(Our Book Reviewer - Ms Suzanne O'Connor, is volunteering with the Loreto Sisters in Timor Leste)
READING AS AN ESCAPE IN A TIME OF CONCERN
African Swine Fever has been discovered in Dili, and is almost certain to appear in Baucau which is a two and a half hour drive from there. My housemate and I live in the Timorese community and are well aware of the role that pigs play in our neighbours’ culture. Every important life stage is celebrated with a huge feast, at the centre of which is roast pork. Most families own a pig which is fed food scraps until it is large and portly. When an important event takes place, the current pig is slaughtered for the feast. Then the family begins all over again. In some ways, pigs are a sign of wealth and certainly a sign that the family is celebrating in the approved and expected manner. It is challenging to remain objective when one’s neighbours are fearful and worried.
In order to escape the malaise, I read a new Young Adult novel by Nina Kenwood called It Sounded Better in My Head. It is set in Melbourne and concerns a student who has just finished the Victorian equivalent of the HSC and is awaiting information about which university has accepted her. Natalie is a very studious girl and does indeed live a lot of her life inside her head. One of the reasons for this is that most of her school life was friendless until she met Zach and Lucy at a camp for gifted students. Their friendship has been wonderful for her and though Zach and Lucy are now in an intense first love relationship, they have the sensitivity to include her. The other reason her life had been internal was that she was hideously self-conscious because of her severe acne about which she was often teased. Even when she takes the standard medication and her acne disappears, she is painfully self-conscious about the remaining scarring. Her life suddenly implodes on Christmas Day when her parents calmly announce that they are divorcing, that they had withheld this information until after Natalie’s examinations and that the family house has to be sold. Suddenly, for Natalie who loves certainty, there is none. She accepts an invitation to a “cool” party from Zach’s older, sporty brother and actually attends it, mainly to annoy her parents. From this uncharacteristic decision she begins to live in the outside world, discovering the glamorous people whom she had feared and disliked are not the stereotypes she imagined them to be. Then the examination results are published to the great satisfaction of both Natalie and Zach, but Lucy, the golden girl of parents with extremely high expectations, shocks them all. It is probably not fair of me to dismiss this novel which is witty and compassionate. I kept feeling that the lives of privileged young people in Melbourne were less important that what was happening so close to Australia and yet so in such a different context.
Feeling even more reckless, I read a JoJo Moyes’ novel called The Giver of Stars. In my defence, I must point out that the plot of the novel is based on actual events. In the middle of the Great Depression, the American President, Roosevelt and his wonderful wife, Eleanor, devised a programme called The Horseback Librarians. These women would ride in the wild Kentucky countryside, among other underprivileged states, delivering library books every two weeks to rural families. The beginning of the book was engaging with lovely descriptions of the landscape and the struggles of the pioneering librarians with suspicious, isolated and frequently illiterate people. However, when we moved on to thwarted romance, the book became deeply ordinary and disappointing. In contrast, my next review will concern a superb book about another librarian.
ALMOST A PERFECT NOVEL
I have always enjoyed reading Salley Vickers’ novels and the most recent one, The Librarian, is no exception. I have tried to explain to Spellcheck that the author’s first name is actually Irish for “willow” but the software remains unconvinced. In fact, Vickers’ parents’ lives and their relationship are worthy of a novel, involving an impulsive war-time marriage, five years in a POW camp, bombing of a house where her mother and her mother’s lover were having an assignation and after which, her mother had both legs amputated. For those who are intrigued and want to know more, please research. If you buy an actual copy of the novel, you will be delighted by its eau de nil cover and time-appropriate representation of a librarian. Like me, Vickers adores librarians and names her heroine after a librarian who encouraged the young Salley to borrow lots and lots of books.
Sylvia Blackwell (another bookish reference) takes up a new position at a library in a country town. She is to be a librarian for children and she is very excited and, with a generous budget, succeeds brilliantly in achieving her dream of enthusiastic young readers. However, this is a country town in the 1950’s in England, and her boss is a bullying one who is discomforted by the appearance of all these enthusiastic children who have the temerity to want to disturb the shelves in the room housing their library. By this stage I was so besotted with Sylvia I actually shouted at her for her foolish falling in love with a married man, one of the local doctors. Despite the fact that her boss is also indulging in what was once called an extra marital relationship, the gossip about Sylvia is much more venomous. After a massively destructive storm, the library has to be reorganised and the Restricted Access cupboard has to be moved into the children’s library space. Despite Sylvia’s concerns about this, she is assured that the cupboard is ALWAYS locked. When a copy of Tropic of Cancer disappears, the scandal is almost as destructive as the storm had been.
Vickers writes beautifully about children’s books, about the gift of becoming a life-long reader and the situation of a young woman trying to make sense of her world. She matures, often through loss and unhappiness, and comes to revise her opinion of her parents and their relationship as well as her own choices.
Why “almost” perfect? The Epilogue was maddening. However, I leave that decision to other readers who may be more fond of tied-up ends than I am. It is still a very good book about libraries, librarians, maturing and people. All of which are some of my favourite subjects.
