Susan Green

Bendigo Writer’s Festival this week. I spent all day there Friday and yesterday –  listening, talking, meeting people. My brain is buzzing with ideas. A real winter boost for the soul, and so very, very enjoyable! I haven’t had time to muster my thoughts about all the sessions I attended, but I’ll do something I promised I would.
Which is to post my complete book list for ‘Green’s Guide to Good Books’. Wearing my (invisible) bookseller’s hat, I presented this session at the Friday schools’ day, called Text Marks the Spot, which is coordinated by La Trobe University Bendigo’s Sarah Mayor Cox. It was a full house in the Bendigo Bank Theatre at the Capital; attentive kids, excellent questions, a great host in Georgie Eberbach from Bendigo Secondary College (we’re pictured here in the portico of the Capital) and lots of fun.
I always madly over-prepare, so here’s the long version of what turned out to be a fast-moving and fun session.

Text Marks the Spot 2018 Green’s Guide to Good Books.

What’s a good book? Everyone’s got their own opinion. One you start? One you finish? Anything that interests you? Quality writing? Gripping story-telling? Gets on with it? Slow burn and takes its time? Cinematic and visual? Streamlined, quick and easy? Challenging? A book that you “get”? A book that “gets” you?

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was pretty snotty about what made a good book and would have excluded a lot of great reads. Because they were genre fiction, mainly. I’ve changed a whole lot. I think all sorts of books are “good” for all sorts of reasons. I’ve chosen (with help from Kathryn at Stonemans Bookroom where I work) 16 good books. Not all of them are exactly my cup of tea. Some I never would have read unless prodded into it. Some of them were really memorable, and have made we want to read more of that author. I’ve tried to vary the genre and style of book but I’m only one reader with one set of eyes. My aim is for you get some ideas from this selection. Maybe you’ll give something you wouldn’t normally read a try. I hope so!

We’re starting with the younger end of YA here. And I’d just like to say something about “reading down” – as in, reading books for a younger age group. I do it all the time. I read a lot of junior fiction, not just because I’m a bookseller and a writer, but because I genuinely enjoy reading it.

The plus for me is often that they are shorter! I think that a lot of books published now are just too long. They don’t always need to be. While sometimes I love to wallow in a long, long book, with beautifully realised time and place, exploring fully the characters past and present – not always. Sometimes I don’t have the time or more importantly, the concentration. I’m tired. I’m stressed. I’m busy. But I want to read! Many junior fiction or YA titles just get on with it. And sometimes, that’s what I need. I encourage you to occasionally look at junior titles – books that are down from your age group – and give them a go.

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
   A Wrinkle in Time has recently been made into a movie. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment. But I know that re-reading this time, I actually want to keep my version of it in my head. Meg Murry’s scientist father is missing and Meg is having a hard time fitting in at school. The other children tease her about her father and her “dumb baby brother” and she can’t help lashing out. Everything seems dark and hopeless to Meg – until one stormy night, everything begins to change. Into her life comes a trio of odd guardian angels – Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which – and her new friend Calvin. Together with her brother Charles Wallace, they travel through a wrinkle in time to find her father.
2. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin
   This is an absolutely spell-binding fantasy novel. I hadn’t read it since I was about 12 or 13, and it’s even better than I remembered. It’s the classic story of young wizard Sparrowhawk. Through pride and ambition, he lets an evil shadow into the world…and it’s up to him to hunt it down and destroy it. An almost perfect book.
3. A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz
   This title includes all the kinds of story elements that I love. Orphans, secrets, gaslamps, séances…It’s 1909, and Maud Flynn is an inmate of the Barbary Asylum for Female Orphans which is somewhere near Boston in the USA. She’s eleven years old, small for her age, clever and defiant and  – according to the Superintendent, Miss Kitteridge, not the sort of little girl that anyone would want to adopt. But she’s wrong. She’s exactly what Miss Hyancinth Hawthorne is looking for. Maud loses her heart to the enchanting Hyacinth, and she’s overjoyed when she goes to live with her, her sisters and their rough but kindly servant, Muffet. But  – of course – all is not as it seems. (How I love those words!)
   Maud is a feisty, complex character; Miss Hyacinth is fascinating and the unfamiliar (to me) setting in 1900s America added a bit of extra interest to the ‘gaslight’ scene.
4. How to Bee by Bren McDibble
   I was completely bowled over by How to Bee. It’s the voice. And it’s almost always the voice. Peony is brave, funny, straightforward. Listen.

Today! It’s here! Bright and real and waiting. The knowing of it bursts into my head, so big and sudden, like the crack of morning sun bursting through the gap at the top of the door. I fall out of my bunk and hit the packing-box floor. I scramble up, right into Gramps asleep in his chair in front of the potbelly stove.
‘Cha!’ he growls.
‘Sorry Gramps,’ I say. ‘It’s bee day.’ I pull on my pest vest and try to squeeze past him, but he puts out his foot.
‘First eat, then bee,’ he says, real firm. He cuts a wedge from the oatcake on top of the stove.
Cockies screech loud from the tree over our shack. They know it’s time to get moving. ‘I can’t,’ I say and try to squeeze past again. ‘Foreman’s waiting.’
My sister, Magnolia, sticks her fluffy head out from the top bunk. ‘Stomp yourself, Peony-pest,’ she groans.
‘You won’t diz me when I’m a bee,’ I say.

This is a world where all the bees have died.  Brave and nimble children have to climb the fruit trees to pollinate the flowers by hand. Pests are picked by hand, too – that’s why Peony is wearing a pest vest – but Peony has set her heart on being a bee. However, her mother, who works in the city, has other plans for her daughter. Big themes and ideas, deceptively simple writing. It so deserves to be on the CBCA shortlist.

5. Marsh and Me by Martine Murray
   As I’ve said, I really, really like books that aren’t too long! It’s great to find a satisfying read that isn’t a marathon. Short doesn’t have to mean simple, just as simple language can tell a complex story. How to Bee is one example. So is Martine Murray’s Marsh and Me.

Joey Green is a good kid. He’s kind and smart and funny, but just not the sort of boy who gets noticed. He’s kind of hesitant. He lacks confidence. He’s so scared of failure that he doesn’t try. He plays guitar and would love to take part in The Battle of the Bands – he’d like to be friends with some of the kids at his school – but his doubts are holding him back.

At school, there’s a footy match on at lunchtime. The guys are all playing, except for me and Digby. Digby is watching a trail of ants. So he isn’t talking. I am sitting in the sun, half watching the guys, half wishing I was one of them, half glad to be just sitting there and not showing how bad I am at ball stuff. I know that’s a lot of halves, but that’s what it’s like inside my mind. It doesn’t add up neatly.

When he meets Marsh – a most unusual girl in a tree house – Joey’s life begins to change. This is a gentle, thoughtful book about friendship, music, taking chances, risking failure – and above all, how you can enter into the mysterious inner lives of other human beings.

6. Take Three Girls by Fiona Wood, Simmone Howell and Cath Crowley
   Moving in to a different age group now – this is older YA, perhaps from 14 onwards. Take Three Girls is a collaboration between 3 well-known YA writers, Simmone Howell, Fiona Wood and Cath Crowely. They take three very different girls and combine their stories.
   We have Ady. She’s the cool girl from a rich family, but neither the cool or the family are quite as they appear to be. Then there’s Kate, the academic over-achiever, expected to be a doctor, whose passion is for experimental music. And Clem, the swimming star who’s lost heart for her sport.
   The girls are in year 10, and they’re taking part in a Wellness Program at their posh private school, St Hilda’s. They’ve all been smeared by PSST, a misogynistic cyber-bullying website. The Wellness Program and what flows on from it – and what they do about PSST – forms the story. This is really, really good YA fiction, just as you’d expect from three such expert authors. It’s compelling, funny, raw, romantic, sexy, occasionally disturbing (Note: language, sexual content!). It’s narrated by each girl in a variety of ways, including through their wellness journals. I love the device of the Wellness Program, because it allows for jolts of introspection without slowing the story down. So many questions get to be raised… Who am I? Am I happy? How well do we really know each other? How might we change our thinking about others? What I want to be? Is belonging the same as fitting in? Do I have to do what I’m expected to do? What is being true to yourself? What is being brave?

Dear Journal,
I like the idea of this but I’m not calling it a Wellness journal. That makes it sound like I’m in some kind of formal therapy, which I fully support if you need it, but I’d rather think of it as a kind of diary.
Am I happy with my identity?
If you’d have asked me before I came to St Hilda’s I would have said pretty much. Now I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things since I moved to the city. My life plan’s gone out of whack…

My life plan had been in place for a while. Study hard. Convince mum and dad to send me to St Hilda’s, where I would study even harder…work like crazy to get into medicine. Become a doctor. Pay mum and day back. Look after them and the farm…

It’s as though, on the day I heard Frances Carter (musician) my self changed. A part of me that I didn’t know existed spoke for the first time. It makes me wonder what else is there waiting to appear

Expect to explore issues of friendship, honesty, courage, love & sexuality. Empathize, sympathize, laugh – even cry – as well.

7. Lifespan of Starlight by Thalia Kalkipsakis
   Lifespan of Starlight is #1 in a trilogy by Thalia Kalkipsakis. It was first published in 2015, and actually slipped by me then. It’s speculative fiction, Sci-Fi – and deals with time travel – the ability to move around into the future. As we begin the book, the future is now – it’s 2084, Melbourne. Unequal, surveilled, grimy and run-down, with food and water rationed, and every citizen is supposed to be chipped so that each aspect of their lives – where they go, what they do, how much they spend – is monitored. One day, in a park in Footscray, an unchipped, illegal teenager called Scout makes a shocking and gruesome discovery. Soon, she and two friends are pushing the limits of what’s possible. The authorities are closing in. Are they desperate enough to risk everything they know? This novel is speedy and exciting, with superior world-building. #2 is Split Infinity and the 3^rd instalment, Edge of Time, has just been released. This is for you, if you you’re into dystopian fiction and would like to hear a distinctly Australian voice.
8. White Nights by Ellie Marney
   From the future to now. World building usually is used in reference to fantasy or sci fi titles, but in this case, I’ll use it in reference to Ellie Marney’s White Nights. Ellie’s the author of the best-selling Every trilogy, which reimagined Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as a couple of Australian teenagers. Here, Ellie has created a realistic and believable small country town as the setting for this novel. Teenager Bo Mitchell is a good kid. He’s into sport, he loves his family and friends. So far, so ordinary. Then Bo’s family life starts to get seriously messy. And he befriends the new girl in his class, “feral” Rory, who comes from an alternative, secretive, off the grid community called The Garden of Eden. Secrets, lies and obsessions can have devastating consequences. This has Ellie Marney’s trademark suspenseful plotting and gritty characterisation.
9. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyami.
   Into fantasy now. This one has been talked about so much! The author, Tomi Adeyami, is a Nigerian American, and this is her debut novel. And wow. A six-figure advance, movie rights sold to Fox 2000, amazing reviews. A great deal of the fantasy you see around is based on Western medieval history – like Game of Thrones. Or, as in Lord of the Rings, on Celtic, Norse or other Scandinavian mythologies. Basically, it’s European. Children of Blood and Bone, a bit like the superhero movie Black Panther, takes us somewhere else. This book delves into the rich world of African – in this case, Nigerian – history, culture and myth. The story is told through two characters; a young girl, Zelie, whose family is Maji (magical). The maji are feared, oppressed and brutalised by the ruling clan of Orisha. The second character is Inan, the crown prince, who is determined to stamp out magic for good. This is prime fantasy material – magic, a journey, a chase, a quest… The writing is vivid, engaging all the senses so you can not only see and hear but almost smell and taste. The action is roller-coaster and exhilarating and actually violent, the emotional lives of the characters have real punch, the world-building is intricate and believable. Un-put-downable!
10. Bonesland by Brendan Lawley
    Bonesland won’t be for everyone. It’s the author’s debut novel, was shortlisted for the Text prize, very accomplished and hard hitting and impressive. It’s small town Victoria again. Bones Carter is almost permanently down. The occasional trips to Melbourne with his mates make him dream of a more exciting future, where there’s colour and energy and anticipation. He’s just suffering out his existence in Banarang, feeling like a failure. Then Naya, a black American exchanges student, comes into his life. She’s not only beautiful, she’s clever and funny and passionate about making the world a better place. And she believes that Bones has a load of untapped potential. But potential doesn’t do anything unless it’s activated…
    I thought this was a fantastic read. Raw, at time disturbing and even upsetting. There’s quite a bit of sexual content, which includes things like the sexual/romantic feelings of the protagonist to the misogynistic conversation and attitudes of some of the characters. There’s drug and alcohol use. There’s language – including hip-hop lyrics – that some might find offensive, including racist language. Just a side issue; when I looked up reviews of this title on Goodreads, there are obviously some readers who get a bit confused when a novel, a work of fiction, has a first person narrator (as in “I went”, “I said” etc instead of “She went”, “She said”). There were readers who assumed it was autobiographical, a real person in a real town, and were outraged at some of the language, attitudes etc. As an author myself, I know that it’s easy for people to assume that first person is ME. Using sexist and racist characters and language doesn’t mean you approve. It means you want to show this stuff.
11. The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.
    This novel begins in New York. Alice and her mother, Ella, have spent years trying to outrun bad luck.

My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways. My first memory is the smell of hot pavement and the sky through the sunroof, whipping by in a river of blue. My mom tells me that’s impossible- our car doesn’t have a sunroof. But I can still close my eyes and see it, so I’m holding on to it.

But now, with Ella married to a rich husband, and Alice enrolled in a posh private school, everything seems set for an almost-happy ever after. But no. Alice’s grandmother is the author of a cult book, a collection of fairy tales called Tales from the Hinterland. She’s a recluse, living on an isolated country estate called The Hazel Wood. When news comes that she’s died, Alice’s life gets strange, and then frighteningly out of control. With the help of her friend Finch, she sets out to find the secret of the Hazel Wood.
I loved this. I’m not sure what genre it fits in to. If it was a film, it would be made by Tim Burton. Strong elements of fantasy, but it would almost fit into horror as well. It’s loaded with suspense and mystery, stylishly written, dark, creepy, twisty, fascinating. Again, not for every reader. The beginning is slow burn – Melissa Albert takes her time to build up the characters and the atmosphere of foreboding. I found the pacing delicious and immersive; the writing calls attention to the words (by that I mean, it’s beautiful writing) which I but I realise that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But for those of you who love this sort of thing – highly recommended. And (no spoilers) the ending really … well. For me, this is a one-sitting read.

12. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
    A shout out to Kathryn McAllister at Stonemans Bookroom in Castlemaine, where I work. She reads a lot more YA fiction than I do, and she pushed this one into my hands. I thought I would hate this book – it’s told entirely in poetry – and yet I loved it. Xiomara (I think that’s how you say it – sounds like a Z but starts with an X) is a fifteen year old Dominican girl (Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean) living with her twin brother and parents in Harlem in NYC. It’s a rough environment, with crime, sexual harassment and violence never too far away. Her mum is a very, very religious Catholic woman, obsessed with keeping Xiomara away from bad influences. That means, mainly, boys. She’d love to have a daughter like Xiomara’s friend Caridad. Caridad is quiet, respects her parents, she can recite the Bible, she wants to wait to have sex till she’s married… But Xiomara is different. Fiesty, clever, rebellious, she fights back against the street harassment, the groping, the comments; she uses her fists to protect her brother; she defies her parents. There’s a secret and more sensitive side to this girl as well – she keeps it hidden, but she’s a poet and she wants to take part in a slam poetry competition. She also wants to get to know a boy in her class. This novel is her story…X’s voice is finally heard. I was pretty sceptical, but it’s brilliant. It says everything it needs to say, and it’s short!

I am un-hideable
Taller even than my father, with what Mami always said
was “ a little too much body for such a young girl”.
I am the baby fat that settled into D–cups and swinging hips
So that the boys who called me a whale in middle school
Now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.
The other girls call me conceited. Ho…Fast.
When your body takes up more room than your voice
you are always the target of well aimed rumours,
which is why I let my knuckles talk for me…

13. A Thousand Perfect Notes by C G Drews

This one is also about parental expectations… X’s mother wanted her to be a certain way; she put pressure on; she made it difficult for X to be herself, express herself, live life as herself. A Thousand Perfect Notes ramps that idea up many, many notches. 15-year-old Beck is a talented musician, but his mother – the Maestro – demands that he be a genius, a prodigy, a star performer who will carry on her shattered legacy in the musical world. No longer able to play, she teaches music at a university and forces her son to practice until his hands bleed while almost ignoring her youngest child, daughter Joey. Failing at school, Beck is paired with the unconventional August in a project. August is a sunny, kind, smart hippie-ish girl but Beck doesn’t need a friend. Because of the Maestro, he can’t afford to have a friend. But August makes Beck into the project… This is an intense, emotional, claustrophobic book, mirroring Beck’s closed-off world; the tension and drama are pumped up high almost into melodrama. It’s easy to read, absorbing, involving. C G Drews is a young Australian author.

14. All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater

I hadn’t read anything by Maggie Stiefvater, though over the years I’ve seen plenty of her novels in the shop – the Raven Boys cycle, and the Shiver books. This is a stand-alone novel.
I’m going for big contrasts here. While A Thousand Perfect Notes is claustrophobic and locked-in, with a small cast of characters, almost like a play, All the Crooked Saints is expansive.

A desert is a lot like an ocean, if you replace all of the water with air. It stretches out and out in unfathomable distance, and, in the absence of sunlight, turns to pure black. Sounds become secrets, impossible to verify as true until the light returns. It is not merely empty because we cannot see all of it. And you know in your heart that it isn’t – that it is the opposite of empty once it is dark, because things that do not like to be watched emerge when the light is gone. There is no way to know the shape of them, though, until your hand is on them.
Something was there in the desert.
The creature was moving slowly among the distant brush, dark against the night-purple horizon, nearly human-shaped. There was a rattling or hissing as it moved, like dry beans shaken gently in a pan.

This novel extends from the savage but beautiful desert setting, to the soundwaves in the air, up into the huge night sky… And another journey, into the strangeness of human beings and their hearts.

We’re in the tiny settlement of Bicho Raro in an arid area of outback Colorado, USA, in the early 1960’s. The Sorio family, originally from Mexico, are saints. Miracle workers. Pilgrims in need of a miracle turn up here and lately, have been staying around. The miracles are not quite what you’d expect. There’s a man covered in moss. A young woman who carries the weather around with her. A priest with a coyote’s head. We’re in magical realism country, with three young Soria cousins. Beatriz, Daniel and Joaquin, trying to work out their destinies. Beautiful characters, reads like a strange fairytale, gorgeous lush language. Expect music, radio, classic cars, science, roses, love, longing, despair, happiness and owls (lots of owls!)

15. The Goose Road by Rowena House

World War 1, 1914-18. The Great War or the War to End All Wars. A hundred years, this November since it ended. If you think about this war – as an Australian, you might just think about Anzac Day, about the Gallipoli campaign. Or, you might think of the Western Front and the battlefields of France, where my own grandfather served. You might think of months, years of pointless-seeming protracted trench warfare, of mud, explosions, shattered minds and bodies. Red poppies, which bloomed in their millions over the buried corpses. I have to admit that, I’d not given much thought to the civilian population of France.
This novel starts on a beautiful summer’s day in 1916. 14-year-old Angelique, living on a farm in rural France, sees the postman coming. It’s the news that her father has been killed fighting for his country. Now the farm belongs to her brother, Pascal. Is he still alive? They don’t know. She and her mother have to struggle on, keeping the farm going for Pascal’s return, selling produce at the market, looking after the animals, harvesting. Bad weather, family disagreements, unpaid debts and illness all intervene, but disaster really strikes when the army requisitions (that means, simply takes) their farm animals. It seems as if they will lose everything. So Angelique decides to raise money by selling the only animals they have left – a flock of geese. To get the best price, she makes a long and difficult journey right across France. It’s a quest story. Angelique sees first hand the horrors of war. She sees the best and worst of people. She’s brave and persistent and kind. Simply told, through Angelique’s eyes – she’s an unsophisticated country girl, a peasant – this is an inspiring story. And – who knew? – geese turn out to be intelligent, affectionate and fiercely protective animals. You might even fall just a little bit in love with them. I was going to read you a very dramatic scene of an attempted goose-theft by starving peasants, involving a very angry Angelique and a rifle, but this is dramatic in another way. A goose egg…

Finally, the struggle begins again. I watch the poor little thing, slimy and dark, wiggling and twitching, constricted in the shell, too weak to break it apart.
“Come on little one. Don’t give up!”
At last, giving in to temptation, I prise open the top of the shell but I’m frightened of hurting the fragile creature inside. It seems to be nothing but a beak and two blind, bulging eyes. Then there’s another spasm of effort, a desperate convulsion, and its head flops into my lap. Instantly it seems impossible that such a big head, such a long scrawny neck, could ever have fitted inside the shell.
“Just your feet and body to go,” I whisper.
Just? The battle is too hard, the thrashing ceases. I look to the hen, but she’s fallen asleep. Clumsily I peel away fragments of the shell, chipping them off with my fingernails.
The gosling appears to be glued to the egg, to be part of it still – half born…
Tremors shake it like death throes, until one outsized webbed foot sticks up out of the shell… The bird doesn’t have the strength to push free. I breathe warm air onto it, stroking the neck with infinite tenderness.
“Fight,” I whisper. “It’s your life. Fight for it, please.”
Minutes pass, the tremors increase, then the gosling jerks, arches, the foot paddles, expands and breaks free.
“Come on!”
A claw-like wing jabs up and out. The body spills onto me, a wet bedraggled ball attached to two gigantic feet. It is the sweetest, silliest, ugliest, most beautiful thing in the world.

16. Lifel1k3 by Jay Kristoff
    Kristoff is a Melbourne writer. Apparently he’s 6’7” – which is around 201 cm… Anyway, he’s the author of a number of best selling titles, including The Nevernight Chronicles and The Illuminae Files. I’d never been attracted to any of these books, and thought reading this would be a bit of a chore. How wrong! This is fantastic. Fast moving, inventive, dramatic, and very, very violent! This has been such a fun read, and I’m going to go back and try his other titles.
    We’re post-apocalypse which is partly environmental – the whole west coast of America has been divided by a massive shift in the San Andreas fault – and partly human made – climate change and wars between rival corporations which have trashed the country. Most of the population lives in what amounts to a megacities turned junkyards of decaying 20^th century buildings, machines and technology. Everything’s rusty, dirty, gritty, greasy, wrecked, dangerous and (did I already say this?) extremely violent.
    The heroine of this novel is 17-year-old Eve. Tough, funny, persistent, she lives with her grandfather; she suffers recurring nightmares of a deadly massacre which wiped out her family; and she spends her time fabricating and piloting giant robotic gladiators which battle in the WarDome arena. Which is where the novel begins. She’s “hunched on the shoulder of a metal giant”, screwdriver between her teeth, welding torch in hand, grease on her face.
    “A black metal sphere sat in the socket where her right eye should’ve been. Six silcon chips were plugged behind her right ear, and a long oval of artificial flesh ran from her temple to the base of her skull. The implant obviously wasn’t made for her – the skin tone was a little too pale to match her complexion. It was just about the right shape for a nasty exit wound.”
    That day in the WarDome, she loses her bout and life changes for the more interesting. Her gladiator machine is destroyed, she loses the money she needs for her grandfather’s medicine, and after she manifests the power to destroy machines with her mind, a bunch of vicious religious fanatics come after her.
    What to do? Desperate for money for her grandfather, she tries a spot of scavenging when an aircraft comes down. Soon she, her “bestest” Lemon Fresh, her blitzhund Kaiser and little robot Cricket find themselves on the run with the handsome android, Ezekial that they rescued from the craft.
    There’s something about Ezekial – a human-like non-human so perfect he’s called a ‘lifelike’ – that tugs at Eve’s memory. That memory that’s on the cybernetic implant. What about those nightmares? What’s real? What’s just a dream? Soon Eve doesn’t know. And she needs to find out if she’s going to survive. This is part 1; the next instalment will come out next year. Read this one now!

A shout out to Kathryn McAllister at Stonemans Bookroom in Castlemaine, where I work. She reads a lot more YA fiction than I do, and she pushed this one into my hands. I thought I would hate this book and I loved it. Xiomara (I’m thinking the “X” might sound like a “Z”?) is a fifteen year old Dominican girl (I had to look this up – Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean) living with her twin brother and parents in Harlem in NYC. Her mum is very, very religious (Catholic) and obsessed with keeping Xiomara away from bad influences, and that means, mainly, boys. She’d love to have a daughter like Xiomara’s friend Caridad. Caridad respects her parents, she can recite the Bible, she wants to wait to have sex till she’s married… But Xiomara is different. Secretly, she’s a poet and she wants to take part in a slam poetry competition. She also wants to get to know a boy in her class. This novel is her story – how X’s voice is finally heard – written as her poetry. I was pretty sceptical, but it’s brilliant. It says everything it needs to say, and it’s short! Here’s a short sequence…

I am un-hideable
Taller even than my father, with what Mami always said
was “ a little too much body for such a young girl”.
I am the baby fat that settled into D–cups and swinging hips
So that the boys who called me a whale in middle school
Now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.
The other girls call me conceited. Ho…Fast.
When your body takes up more room than your voice
you are always the target of well aimed rumours,
which is why I let my knuckles talk for me…

Four new books! I am preparing a talk for Text Marks the Spot, the schools program of the Bendigo Writer’s Festival, so right now, I am reading, reading, reading. Which is great, as we’re in the depths of winter and there is nothing nicer than snuggling up with a cup of tea, a nanna rug and a book.
That being said, I really, really like books that aren’t too long! It’s great to find a satisfying read that isn’t a marathon. Short doesn’t have to mean simple, just as simple language can tell a complex story. How to Bee (reviewed earlier) is one example. So is Martine Murray’s lovely Marsh and Me.

Joey Green is a good kid. He’s kind and smart and funny, but just not the sort of boy who gets noticed. He’s kind of hesitant. He lacks confidence. He’s so scared of failure that he doesn’t try. He plays guitar and would love to take part in The Battle of the Bands – he’d like to be friends with some of the kids at his school – but his doubts are holding him back.

At school, there’s a footy match on at lunchtime. The guys are all playing, except for me and Digby. Digby is watching a trail of ants. So he isn’t talking. I am sitting in the sun, half watching the guys, half wishing I was one of them, half glad to be just sitting there and not showing how bad I am at ball stuff. I know that’s a lot of halves, but that’s what it’s like inside my mind. It doesn’t add up neatly.

When he meets Marsh – a most unusual girl in a tree house – Joey’s life begins to change. This is a gentle, thoughtful book about friendship, music, taking chances, risking failure – and above all, how you can enter into the mysterious inner lives of other human beings.

Take Three Girls is a collaboration between 3 well-known YA writers, Simmone Howell, Fiona Wood and Cath Crowely. Three very different girls – Ady, Kate and Clem – are taking part in a Wellness Program at their posh private school, St Hilda’s. They’ve all been smeared by PSST, a misogynistic cyber-bullying website. This is a compelling look at life as a 16 year old in Year 10, and it’s definitely for “young adults” – maybe readers from 14 or 15.
Lots of questions are raised. How do I know who I am? What I want to be? Is belonging the same as fitting in? Do I have to do what I’m expected to do? Expect to explore issues of friendship, honesty, love, sexuality, change, and courage. It’s also pretty funny in parts, so expect to laugh as well.

Lifespan of Starlight is #1 in a trilogy by Thalia Kalkipsakis. It was first published in 2015, and actually slipped by me then. It’s speculative fiction (as we seem to be calling sci-fi  these days) and deals with time travel. As we begin the book, the future is now – it’s 2084, Melbourne. Unequal, surveilled, grimy and run-down, with food and water rationed, every citizen is supposed to be chipped so that each aspect of their lives – where they go, what they do, how much they spend – is monitored. One day, in a park in Footscray, an unchipped, illegal teenager called Scout makes a shocking discovery. Soon, she and two friends are pushing the limits of what’s possible as they test the ability to move around into the future.The authorities are closing in. Are they desperate enough to risk everything they know? This novel is speedy and exciting, with superior world-building. #2 is Split Infinity and the 3^rd instalment, Edge of Time, has just been released. This is for you, if you you’re into dystopian fiction and would like to hear an Australian voice.

From the future to now. World building usually is used in reference to fantasy or sci fi titles, but in this case, I’ll use it in reference to Ellie Marney’s White Nights. Ellie’s the author of the best-selling Every trilogy, which reimagined Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson as a couple of Australian teenagers. Here, she has created a realistic and believable small country town as the setting for this novel. Teenager Bo Mitchell is a good kid. He’s into sport, he loves his family and friends. So far, so ordinary. Then Bo’s family life starts to get seriously messy. And he befriends the new girl in his class, “feral” Rory, who comes from an alternative, secretive, off the grid community called The Garden of Eden. Secrets, lies and obsessions can have devastating consequences. This has Ellie Marney’s trademark suspenseful plotting and gritty characterisation.

Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon was winner of the Newberry Medal in 2017. Here’s what the blurb on the back says.

Every year the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as a sacrifice to the witch that lives in the forest. But the witch, Xan, is a kind one. She rescues the children and delivers them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest, nourishing the babes with starlight on the journey. But one year Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic. Xan decides she must raise this girl, who she calls Luna, as her own. As Luna’s 13^th birthday approaches, her magic begins to emerge – with dangerous and thrilling consequences.

This is, apart from anything else, a fabulous demonstration of world-building. I have this issue with some fantasy stories – and my husband laughs at me – I call it the “market garden problem”. When we watched the Lord of the Rings movie, I objected to Rohan, the home of the horse lords. It sits right in the middle of nowhere – and there appeared to be no market gardens. So where did they get their vegies from? In this book, though there are many magical elements, everything makes sense. There are (so to speak) market gardens. The witch Xan and her friends are strong and lovable characters; Luna is a gifted, exasperating, loving heroine; the large cast contains some memorable villains. This story brought tears to my eyes (which doesn’t happen very often), made me laugh and kept me guessing. There are multiple plot-lines that twist and twine and eventually all come together in a surprising and satisfying finale. A coming-of-age story that talks about good and evil, love, family, belonging and growing up and growing old. Beautiful.

I have a lovely stack of children’s books here in front of me – more than a weekend’s reading, probably, but I hope to get through them quickly. Because I’ll be reading the same number  again, a couple of times, before the end of July.

This is because I’ve been asked to do another “Green’s Guide to Good Books” for Text Marks the Spot, which is the Bendigo Writer’s Festival schools program. It consists of me talking about the books I’ve read and enjoyed and would recommend. Therefore the pile. Too many nights watching British crime and knitting lately, so this is a much-needed push into catching up on my reading.

And there are so many good books out there! I’m already completely caught up in How to Bee by Bren McDibble. It’s the voice. And it’s almost always the voice. Peony is brave, funny, straightforward. Listen.

Today! It’s here! Bright and real and waiting. The knowing of it bursts into my head, so big and sudden, like the crack of morning sun bursting through the gap at the top of the door. I fall out of my bunk and hit the packing-box floor. I scramble up, right into Gramps asleep in his chair in front of the potbelly stove.
‘Cha!’ he growls.
‘Sorry Gramps,’ I say. ‘It’s bee day.’ I pull on my pest vest and try to squeeze past him, but he puts out his foot.
‘First eat, then bee,’ he says, real firm. He cuts a wedge from the oatcake on top of the stove.
Cockies screech loud from the tree over our shack. They know it’s time to get moving. ‘I can’t,’ I say and try to squeeze past again. ‘Foreman’s waiting.’
My sister, Magnolia, sticks her fluffy head out from the top bunk. ‘Stomp yourself, Peony-pest,’ she groans.
‘You won’t diz me when I’m a bee,’ I say.

This is a world where all the bees have died.  Brave and nimble children have to climb the fruit trees to pollinate the flowers by hand. Pests are picked by hand, too – that’s why Peony is wearing a pest vest – but Peony has set her heart on being a bee. Big themes and ideas, deceptively simple writing. It so deserves to be on the CBCA shortlist. And what a really beautiful cover it is.

I’m not confining myself to new releases, however. I have just re-read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time in 50 years. Yes, I am that old! I bought this copy in 1968. Puffin books were 60c then, and $2 birthday money got me 3 books – what bliss.
And another great cover.

I haven’t seen the film, and probably won’t, since an 8-year-old film critic and I had a long conversation about it in the bookshop where I work. We agreed that converting a book to a film is a tricky thing. You can’t always leave everything in. Scenes and characters you love sometimes get the chop.  And that’s what happened in this film version.
“They left out Aunt Beast,” he told me. And he was very unimpressed. “I can’t recommend it,” he said. Even-handedly he added, “But you never know, you might like it.”
“Not without Aunt Beast,” I said.

Last weekend, I went to a friend’s house for a ritual burning. Don’t worry – no humans or animals were harmed. Both of us were in the process of clearing the backlog of documents and paperwork that had been cluttering filing cabinets and cupboard for far too long. Among the archived bills and receipts were more personal papers, and we spoke about these  as we let them go.

My friend consigned her Year 12 assignments  – dating from 1976 – to the flames. Sheet after sheet of beautiful, neat handwriting, diligently researched essays about ancient Greek battles and the poetry of Keats and art and architecture of the middle ages, turned satisfyingly to ashes. And I got rid of diaries and journal pages. What a lot of whingeing! Heartbreak, heartache, boredom, discontent, stress and pain. How useful those pages were at the time, a pressure valve and outlet. But no need for them now; those were old hurts and worries and time to move on to new ones.

And there were school reports, references, CVs and academic results. I chucked those onto the bonfire with regret at first, but then with glee. Though I snatched back a page from 1973, in which my much-loved English teacher, Mary Lavallin had given me an A for achievement and attitude, with the comment: “Susan’s written work is always a pleasure to read, and her essays into humorous expression augur well for future versatility. She reads widely and has an excellent vocabulary. Her understanding and love of words are clearly displayed, but at times meaning tends to be obscured by the lavish generosity of expression.”  Yep. And I think I talked a fair bit in class, too. On the same page, for chemistry, there’s a D, and “Sue has had difficulty understanding the basic principles of this subject.”

Why had we kept these things for so long? My friend said that it was the feeling that she’d put so much effort and time into those essays, so they couldn’t just be trashed. And as for me – perhaps there was some idea that by documenting your life, you prove that you exist. Or  – in the case of the reports and references – simply some vague feeling of obligation to authority. Who knows? I certainly don’t. I only know that I loved watching these things curl and singe and brown and then blacken, flare up and flame and eventually turn to grey ash. What a feeling of freedom and lightness.

This weekend, I’ve gone through my bookcases and had a mighty purge. Some books are going to the Op Shop, some to the bin, and some to the local antiquarian and second-hand bookseller. I know some people can’t throw books away, but there are things I’ll never read again, interests that have waned, projects that have been long completed. I don’t need the evidence. And emptier shelves means room for more books.

In mid-May, I gave a couple of library talks about my novel “How Bright Are All Things Here”. One was at Woodend, and the other was here in Castlemaine. Here’s an edited version of the talk.

A question I’ve been asked, many times, is “What’s the novel about?” I’ve listened to marketing and publicity experts, I’ve been to workshops and seminars; you should be prepared for this question. You should have something brief and punchy prepared. One sentence… Well, I fumble around with that one. It’s hard to say.
It’s about all the things that I like to think about.
Or, it’s about Bliss Henderson, an elderly woman lying dying, excavating her past, while her three stepchildren, with messy lives of their own, hover. Which sounds a bit grim, but I promise you, it isn’t.
Or else, it’s about all sorts of things that interest me. Art and artists, feminism, mysticism, poetry, aged care, fashion, food, the Festival of Britain, children and families, marriage, masculinity, mysticism and the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works.
But, really, basically, at its heart, the novel is about time. From the very first sentence, it’s about time.

Am I dead yet?
It can’t be long now, darling. Can you tell me when? I mean, exactly?
Or is it meant to be a surprise?

Bliss, suffering from heart failure and having recently fallen and damaged her spine, is in an aged-care facility – and how she despises that name. She knows she’s dying. Her question is about the future. When? Her stepdaughter Paula comes every day, rushing, making the time, taking the time, never enough time. But Bliss has all the time in the world.

Could I give her some of mine? Lord knows, I’ve wasted enough, on tears and fears and falling in love. But still, in spite of all I’ve let slip through my fingers, there is so much time left. It flows and folds, loops backwards and forwards simultaneously like an endless ribbon. I go back, back, back. I find my mother’s button jar, plunge in my hand and watch the buttons scatter with a clattering sound. Pearl, horn, shell, glass: shiny jet from an evening gown: Bakelite from a shirt. Here I am, in my bed. What will I find if I reach in? More time. All the times of my life.
How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
I try to clutch the dancing sparkles that spin above me in the sunlight – so close! – but they always, always whirl away from me up into the air and stay suspended, glittering, just out of reach.

All the times of my life… She’s in a space that’s out of time. She’s on morphine. Infinite time. Time suspended. It’s a bit like that Tardis in Dr Who. And yet. She goes on (and a warning for those who are offended by bad language – Bliss doesn’t swear much but occasionally for emphasis she lets rip with the f-word).

That’s all very poetic, but down to business. Time is running out. Since that day in the kitchen, it’s been a flat-out fucking gallop. Pardon my French, it just slipped out.

The structure and rhythm of the novel are all to do with this backwards and forwards motion of time running out and endless time. Bliss and her stepchildren – Paula, Tom and Anne – are dealing in their various ways with the countdown and so of course, something closely related to time comes into play for all of them. It’s memory. So the book is also about memory.
Bliss has a fabulous memory. Total recall. She thinks.

Once, at a cocktail party, I boasted to a writer about my powers of recall and was brought up short when he asked, “How do you know what you’ve forgotten?”
“Obviously there’d be a gap,” I said. “And there isn’t.”
“Perhaps not a gap in continuity, but what if you’ve forgotten some infinitesimal detail – a look, a gesture, a word – which, left out of your narrative, entirely changes the whole meaning?”
“That sort of thing only happens in novels. Your novels.”
We both laughed, and then he said, “What if our memories are a screen we’ve made to shield us from the truth?”

Lying in her bed, Bliss relives her life. I can use lots of metaphors here – she excavates, she peels away layers, she even (though she’d never say this) picks at scabs. But there are some memories she can’t or won’t approach directly, some she turns away from and some she cannot even acknowledge. As all of us amateur psychologists know, some of what makes us who we are is deeply buried in our childhood, in memories before memory really exists, and even in the traumas of our parents. These are issues that interest me deeply. Bliss relates moments from her early childhood in the 1930s, with her reclusive illustrator mother; the elderly lesbians who adopt her; art studies in London in the 1950s and marriage to an expat Australian artist there. There are affairs, another marriage, friendships – especially friendships – and work. And then there’s a shift back to Australia and the four children. Bliss narrates most of the novel, but the children get their own sections as well. This allows the reader to see Bliss as others see her, and is often the case with parents and children, you would sometimes think they are talking about different people, their perceptions can vary so markedly. Again, it’s the mystery of other people.

Here are the two step-daughters at the nursing home. Bliss is now in palliative care. They look down at her as she lies in the bed.

Anne says, “It’s so sad. Tragic really. She wasted her life.”

Paula turned to her, shocked. “Shh.”

“You don’t have to hiss at me like that, Paula. Anyway, she’s sleeping. She can’t hear.”

“You don’t know that. And her life wasn’t wasted.” Paula stared at her sister. How could Anne imagine that Bliss’s full, wild, flawed life was tragic and wasted? By what criterion did she judge? He eyes moved back to the figure under the blanket. Fountains, fireworks, flowers: explosions of colour and light: a sudden breeze that blew the fusty curtains open: a leopard skin coat, a wicked almost dirty laugh. It was love, it was joy, it was art –

“Wasted or not, it all comes down to this,” Anne said, and Paula knew she now perceived only the skull beneath the skin, the withering, the waste, the decay.

“It comes down to this for everyone,” Paula snapped. For the beautiful, the irresistible and dangerous. And for the perfect wives and mothers, too. “Come on, let’s go.”

Since the book is about time, it’s also about change. I’ve long had a fascination for the immediate post-war (post 2^nd world war) period in Europe and Australia. Enormous political and social changes were underway, but my initial interest was piqued by the stories my parents told, of their time in the UK in the early 1950s. I did a great deal of very enjoyable research for this novel – so enjoyable, that it didn’t seem to count as work. I investigated women’s magazines and their illustrations, short fiction and journalism; the novels of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark; biographies of artists I admired, like John Minton and Edward Bawden; the Festival of Britain; social history titles such as the series by David Kynaston on ‘Austerity Britain’, Tony Judt’s Post War’, AN Wilson’s “After the Victorians” and “Our Time”. I watched 1950s and 60s movies and TV series set in that time. I also scrounged around in second hand shops for books of social history and current affairs published at the time. There was the feeling in Britain that everything was going to get better. Better and better. Never had it so good. And yet – anyone who’s seen “The Crown” on Netflix will recognize how difficult and uncomfortable it is to live in the precise moment when the powerful, entrenched “old” is grindingly, slowly, reluctantly moving aside for the new. Like being pincered. Poor Princess Margaret!
These huge changes meant that the look of things in art, architecture, textile and furniture design, fashion, publishing all changed. The ideas expressed in literature changed. What could be said (without fear of prosecution), changed. Some of changes took a while to peak or to surface. For instance, it was as late as 1960 that the publishers of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were being prosecuted for obscenity, and the barrister questioned whether the book was something “you would even wish your wife or servants to read.”

What’s the novel about?  Time, memory, change. Not in the abstract; personally, too, as I’ve experienced them. It’s a personal book for me; it isn’t autobiographical, but I’d be lying if I said that “I” wasn’t in it. The sections set in the bayside suburb of Chelsea and in Melbourne in the 1960s contain my memories of the look and feel of the time. There’s a paragraph where Bliss names of the railway stations all the way to Frankston; I used to do that. And I had an epiphany, somewhat different, but visually the same, in York Minster  with the Heart of the North stained glass window, the doves, the sunset and the organ music swirling around me. I’m not either of the daughters Paula or Anne, but there’s the aspect of being there with a parent physically declining, suffering, needing care. And dying. My mother was not Bliss. But some qualities – her courage, resilience and humour in the face of intense suffering – are part of that character. I’m not heartless, and I loved my mother dearly, but the novelist in me cannot help but observe, and store those observations for use. In a way, in my way, writing was a part of memorializing my mother’s struggle, her suffering, her courage.

Finally, this book is about love. First love, last love; sex and passion and the terrible mistakes a person can make when they’re in the grip those two; married love, when you’re young, innocent and full of hope and when you’re old, and things are different; the love of, for and between parents and children, and siblings, and friends. Bliss meditates a great deal on love. How she’s failed and faltered. How it’s always a little flawed, or it comes too late, or it’s wrongly expressed, or is simply the work of forces we don’t understand. She’s somewhat cynical in her old age.

She meditates also on love for her work. Bliss talks quite a lot about painting and drawing, both in her youth and her old age; she was taught to draw by her artist mother and her adopted aunt, a famous portraitist; she did figure drawing at the National Gallery School; she won a scholarship to study in London, and later she worked as an illustrator and a textiles designer; she ran a trail-blazing interior design business. In fact, one of the early editors wanted more of that side of Bliss’s life in the book, and originally there was, but it turned it into a different kind of book, changed its shape and its focus, so the chapters are still sitting in their file on the computer. There’s a very wise book, by psychologist Anthony Storr, called “Solitude: A Return to the Self”, in which he challenges the idea that (Here I am quoting) “interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness”. He examines the lives of various creative people, famous and not at all famous, to show that whether it’s your career, your vocation or your hobby, solitary creative work can bring immense satisfaction and happiness and joy. Bliss, at the end of her life, is all for joy.

First day of winter. I’m here in a north-facing room – in front of the heater! – looking out of the window, and the sun is shining. There are still lots of coloured leaves on the fruit trees in the garden and as they catch the light, they glow. And there must be tasty things – insects, gum blossoms? – around, because the crimson rosellas, with their distinctive calls, are swooping down and settling for a bit and then flying off again. The house is calm; today I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything or be anyone. Deep breath. Ah.

It may be the time of year, or perhaps it’s because I’ve just had a significant birthday, but I’m having all these elegaic thoughts. Best expressed, I think, by Sonnet 73.

What time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, nor none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which is was nourished by.
This thous perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Actually, whoa there! Maybe not that elegaic. I’m only 60, after all. “Ere long” will be, I hope, a very very long time. There are places to go, things to do, and after all, I have to get value from my Senior’s Card.

…and there are all those leaves to rake up, and put in the compost, so the cycle continues.

Last week was the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death. The camellia a friend gave me only a few days afterwards is always beginning to bloom by her birthday, and smothered in flowers by now. It’s a beautiful reminder.

I think about her often, usually lovingly, but at times I also curse. It’s the stuff. There’s so much of it. Superannuation records, tax files, appointment diaries. Every card I ever made her. It looks like every drawing my son did, too, even those wild toddler scribbles and scrawls. She kept everything. Only last week I got into a box that contained things like certificates for cholera vaccination in 1952 and though I’m not the despairing kind, I…well, at times it’s tempting to chuck a whole box of these relics into the bin and be done with it.

I’m not sure of her motives. Did she perhaps intend to write a memoir or an autobiography? Mum, amongst other things, trained as a librarian; she was quite the archivist, and there is plenty of well-ordered material on her and my father’s lives and careers.  Perhaps she hoped I’d take it on. Yes, it’s a possibility.

But I am a fiction writer. Just the thought of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth brings me out in hives. It isn’t the burden of research; I love research, and did heaps of it for the three Verity books, and heaps of it, again, for How Bright Are All Things Here. It’s just that my bent is for imagination. Not necessarily invention, for making up novelties, completely new things. My attempt at a fantasy novel taught me that I’m a realistic novelist, and that even if I include supernatural elements (as in Verity) I like to have the plumbing and public transport sorted. What I love most is to imagine myself into facts.

Underneath the mass of material – the facts –  my mother left, is a mystery. I knew her, of course, as my mother growing up and as the one I cared for as she aged. But before she and my father were my parents, they were themselves. Their young selves, newly married, exploring Europe, seeing such sights as two young Australians had only read about or seen in books or films. Realising how much I myself had changed from my twenties to my fifties – I was almost a different person! – I began to wonder, who were they? And I knew, that though there were hints and signs in that mass of archived material, I’d never really know.

And perhaps it’s not for me to know, anyway. In How Bright Are All Things Here, I wanted to get at a truth that I think – I hope – is an important one. It’s certainly one that has preoccupied me for a long time. It’s not original, it’s not earth-shattering, but it’s this  –  you can never truly know anyone, even the ones you are closest to, even the ones that you love. It’s the mystery of other people. Perhaps that’s what many – most – books are about, anyway.

It’s six months since we visited a kitchen show room in nearby Bendigo to choose our cupboards and bench-tops and knobs. It’s five months since a handyman came to rip out our old kitchen.  It was shortly before Christmas that the incorrectly cut stone bench-top was replaced, and a range-hood (left out of the initial plan because I didn’t realise that it was the same as an extractor fan) installed. Our old kitchen was a shabby 1970s affair, but we wouldn’t have bothered replacing it if had been able to accommodate a dishwasher. We (well, it was actually foolhardy me) reckoned that you could just cut the end off a cupboard and book in the plumber and it would be done. But no. It’s not that simple. As I have since found out, in the world of home renovation, it almost never is.

I’m not a natural at Home Beautiful. There’s so much stuff you have to keep track of. Endless decisions about very small details. Purchases. Tradespeople. Things you’re meant to know about, like the wiring and where the waste water exits the building. You have to care enough about the colours of tiles and reconstituted stone and melamine joinery so that you can choose from a bewildering number of alternatives. I won’t say it’s been hell. That would be ridiculous in a world where millions of people are not only without kitchens, but without roofs. But it’s been a journey, and a frustrating, time-wasting, delay-ridden one. Friends kept saying – we kept saying this to each other, too – “But you’ll love it when it’s finished.” Well, we shall see.

Yesterday the tiler came to affix the last five tiles. The plumber connected the gas to the cook top. And now – in perhaps the lengthiest and yet tiniest kitchen renovation on record – my husband’s just cooked the inaugural meal. Baked beans on toast with fried eggs. (It’s not to be sneezed at – the perfect Saturday night dinner on the first really cold night this year). I’m planning roast chicken tomorrow, but I think it will take a lot of dinners before it feels like “my ” kitchen. It’s probably the absence of grot and clutter – at present we’re fanatically wiping and rinsing and putting away –  but a little time will take care of that.

All of this made me think about those perfect kitchens that feature in interior design books and TV shows and magazines. Home Beautiful kitchens. The ones with only a basket of quinces on the bench top, or else an artful platter of  heirloom tomatoes. They may be stainless steel quasi-laboratories, or so-called “country style’ or retro or mid-century or whatever else is in vogue, but these shiny clean spaces usually have something in common; they don’t appear to be actually cooked in. Lived in. How busy the stylists must be, stowing tea towels and oven mitts and food processors and t0asters and the compost bucket.

My 1984 book of essays, Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today by Rosalind Coward, is dated in some ways (how could it not be?) but not the chapter called Ideal Homes.

This regime of imagery represses any idea of domestic labour. Labour is there all right, but it is the labour of decorating, designing and painting which leads to the house ending up in this perfect state. We hear about how much the wallpaper cost and how much it cost to get the underlying wall in good condition. We don’t hear about how long it took for some woman to get the room tidy, or who washed the curtains. But the photographs only show the ever-tidy, clean and completed home. The before and after imagery endorses the joint work of couples, the husband and wife who plan, design and decorate the house. The suggestion is that together men and women labour on their houses. The labour is creative and the end product is an exquisite finished house-to-be-proud-of. Domestic labour, the relentless struggle against things and mess, completely disappears in these images. The hard and unrewarding ephemeral labour usually done by a woman, unpaid or badly paid, just disappears from sight. Frustration and exhaustion disappear. Instead, a condition of stasis prevails, the end product of creative labour.

I had the great good luck to be raised by a stay-at-home dad. Many women of my generation had mothers with ferocious standards of housekeeping, up to and including the requirement for a toilet so clean you could almost eat from it.  For some of them, there’s a residual guilt that their houses don’t measure up to Mum’s ideal. This was not my father. His emphasis was on comfort and good food. I remember being shown how to sweep dirt under the mat when visitors were imminent. Don’t take that to mean he despised domestic life; I think he loved it. As I do. He was aware of the large and small ways in which he was responsible for this machine/organism we call “home”. I gained a sense of the seriousness of the task. A well-run home is important to everyone – the adult partners and the children. You could say, to society in general. But it’s still seen as women’s work. And – how wearying this is! – still so undervalued.

However uncritical women may be of bearing the responsibility for the home, it is a rare woman who has never experienced home as a sort of prison…bearing the awesome responsibility for the survival of young children, or torn by commitments to work and children, the home is often a site of contradiction between the sexes, not a display cabinet. Even in the most liberated households, women are well aware of who remembers that the lavatory paper is running out and who keeps an eye on what the children are up to.

Female Desire; Women’s Sexuality Today by Rosalind Howard, Paladin Books, London, 1984