WE MUST BE BRAVE by Frances Liardet

When a book moves you to cry you gotta give it 4+ stars. Te power of words to make pictures, tell a story, touch a heart is really quite amazing, such a skill to tap into an imagination to conjure emotion. There is so much sadness in this story, but also hope and so much love.

It is actually quite a simple plot line but the intensity of emotion and relationships create a very powerful story with challenges and complications. It all begins in 1940, Britain is being bombed to bits. One night buses bring residents fleeing the bombing in Southampton to a small village, where the locals take them in. Ellen Parr, a young woman married to the older Selwyn, finds a four year old girl alone on the bus, left behind, abandoned  - who knows. No one claims her, so Pamela becomes the daughter that Ellen and Selwyn do not have. Some years later, Pamela's father turns up and takes Pamela to Ireland to live with relatives there. We can only imagine the torment, despair and grief that Selwyn and particularly Ellen go through, in fact the whole village really. Ellen carries the grief for the rest of her days, and like any form of grieving it never goes away, you just learn to live with it. More years pass, and another little girl inches her way into Ellen's heart, opening up that wound brought on by Pamela. What will happen this time?

Such a beautifully told story of a mother's love for a child, even if that child is not biologically yours. All mothers must be brave, as at some time our children will leave us - we just have to hope that we have given them the tools to be brave and strong themselves in their own lives. 

A LIFE LESS THROWAWAY: THE LOST ART OF BUYING FOR LIFE by Tara Button

Almost daily we read about, hear about, are social media-ed about downsizing, decluttering, being less wasteful, purchasing carefully and mindfully - you get my drift. So much advice, help, mindfulness, guilt trips, recycling, mental torment. In my own little way my 2018 New Year Resolution was to not buy any new clothes for 12 months, other than replacement underwear, socks, walking shoes, and Kmart sports gear. On the first day of a new year, I now look back and think I did pretty well, not perfect - I did buy a light weight travel jacket for an overseas trip, a skirt on my birthday, some seriously discounted winter woolies which have been put in the garage till next winter, and in a reversion to pre 2018 form, in November - yes 11 months it took - I had a little spree in Zara, but I have worn them all since. Plus I still have clothes in the wardrobe I have not worn, despite taking a pile to the opshop. Obviously still too many clothes, but the whole experiment has made me much more aware of how I shop, how I look at clothes, how I am not really that interested in just browsing for the fun of it. And also made me more interested in the psychology of buying - why we are somehow biologically programmed to acquire stuff, replace it or more likely replicate it, only bring things like wedding present silver out on special occasions, buy cheap for instant gratification. 

Which is why I read this book - random choice really, not being a fan at all of self help books - this looked like a good place to start. And it is! There is nothing earth shatteringly new in this book, but the author is on a crusade to change the way we shop, how our mental and emotional health is affected by the consumer/materialism culture we live in, and how we can jump off that train and manage firstly, with what we have plus how to look after it,  and secondly buy with our actual needs and personalities in mind. Although this latter does come with a heftier price tag, the author also being the founder of TheBuyMeOnce website, championing products that are more expensive because they will last forever. That is actually quite interesting reading too. She also looks at things we can do to make our lives more enriched without having to resort to shopping to get the fix - friendships, activities, hobbies and so on. Prevent the boredom...

There are a number of self-reflective tests you can do to find your shopping style, your clothing style, getting your head around brands and advertising, how to declutter your living space literally cupboard by cupboard. Like all these sorts of challenges, you never set out to to it all at once, you will end up a blubbering mess. She suggests a cupboard or drawer a day, little by little. The only drawback to this, I see, is that by the time you have done every storage space you will have to start again as the detritus of modern life begins to accumulate again!

So worth a read if you want some inspiration while looking at the overflowing kitchen drawer with four of everything in it. How many vegetable peelers do you really need? I probably do have four. 

WHISPERINGS IN THE BLOOD by Shelley Davidow

The author lives in Queensland. I estimate she is now in her fifties. Born in South Africa, she has lived in a number of different countries, leaving SA in the early 1990s following the political upheavals taking place there. She had a vague knowledge of her family's history, that her grandmother Bertha was American, that she grown up in an orphanage, but aside from that knew little about where her family came from.

In 2012 she found a box of letters and diaries that belonged to her grandmother, and this was the starting point for her to finally learn about her family's story. In the course of tracing her grandmother's and great grandfather's footsteps, she also came to see how her life is mirrored in those who have been here before. To be honest I found this aspect of the memoir annoying and unnecessary, almost as if she is riding on the coattails of her grandparents. Because her life is not nearly as interesting, dramatic or amazing as their's. Maybe I am being mean.....

The story begins in 1913  with her great grandfather Jacob Frank fleeing the Jewish programs of Lithuania, making his way to America. Marriage and children follow, for a brief time Jacob is happy and fulfilled, but the death of his wife leads to him putting the children Bertha and Meyer in a Jewish run orphanage. Unlike your usual orphanage story, the children had a good life here. Bertha developed into a smart, lively and beautiful young woman, making the extraordinary and very courageous decision in 1937 at the age 21 to migrate to South Africa to marry a man - Phil - she had never met, although a lengthy and loving mail correspondence had evolved. She turned down numerous proposals on the ship over to South Africa, I almost wanted her to jump ship with any of the lovely young men she met on this voyage, totally smitten with her. One was a New Zealander, and he promised to write to her every year for the rest of his life, which he did! The diaries of her voyage are a fascinating glimpse into ship life, the main form of long distance transport, and especially for migrants.

She remains true to Phil, marries him, is totally in love, and they begin married life in Johannesburg. Like most marriages there are good times, sad and tragic times, but Bertha is a fighter and a survivor. You have to be to migrate alone to a completely new country, family, society, way of living. What an amazing woman she was, and the memoir is really about her, and the legacy of family she left. Bertha's life is set against the back drop of the Depression, WWII, apartheid in South Africa and her travels back to the US. She retains contact with her oldest friends whom she was in the orphanage with, and also with her dearly beloved brother Meyer. You can see why I don't think Shelley needed to put her life in here too! Bertha's story is one worth telling, and Shelley does a superb job of it. This is well worth reading, and if you are spiritual type of person you may well like the Shelley bits and pieces. Not so for me, but loved reading about Bertha. 

THE SHEPHERD'S HUT by Tim Winton

This has to be the best book for me of 2018, hands down, without a flinch of doubt. The man is a genius, possibly one of the best things ever to come out of Australia? Certainly West Australia! His love of the harsh WA environment oozes through every page - the landscape, the weather, the air the characters breathe, the vast expanse of the outdoors. And his characters - in this book only two, but oh, what works of art and harsh beauty they are. A young boy and an elderly man - what greater contrast in life events, life skills, attitudes could there be. They have in common that they are both outsiders, running away from lives they have found intolerable.

Jaxie is a teenage boy, living with his abusive and neglectful father, his mother having died from cancer some years previous. He finds his father dead, and petrified he is going to be picked up for the death, he runs away: a born survivor, determined to make the long trek to a distance town where his aunt and cousin live.

After a few gruelling days in the hot WA sun, trying to fend for himself, he chances upon an old recluse, Fintan MacGillis, a defrocked priest banished to the salt flats outback. One of the mysteries of the story is that the reader never actually finds out what he did to be banished. Suffice to say, the obvious is what occurs to young Jaxie, making for a most uneasy alliance as the two forge a side-by-side life together. This can't last forever of course......

The voice of Jaxie is incredible.  Getting inside the head of a teenage boy is a challenge I don't even want to think about. The story is told entirely through Jaxie's eyes and voice, creating a character half man, half child - , tough, vulnerable, arrogant, frightened, strong, focussed, impatient, a vocab you would not want to share with your grandmother.  And his portrait of old man Fintan shows a tough, damaged but oh so wise old geezer of a man, totally self reliant apart from 6 monthly visits by unknown outsiders who replenish his meagre supplies.

I read 'Cloudstreet' a few years ago, and really did not like it. Then I read 'Dirt Music'' which I loved. This is along the same lines, simply amazing.  

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum on the fringes of Mumbai airport, home to about 3000 people in a small space, next to a sewage lake. You don't want to be living there. Every day gives meaning to the phrase the 'survival of the fittest'. Or the strongest, the fastest, the wiliest, the best network maker, the strategist. Here in the West, we really know nothing about the skills and innate instincts for survival. Which makes this book even more extraordinary, researched, compiled and written by an American journalist who knew nothing of the local languages, very little about India and its peoples. She had however, worked in and reported on a number of poor communities in the US, but absolutely nothing prepared her for the shock that is India following her marriage to an Indian.

Yet over the course of a few years from 2008-2012 she grew relationships, developed networks and trust, found herself an excellent and intuitive interpreter. This book are the stories and lives of just a tiny handful of people who live in the slum. The author writes a little about how she came to write this book, telling her own story of immersion in the slum community that resulted in this book.

The book itself, however, is not about the author, she makes no appearance in it at all. What makes the book so extraordinary is that she narrates the stories of the slum and the people in the form of a novel. She has got inside their heads, their souls, so we learn about what motivates them, their dreams, their hopes. We feel the anger, the dismay, the despair when things don't go as planned for Abdul, Fatima, Asha, Manju and others.  This book goes way beyond fact telling as one would expect from a non-fiction book, and yet the stories and relationships she weaves feel so authentic.

This book also exposes the very seedy and horrible underbelly of modern day India, that really no one really wants to acknowledge. The corruption is sickening, and yet an integral part of how the system works in India. I look on online and see the variety of tours us Westerners can do of the Mumbai slums. It makes me feel ill to even contemplate such a thing - more money being made out of the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. The reviews on line are great, the sell of the tours is very attractive, but having lived in India for a period of time, daily walking or driving past where the poorest of the poor live, having read this book, having seen the negative reactions of Indians to realistic movies such as Slumdog Millionaire, I know in my heart that paying money to be taken on a tour of what will only be the cleanest and brightest places of a slum, where very little of the money you pay goes to your young well spoken tour guide and others involved in your tour, is not a good thing to be doing at all. 

AMERICAN BY DAY by Derek B. Miller

This appears to be a sequel of sorts to Norwegian By Night which also sounds like a ripper of a novel. This novel opens with Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard on a forced leave following the violent outcome at the end of the earlier novel. She has gone back to her father's farm, spend a bit of time, find some sort of inner peace. Instead she finds that her father is in a bit of a state, having not heard from his first born child, Sigrid's brother Marcus. Marcus lives in the US, upstate New York, in an academic position at the university there. Life for him has not been easy following the death of their mother from cancer when they were children, and that for some perverse reason he seems to hold himself responsible for. Marcus is a regular letter writer to his father, and had recently fallen in love. Now, for some unexplained reason, the letters have stopped. Unbeknownst to Sigrid, her father has bought her flights to New York to go and find her brother.

No rest for the wicked! The USA is unknown territory to Sigrid, and she finds herself in a society, a city, a community in all sorts of turmoil and at complete odds with the way life is lived out in Norway. She locates the sheriff of the County that Marcus lives in, and finds out that not only has Marcus disappeared and is a wanted man, but that his lady friend, Lydia is dead having fallen from the fifth floor of an abandoned building. Central to the whole story is the shooting by a white police officer of Lydia's 12 year old nephew, a black boy, who was playing goodies and baddies with his two white school friends, with a pretend gun in his front yard. Into this terrible mess comes Sigrid with her Norwegian calm, perceptiveness, meticulous and analytical detective work methods. Her antithesis is the sheriff, Irving Wiley, a man of extraordinary compassion, intellect, and diplomacy, walking the narrow tightrope between a hurt and angry black community, a frightened, knee jerk white community, with the law hovering somewhere in between. The story takes place late 2008, just before the US Presidential election that will see Obama become the first black president. Hence the unease.

Together Sigrid and Irv make quite the team as do the other characters, who although minor, are as deeply rounded and developed characters as Sigrid and Irv are. We see America entirely through Sigrid's eyes - a place she simply cannot understand - its free for all gun laws and how somehow this is not responsible for random gunshot deaths; its continuing displacement and disregard for the black human being; that law enforcers - sheriffs, district attorneys - are elected individuals rather than professional appointments; the disdain that successful women, especially successful black women are held in. What surprised me was that all this took place in New York state, and not in some red neck southern state where I would have expected such attitudes to be. Many of the themes and issues raised by the author in the story, we as outsiders in NZ see looking in on America - what is amazing is that Americans themselves don't seem to be able to see what a really terrible society they have created over the past couple of hundred years, and continue to live in.

Despite the serious tone of the book, and the sometimes preachy ramblings by Irv, this is a great story. The relationship between Irv and Sigrid is outstanding, each trying to outdo the other on the crime solving front with completely different methods, the characters are wonderful, all of them. There is real heart and depth to them, to their relationships with one another. Parts of it are hilarious - the dialogue and repartee, turn of phrase particularly from Irv. The only person I can possibly imagine playing him in a movie or TV series is Tommy Lee Jones, who may now be a bit old for the part, but has that perfect combination of all the Irv personality. I loved this, couldn't stop reading it. Just brilliant writing, and how on earth you can have humour in a story with so much tragedy and wrong things in it I don't know, but boy does it work.