eyes flitted over her face. She could see him consider. Efficiently, as though he'd judged the price too high, he buttoned his trousers. (loc. 2490)

Throughout the book, there are practically big, flashing neon signs that point out Alasdair is actually Mr. Rapey McRapeculture. He spends a ridiculous amount of time slut-shaming Starling - either mentally or to her face - and, sometime after the above excerpt, Starling even says to him resignedly "You don't understand the word 'No'. You never have. To you the word means later." (loc. 2831). He is such a catch, even excluding the way he intends to marry Lavender and make Starling his mistress. 

At this point, my rating might seem a bit incongruous, but I gave Starling 2 stars for two reasons. The first was that is was so well-written and engaging, I shamefully almost didn't care about any of this stuff until I thought it over after finishing the book. Secondly, I really enjoyed the historical Australian setting, and historical romances set in Australia are unfortunately few and far between. Despite my overwhelming hatred for him, Alasdair's connection to the Ballarat goldfields has stuck with me, and sparked a desire to read a romance set against the multicultural backdrop of the 1850s and 60s Victorian or New South Wales goldfields. If anyone knows of one, please let me know - I can only think of MG/YA novels: some of Kirsty Murray's Children of the Wind books and A Banner Bold in the My Australian Story series from my childhood, and the newer The Night they Stormed Eureka by Jackie French, and of Zana Bell's gold rush romance Fool's Gold, which I really enjoyed, but which is set on the South Island of New Zealand. 

Review: In at the Deep End by Penelope Janu

3 stars

In at the Deep End was a quirky Aussie romance by debut author Penelope Janu. I'd really been looking forward to this one, but I'm left feeling ambivalent, because, while I enjoyed the second half, I didn't connect to the first half.

Harriet 'Harry' Scott grew up in the public eye as the daughter of two globe-trotting conservationist documentary-makers. But an accident in her childhood has left her petrified of water. When the ship she is captaining - which was once her parent's but is now owned by the charitable foundation they set up - goes down in Antarctic waters, Per Amundsen comes to her rescue. He's a Commander in the Norwegian Navy, on loan to the Australian Navy, and he's unimpressed by Harriet's plight. The sinking of the The Watch has damaged Harry's reputation, but Per has lost his chance to undertake his research on the Antarctic ice shelves. 

Harry has a plan to put things right: the Scott Foundation will buy a new ship, and Per can use that for his research. But the foundation doesn't have the money. Although Harry's high profile and Per's scientific connections would help fundraising efforts, Per wants no part of it. He thinks that Harriet is incompetent, irresponsible and a danger to herself and others. When it becomes clear that the only way he will get what he wants is by working with her, Per places a condition on his involvement: Harriet must learn to swim. And, when Per takes charge of Harry's swimming lessons himself, sparks fly. 

The whole novel is written from Harriet's perspective. This gives the reader an awareness her phobia - which I thought was portrayed realistically and sympathetically, as were the other psychological matters the book dealt with - but it also means that, until late in the piece, the reader sees Per as Harriet sees him: as an uptight, overbearing pain-in-her-ass. 

This lack of insight into the hero was critical to me, because I had trouble relating to Harriet. She doodles in high-stakes meetings with lawyers, even when people are talking directly to her. In her day-job as a geography teacher, she seems to spend more time drawing pictures on the whiteboard or talking to her students about her personal life than teaching the curriculum. She's also massively clumsy, which never sits well with me. Some of her irrationality and juvenility can be attributed to her phobia, but not all of it. For example, about mid-way through the book, Harry elbows Per in the stomach, because he's holding her arm and she's having a panic attack. That's perfectly acceptable. But then, towards the end, she punches him - 3 times - because he's "frustrating and intractable" (loc. 4409). Not acceptable. The romance between the two is a very slow-burn, which I usually love, but characterisation here meant that I had trouble even getting to the point where the romance began to warm up. 

However, the second half, when Per and Harriet worked through their enmity, was nuanced and engaging. As Harriet and Per opened up to each other - particularly he to her, since we're already inside her head - I was better able to invest in their relationship. Their growing closeness allowed Per to be the kind of hero that I love, caring and compassionate. In fact, there were a few moments that gave me butterflies, especially around the way he handled consent and safe sex. 

I also really enjoyed the fact that In at the Deep End was set in Sydney, where I live. I can't help but feel a connection to a book that references and describes familiar places like the Quadrangle at USyd, the HMAS Penguin at Balmoral and Royal North Shore Hospital, which I have always known like the back of my hand, first because it was my dad's workplace, and then because it was my own. 

Because of my background in health care (and my general pedantry), I was pulled out of the story several times because of the artistic license taken with medical matters. While there's nothing wrong with that, and I doubt it will bother anyone else, I can't help but issue a PSA: if someone has hypothermia, don't massage or rub or massage their body or extremities. Best case scenario, you'll send the patient into worse shock and severely chaff their skin. Worst case scenario, you've got a cardiac arrest on your hands. 

Harriet's reminiscences about her childhood travelling the world also made me quite uncomfortable, because they were continually exoticising and primitivising other cultures: 

When I was fifteen I spent weeks living with him in stilted huts on the banks of rivers in South-East Asia. The village women forced me to eat even though their own children were far skinnier than I was. The following year...we catalogued the wildebeest migration from the Serengeti in Kenya to the Masai-Mara in Kenya. A few months after that we spent the summer on horseback with Mongolian herdsmen on China's Silk Road. (loc. 317) 

There's a lot of footage of Drew and me dancing together--with Ghanaian drummers, North American boot-scooters, Turkish belly dancers. He used to say that he only got into trouble when I wasn't dancing with him, like the time he waltzed with a dictator's mistress in Cuba, and did the tango with a Geisha in Japan. (loc. 2079)

Paragraphs like these occur throughout the book, and I suppose their purpose is to highlight Harriet's experiences across the world growing up, but they brought nothing to the story. In fact, they often interrupted the narrative flow, and the way people and their lives are made into props in Harriet's 'adventurous' life left me feeling a little bit off. 

Because I did have such disparate feelings about different parts of this book, I've been struggling with this review for a long time. I've had trouble putting everything into words, so this isn't a particularly eloquent or coherent review. It's very rant-y for something that I ended up giving 3 stars to, but I was just so damn ambivalent about everything. I'd think of something I disliked and lower my rating, then remember something that worked for me and bump it back up. In the end, I went with 3 stars, but it's one of those cases where I think people should make up their own minds. Almost all other reviews have been favourable, so if it sounds like something that's up your alley, give it a go. Maybe it's just me, and you'll have an easier time with it.

Review: Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar

5 stars

Summer Skin by Kirsty Eagar lies somewhere between young adult and new adult romance. It's raw and unflinchingly honest, a feminist exploration of Australia in the social media age, where young, imperfect characters are both shaped by and fighting against the norms of their world. 

The synopsis says: 

Jess Gordon is out for revenge. Last year the jocks from Knights College tried to shame her best friend. This year she and a hand-picked college girl gang are going to get even. 

The lesson: don't mess with Unity girls.
The target: Blondie, a typical Knights stud, arrogant, cold . . . and smart enough to keep up with Jess. 

A neo-riot grrl with a penchant for fanning the flames meets a rugby-playing sexist pig - sworn enemies or two people who happen to find each other when they're at their most vulnerable? 

It's all Girl meets Boy, Girl steals from Boy, seduces Boy, ties Boy to a chair and burns Boy's stuff. Just your typical love story.

Basically, last year, Knights College had a challenge to see who could be the first to sleep with a Unity girl, and Jess' best friend Farren ended up having her sexual encounter with a Knights boy streamed to other members of the college. This year, Jess isn't going to let sleeping dogs lie. Behind Farren's back, she and her friends set up an alternate challenge: the first Unity girl to get a Knights boy back to her room and give him a "make-over" wins a defaced Knights jersey that Jess has stolen from a Knights boy. Her meet-cute with the hero, Mitch, is when she is in the process of stealing that jersey from the Knights laundry. Jess writes him off as just your average Knights-attending dick, and in some ways she's right, but Mitch is also dealing with the aftermath of a personal tragedy that made him take a year off uni and reevaluate his life. Despite the fact that Jess and Mitch are two very different people with two very different experiences of the world - reflected in their very different college choices - they just keep crossing paths at inopportune moments. Or are they really opportune moments?

Summer Skin is set in Brisbane (implicitly at the Uni of Queensland), and, in some ways, it's quite Queensland-y, with lines like this: 

"Sugar mill, hates the smell of rum...You're not from Bundaberg, by any chance?" (p. 57)

However, it could just have easily been set in Sydney - where the University of Sydney's all-male St Paul's College is well-known for sexual assault, it's pro-rape Facebook pages, making young women drink toxic mixtures that see them hospitalised and, most recently, for refusing to comply with a University review into college culture - or any other major Australian city with an old-school university. 

I read Summer Skin in short increments, partly because it was one of the best books I have read this year and I wanted to savour it, but partly also because it was so close to home. I never went to college - one of the reasons I chose my uni is because it didn't have colleges -but this is the story of many of my friends and family members' college experiences. This is the story of my younger high school years, when I went to a private girls school, and our brother school had the exact same motto - and misogynistic mentality - as the Knights boys. Virgil Agitur; Do the manly thing. This is the story of my experience with some uni societies. I ended up massively conflicted by paragraphs like this:

At that moment, a stocky guy with curly hair...blocked Blondie's path, addressing him as 'Killer' and telling him it was the Paddington Tavern for afters, acting like he couldn't see Jess, tucked under Blondie's arm. He probably thought he was being subtle. And Blondie played right along: widening his stance as if experiencing a sudden and significant surge in ball size, speaking in the drawl used by guys who are fluent in Brah.

"Yeah, right, the Paddo. Not gonna make it, hey."  

At that, the other knight finally focused on Jess, and she decided she didn't like his eyes. "Roger that." He smirked. "Killer." (p. 45)

You can't help but smile and even laugh because it's so spot on; "guys who are fluent in Brah" is pure genius, and I will be adding that to my vocabulary, thank you very much. But at the same time, it's also a bit painful. This representation can only appear on the page because it reflects widespread attitudes and behaviours and that, frankly, is depressing. 

And it's not just the sexism that Jess is fighting - even, and especially, in Mitch - that resonates. In the same piercing way that Summer Skin deals with gender, Eagar also talks straight up about class in a country that supposedly has none. Mitch is a rugby-union player from a well-off background, and, as Jess describes her family to him: 

"My family are probably your family's worst nightmare. Self-educated rednecks. Bogans with books. Other people worry about climate change; we worry Ford will stop making V8s. I'll know I've arrived when I buy a jet-ski."  (p. 109)

All of these things are so specific to the Australian context, but stripped of its quintessentially Australian characterisation and writing, at Summer Skin's heart is a story about hook up culture and binge drinking, rape culture, objectification of women, male entitlement and feminist push back that could occur in any number of countries. A story about women developing a take-no-prisoners approach because the establishment is just so weighted against them. It's the same story that saw a Columbia student carry her mattress around with her in protest after the university dismissed three complaints against her rapist, the UK's National Union of Students call for a summit on 'lad culture' or protests at University of Sydney's Open Day against the university's handling of  campus sexual assault. 

If I've spent too much of this review talking about myself or society, it's only because Summer Skin is so unapologetic about being a book about - and for - a particular generation of Australians, from the music references to the public/private school divide to the use of Instagram to the game of Classic Catches. It tackles love, sexism, class, body image, men's right to women's bodies and a bazillion other relevant themes with wit, grace and strength. It's sex positive, subversive and thought-provoking, and it has wonderfully complicated characters - both male and female - who don't get written off for being morally grey (too often it's only the guys who get a free pass on this). 

But potential readers should rest assured that the romance between Jess and Mitch is smart and funny and sexy and poignant. I was going to say 'equally engaging as the rest of the book' but that is misleading: the romance between Mitch and Jess does not exist outside all of these themes that Summer Skin deals with, but is inherently a part of them, and I love it for that. There can be no true exploration of sexism and objectification without a hero who, at times, displays sexist and objectifying behaviours, and more power to Eagar for somehow managing to make Mitch a attractive and sympathetic hero, even when he's being a bit of a dick. And if somebody could please give me the strength to stand up for myself and call these things out as strongly and coherently as Jess and her friends do, that'd be super.

I don't think I've ever called a book a must-read on this blog - people have a right to read what they like without being prescribed to - but I genuinely think that if there ever was a must-read piece of fiction for Australians of my generation, Summer Skin is it. It's like looking in a mirror, and while we may not always like what we see, it's ultimately a hopeful portrayal of what love and our microcosm of society can look like if we - both guys and girls - take no shit and accept that, as Jess says, "being human isn't two different experiences" (p. 214). 

Review: Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins

5 stars
*SPOILER ALERT*

My original review for this book got lost in the digital ether somewhere between Auckland and Sydney, so excuse me if this one suffers from rewrite-itis. As we all know, once a piece of writing is lost it becomes the most inspired, crucial thing since the Magna Carta, never able to matched no matter how you toil over it. Not that I'm being dramatic or anything.

Anyway, Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins features quirky rural vet Helen McNeil. One night, escaping someone at a party, she runs into a guy called Mark and they make small talk. Only later does she realise that Mark is actually Mark Tipene, All Black and shirtless poster on the work tearoom wall. He could have any woman in New Zealand (as everyone keeps reminding Helen), but for some reason he stops by Helen's clinic and asks her out. Nor is he deterred by her on-call roster (formidable during calving season) and discussions of bovine uterine prolapse. But he's based in Auckland, and she's in the Waikato, and then something happens that throws their burgeoning relationship right off it's planned course. 

I felt like Chocolate Cake for Breakfast sat midway on the spectrum that ranges from chick-lit to contemporary romance. It was written completely from the heroine's point of view, the love scenes were closed-door, and the romantic arc saw the hero and heroine in a stable relationship for much of the book; all characteristics that I would associate more with chick-lit or 'sweet' contemporaries. 

However, in other ways, it did feel very much like a contemporary, but I'm not going to list those ways because I  promptly forgot most of them after writing them in the original review. The distinction between chick-lit and contemporary is extremely arbitrary, but I feel the to situate Chocolate Cake for Breakfast with reference to them because it felt...different than the majority of both. Somehow, the sense of fulfilment I got from reading it reminded me of those first dozen romance novels I devoured, which made me feel so gooey inside and and which still hold a special place in my heart, even if, rationally, I know that there might be nothing incredibly exceptional about them. 

I read Chocolate Cake for Breakfast in a day, driven by my love for the quirky Helen and her poignant but still comic struggle with coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy. Her internal disquiet and insecurities surrounding her relationship with Mark and their impending parenthood were so raw and touching, and I think the lack of sugar-coating was one of the things that made the book feel so different and special. 

Helen can't understand what Mark sees in her, and feels sure that the pregnancy means that he'll stick with her just out of obligation. They develop massive communication issues that stem from the fact that they are very different people, who, because they have only been in a relationship a short time, don't understand each others' needs that well. Because the book is written from Helen's perspective, I've focused a lot more on her, but Mark was a great hero, a classic old-school Kiwi bloke with just enough new-age sensitivity thrown in. 

The fact that he's an All Black opens the field for comparisons with other rugby romances, particularly Rosalind James' well known Escape to New Zealand series. As much as I did like those, Chocoloate Cake for Breakfast feels far more organic, with New Zealand and the All Blacks undergoing far less fetishisation. This is much more made for an internal Kiwi audience, rather than people for whom New Zealand and rugby are exciting and exotic. 

Instead of having one of New Zealand's major draw-cards as a setting, here we have a fictional rural Waikato town, and the representation was both incredibly comic and spot-on. There's grumpy dairy farmers, the local pub, trips to 'big smoke' Hamilton and cousins who spot each others' cars in the local supermarket car park. 

I'm sure the way this book portrayed the familiar rhythms of life in the Waikato has impacted my rating, because it's impossible for me to separate my experience of Chocolate Cake for Breakfast with my near-constant sense of...not homesickness, exactly, but of nostalgia, longing and belonging. As a result, I've debated with myself a lot over whether I'm being rational giving this book 5 stars, especially since I 5-starred The Hating Game so recently. But, at the end of the day, when something is a 5 star book for someone, it's a 5 star book.

Review: Girl on a Plane by Cassandra O'Leary

2 stars
*SPOILER ALERT*

For me, Cassandra O'Leary's debut novel Girl on a Plane didn't live up to the anticipation and hype that surrounded it. The hero was frustrating, which has been a bit of a theme for me lately. I know I don't deal well with misogynistic, patronising or insert-dickish-tendency-here heroes (there's enough of that in real life) but am I asking too much to be able to track a hero's journey from jerk to not-a-jerk, or from emotionally stunted to not-emotionally-stunted?

The hero here, Gabriel, is the Australian CEO of a travel website, and en route to London to set up the European arm of his company, he meets Sinead, an Irish flight attendant. Due to a typhoon, the two of them end up stranded in Singapore, where the hotel has accidently double-booked them in the same suite. Sinead - who is on the fence about the way Gabriel has been behaving - isn't about to give up easily, and a power struggle ensues, until they fall into bed together. When the bad weather clears, they have to decide whether they simply go their separate ways, or whether their secluded few days is the start of something more.

For the first third or so of the book, Gabriel is shown to have serious man-baby tendencies and the emotional coping skills of a baby howler monkey. I might have been more accepting of the excuses given (he was tired, he hadn't meant to do whatever) if he hadn't been so calculating in the way he treated women, and if it hadn't been the female characters, including the heroine, who bore the brunt of his bad behaviour. I mean, he randomly accosts Sinead when she's off-shift in a neutral environment (the airport lounge) to take out his anger at her employer over an unavoidable situation.

While these overt instances of white male privilege fall away somewhat, we're still left with a less than admirable hero. I particularly disliked the male banter between Gabriel and his best friend. In one instance, Gabriel admits to having met someone, and this exchange follows:

Ryan leaned forward in his seat. "Now I'm intrigued. Give me the low-down." 

"Flight attendant, Irish accent, long blonde hair, fantastic breasts. She's hot, but she's more. Funny and sweet. She's got me agreeing to all sorts of crap to keep seeing her....She's making all these rules. No touching for a month." 

"Oh man, you'll be out of your mind. You agreed? She must be special." 

"Special." Funny, Sinead had used the same word. It was growing on him. "Yeah, you could say that. Lucky we already got down and dirty in Singapore so I know it's worth waiting for. It'll be hell in the meantime though."

There's a few things going on here, and elsewhere. First and most obvious is the objectification, followed by the male entitlement to a female's body. This might be a realistic portrayal of how men talk and think amongst themselves, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially since Sinead has left an abusive relationship and spends the whole book dealing with the fallout of this. Gabriel doesn't know this at this point (I don't think, I can't remember with 100% accuracy), but the reader does, and it I found it hard to back a relationship where the hero seemed to have some of the same entitled behaviours as the abusive ex.

However, Gabriel's backstory about his mother's early onset Alzheimer's was going some way towards redeeming him, at least until that all fell apart as well. His concern about succumbing to the same illness and not wanting Sinead - or anyone - to have to care for him was poignant and the major barrier to them establishing a long-term relationship. And yet, we don't see it being worked through. Gabriel breaks up with Sinead over this fear, then all of a sudden, he's back on the scene, saying he's been to a doctor and he's going to be fine. Cue HEA.

On the other hand, I did genuinely enjoy Sinead's observations on life in customer service. She describes her work-mode self as a 'flight attendant zombie', and is over the fact that she is clever, fluent in 3 languages and simply worth something as a person, and yet has to put up with being patronised, objectified and generally treated badly. She also holds some ill-will towards a male colleague, who does the same job as her, yet is sullen because he thinks he's above certain parts of it, and is treated differently. I related to her sense of disenchantment, and enjoyed the snark, wit and bone-tiredness that infused her observations. It went some small way to making up for my frustration at Gabriel and the plot. In other ways, however, Sinead's observations made my annoyance worse: the author doesn't have any illusions about being a woman in the service industries, and yet her hero is still exhibits those characteristics her heroine hates.

Review: Fearless by Nicola Claire

2.5 stars

For the most part, I didn't connect with Fearless by Nicola Claire, and I think the Gothic element had a lot to do with that. Fearless trades in the suspense of old-school Gothics, but I've never been someone who liked or was drawn in by that atmosphere of generalised fear. In fact, it's because I dislike being scared, upset or uncertain that I read romance. So when Fearless was described as the first in a "Gothic romance series [that] introduces a dark and sinister early settler New Zealand", I knew it was a risk. I took it anyway, because a) New Zealand setting and b) suffragette heroine. In the end, my relationship with it turned out pretty much as you'd expect.

The set up is that there's a Jack the Ripper copy-cat killing Suffragettes in Auckland in 1891. Anna Cassidy was trained as a surgeon by her father, who was the Chief Surgeon of the Auckland Police. However now that her father's dead, the Police Force won't have anything to do with a informally trained female doctor, even when the victims are her friends and fellow suffragettes. Inspector Andrew Kelly is investigating the deaths, and is finding it hard to turn down Anna's involvement, especially since the actual new Surgeon General is a drunkard. It also becomes increasingly obvious that, whoever the killer is, he has some kind of twisted obsession with Anna, so Kelly needs to keep her close. 

For me, the Gothic-ness made it feel very long and drawn out, because there's that slow build up of tension. I started off reading the descriptions of horribly mutilated bodies, but I ended up mainly skipping over them for my own peace of mind, which probably further reduced my ability to buy into the suspense and my investment in the characters finding the killers. But, really, there's only so much a girl can take. However, I did find the medical aspect quite interesting: the autopsy and crime scene stuff (where I read it), the use of opiates with other drugs, the movement of medical knowledge from Britain to the colonies. 

I rather liked Anna as a heroine, but I also didn't feel like she progressed very much, because the same character traits are brought home to the reader time and time again: she's fearless, clever, medically detached and strong. I didn't find it implausible that she was medically trained, but I was unsure about the way she laid claim to the title 'Dr.' and her faith that the Surgeon General position should be hers. This seems like a big step up from wanting the vote or wanting to be accepted a doctor in general; New Zealand's first female medical student, Emily Siedeberg, who began her studies in 1890, the year before the book is set, and graduated in 1896, mainly treated women and children, because this was what was acceptable. Her friend and fellow student, Margaret Cruikshank, the first woman to formally qualify and register as a doctor in New Zealand, did treat the whole community in Waimate, but only after her male colleague left to fight in WWI, and also attended to domestic tasks on house calls, such as cooking, feeding children and milking animals. So far as I know, neither ever held any position of authority, let alone one of the highest in the land.

It annoyed me that Inspector Kelly was so paternalistic to Anna, even as he recognises her strength of character and medical capabilities. To be honest, that's probably quite realistic, I just wish it had been more offset with other endearing traits. Instead, it was all 'Anna, be more ladylike', 'stay at home and knit something' and 'I'm cold and distant to you for your own good'. 

On that last note, potential readers should also be aware that this is a series, like a we're-going-to-be-following-these-same-characters-for-multiple-books series, because that sure shocked the hell out of me in the final pages. I just thought that Inspector Kelly was super belated getting his ass into gear, but there's no HFN/HEA here. So I read 355 bleeding pages of death and dreariness, thinking that at least there would be some happiness and romance at the end and then I didn't even get that. Some warning would have have been nice. 

Anyway, I've been slightly more lenient in my assessment of Kelly and Anna's relationship now that I know it wasn't meant to be a full romance arc, but at the same time, I still feel like there should have been more of a connection between the characters. The book opens with them already knowing and pining for each other (so there's not really any forward movement there, since they're still pining at the end), and while I felt like I had enough understanding into Kelly's attraction to and love for Anna, I didn't have the same insight into why she felt the same about him. 

The Auckland setting was primarily why I chose to read this book, and while that was the aspect of it I enjoyed the most, I still feel like it didn't reach its full potential. There was of course mentions of familiar places - Grey Street, Constitution Hill - and vague mentions of historical events - 'trouble in Northland' - but overall I still wasn't massively impressed. The suffragette angle was interesting and geographically and temporally linked it to late-1800s New Zealand, since we were the first to seriously campaign for and win the the vote, but apart from that, Fearless could have easily taken place in London. The author aimed for it to be "Whitechapel meets early settler New Zealand", but its dark vibe and mean streets push it towards Whitechapel and prevent it from developing Auckland as a growing colonial town. Maybe I normally wouldn't have noticed this or felt its absence so much, except that I recently read such strong portrayal of colonial Sydney in Jasper and the Dead. 

This was primarily a case of me not gelling with a book, but I also do feel like the lack of romance arc and the unadvertised lack of a HEA will be a potential stumbling block for a lot of other romance readers. 

Review: Jasper and the Dead by R J Astruc

4 stars

Several months ago, as I walked along the Sydney foreshore that bears his name, I wondered why more people haven't written books about Billy Blue, since he was such a legend of the early colony. At the time, I thought Blue's daughters would be wonderful romance inspiration, since they married into the creme-de-la-creme of English settler society despite (or because of) the fact that their father was an eccentric, Black businessman who was an ex-convict and probably also an ex-slave. Little did I know that Astruc had already written a romance featuring Billy Blue and his family, one beyond my wildest imaginings. 

Jasper and the Dead takes place in an alternative colonial Sydney, where one of the convict ships arrived with a cargo of infected zombies. In the three years since, there's been a constant battle to control the hordes and keep Sydney safe. The town's been quarantined, and although Governor Macquarie sent word to England, no help has arrived, until one day an emissary sails through the heads. Macquarie calls on Billy Blue, both in his capacity as ferrymaster and as a friend, to get him safely through town and out to the ship, and Billy entrusts the job to his secretary, Pape Sassoon, and son, Jasper Blue, a seasoned zombie hunter. It's intially a mystery to Jasper why his father insists the bookish Pape needs to be involved, until he realises that this is another one of his father's elaborate matchmaking schemes, only this time his father has actually got the gender of Jasper's potential partner right. 

It's an unique set-up, made amazing by the all the world-building Astruc manages to cram into a novella-length piece. As a native Sydneysider, I enjoyed being able to relate to a city that is portrayed in such an interesting and dynamic way. In the final pages of the book, Astruc hits on something that I think is somewhat an eternal feeling in this changeable city of ours: 

It is a strange thing, but it occurs to Pape that Sydney has grown into its cityhood as he has grown into adulthood. He has watched the city spread its crude convict roots into the hub of life it is today. Pape has never fought for anything in his life, but he wonders now if he could fight for Sydney. 

Australians who know their history will also be delighted by the colonial personalities - both real and semi-fictionalised - that are interwoven throughout the story. However, these elements are not essential to understanding the story, and I think someone not from Sydney or Australia would still find Jasper and the Dead engaging, just in a different way.  

As you can also see from the above excerpt, the story is written in present tense. It's a testament to Jasper and the Dead that I made it through at all, because usually I end up going completely batty and DNF'ing about 20% of the way through present-tense books. Its use did pull me out of the story, and make it seem as though the characters' thoughts are being relayed simplistically and didactically. Despite this, I found the relationship between Jasper and Pape to be fulfiling, if low-key, and I loved that everything ended on such a sweet note. 

Jasper and the Dead originally appeared in the Under the Southern Cross anthology, but today there's the annoying choice between buying an individual online copy of each novella or buying a physical copy of the whole anthology. Nonetheless, after Jasper and the Dead I'm excited for the other novellas. 

Review: Cursed Love by Catherine Mede

1 star

EDIT: I originally gave this 2 stars because I was trying not to be overly harsh, but bad representation is bad representation, and it was wrong of me to sugarcoat that to make myself more comfortable.

Going in, I wasn't sure where Cursed Love sat on scale from contemporary-with-mystic-elements to full-blown paranormal, given that there was only the vaguest mention of the paranormal in the blurb, but it's subtitled Aotearoa Paranormal Romance. To be honest, I still don't know how to characterise it, except to say that I wasn't a fan. 

The book opens in colonial New Zealand with the heroine's Pakeha ancestress, Esther, getting cursed by a Maori tohunga wahine for 'stealing' her man, so that henceforth her line will only breed females, and will never be able to hold onto love. When Esther asks her Maori husband what the hell just happened, he avoids answering by having sex with her. So, within the first few pages, we have the stereotype of the morally deficient and sexually dangerous 'Native' man, not the mention the exoticised spiritualism of the curse (which only gets worse as the book goes one, and gets weirdly mixed with Christian theology somewhere down the line). 

Anyway, forward to the present day. Jinny Richards has spent the last 18 years mourning her partner and unborn son as she built herself up from abandoned narcotic addict to successful insurance assessor. Now her company has parachuted Ethan Montgomery into town and they're meant to work together on a case of goods stolen from a company, run by her dead partner's brother. There's more there than meets the eye, and Jinny's growing feelings for Ethan has the potential to bring the curse down on them both. 

For the first third of the book, Ethan is a bit of a dick, and fully takes over the case that Jinny's meant to be leading. Then, the insta-love happens and his dickishness abates, leaving...nothing. Jinny's characterisation is slightly stronger. I liked her back story and her strength in the first half, but she too deteriorates, becoming weak and idiotic in the service of a overblown and convoluted plot. 

Jinny is one-sixteenth Maori, by my calculations, thanks to the Maori great-great-grandfather who brought about the curse. At one point, out of nowhere and vis-a-vis nothing, she proclaims:

"...yes, I can claim certain Maori rights, but I leave that for those less fortunate than myself."

Ethan praises her for her generosity, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. As much as it's extremely problematic to start making calls on who is or isn't part of a particular ethnic group, Jinny is never shown to have any connection to Maoritanga (Maori culture and tradition), to an iwi (tribe), hapu (subtribe) or whanau (extended family), although I suppose, if her ancestors also from modern-day Nelson, then her iwi would be Ngai Tahu. All she has is a pounamu necklace that holds that stupid curse. Nor is she subject to any of the discrimination or racism that comes with being identifiably Maori. Basically, her statement is the Kiwi version of "my great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess". Many fifth or sixth generation Pakeha New Zealanders have at least one Maori ancestor, usually a foremother, since there were not many Pakeha women in the days of the early colony. (It's odd - but I suppose not beyond belief - that Jinny's Pakeha great-great grandmother married a Maori man, given that there would have been many Pakeha men looking for wives, and - as always seems to be the way - intermarriage between white women and men of other races is far more frowned on than the reverse). 

Overall, I don't have much else positive to say about this book. I did like the New Zealand setting, but feel that this cannot be separated from the problematic representation. If it hadn't been for the setting, I might have given up, but, in the end, I'm just too greedy for Antipodean romances. 

Review: Fly In Fly Out by Georgina Penney

4 stars

Georgina Penney's Fly In Fly Out (previously titled Unforgettable You) was a solid romance, made extraordinary by its nuanced portrayal of Australia and her dichotomies: rural and urban, old and new, good and bad. It's set in Perth and the Margaret River region, as well as on an oil rig off the coast of Mauritania, where the heroine works as an engineer.

Yes, you read that right: the heroine, Jo, is an engineer. She's a FIFO; someone who flies in and out of their job in mining, petroleum extraction or another insanely profitable natural resources industry. But Jo's migratory lifestyle means that her sister and her best friend, Scott, are left to look after her cat. When Scott's cousin Stephen needs a place to live, Jo's empty apartment seems like a good idea.

Stephen and Jo knew each other as children, and Stephen still feels bad about something that happened when they were teenagers, something that caused Jo to leave their hometown in the Margaret River and move to Perth. He's keen to make amends, and he feels like looking after her apartment is the way to go about it. After a rough start, they settle into a tenant-landlord relationship, which grows into something more. But, even then, Stephen's attempts to delve into their shared past are rebuffed.

Whereas normally we have the closed-off hero, and the coaxing heroine, here it is the other way around. Jo is emotionally closed off, having learnt the hard way to keep her problems to herself. Stephen, on the other hand, is so scarred by this defining incident of their youth that he is hesitant when it comes to women, careful not to push too hard. This made him a really interesting hero, just as Jo's down-to-earth nature made for great heroine material. All of the characters, right down to Jo's cat, Boomba, are well-rendered.

Without wanting to give to much away, the characters came together in a particularly nuanced portrayal of Australia's problem with alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Old attitudes of "don't talk about it" are contrasted with new, more open understandings. In a similar way, the old, rural Australia acts as a foil for the new Australia, where disposable incomes have risen on the back of the mining boom.

In Fly In Fly Out, Penney brought to life one aspect of new Australia I've never known much about: the mysterious world of oil rigs. Until now, my only point of reference has been that line from Cold Chisel's Khe Sanh: "I held a job on an oil rig, flying choppers when I could, but the nightlife nearly drove me 'round the bend". Studying that song in high school history classes about the Vietnam War, I never understood if it was a lack or surplus of nightlife that drove the song's narrator 'round the bend. But now I think I know: it was the lack thereof. It sounds like gruelling work: long shifts interspersed with bad food and sleep.

Weirdly enough, while writing this, I flicked over to Twitter, only to find Yassmin Abdel-Magied, well-known social activist and little-known mechanical engineer, talking on Radio National about her experience on oil rigs. According to her, there are usually only three to four women out of the 150 workers on a rig, but she also says that the dynamic can be different than those numbers suggest.

Regardless of what the reality might be, I liked the way Penney constructed Jo's work environment. She's friendly with the guys, but she'll never be one of the boys, and with an incompetent junior engineer and Stephen playing house in Perth, she becomes increasingly discontented with her job.

I picked up Fly In Fly Out the day after having my wisdom teeth removed. I guess I thought that, since it seemed light and had a familiar setting, I could read it through the fog of industrial-strength painkillers. If it had been a lesser book, I think I'd probably have mostly forgotten it by now, but the emotion of Fly In Fly Out is hard to forget. All those feels could have been the result of the oxycodone, but I'm pretty sure it was just good writing.