Joelene Pynnonen

Joelene Pynnonen embraces the life of an avid book lover in every way. Her household is ruled cruelly by a wrathful cat; and should a fire ever start it is doubtful that she would make it past the elegant stacks of novels to her room door. At least once a year she coerces her mother into watching the BBC mini-series of Pride and Prejudice with her, and will often follow up by re-reading the book.

 

 

Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen

When Tommi Greyson heads back to New Zealand, she is hoping to find out more about her paternal family. Her mother fled the country before Tommi was born, running as far from Tommi’s father as possible. Now that her mother is dead, Tommi feels as though she can find out who her father is.

She doesn’t expect to find that before he died, less than a month ago, he was the leader of a pack of werewolves. The most powerful pack in the Southern Hemisphere, in fact. After being attacked by her relatives and enduring a gruelling first change, Tommi is saved by an unlikely ally.

Lorcan is an immortal who has worked for Treize, the supernatural world’s justice system, for centuries. With his battle expertise, he is the best candidate to train Tommi in her new abilities, or to kill her if she becomes a threat.

Who’s Afraid? is the first novel in a new romantic paranormal series that introduces combative werewolf, Tommi Greyson. Paranormal romance is a relatively untouched genre for me. I’ve read a few books from the heavy hitters – Charlaine Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Patricia Briggs – but haven’t really gotten in to any series. So it was good to find a fresh, new addition to the genre.

It’s a solid beginning. It introduces a world in which supernatural creatures exist and are kept in check by the Treize. Enough information is given about the world that the story is never confusing, but there a lot of questions yet to be answered. Lewis has kept the balance well. I’m intrigued to know more about Tommi’s werewolf family and whether the mysterious Treize is really as benevolent as Lorcan would have us believe; but I’m not frustrated that the answers weren’t in the first book.

Though Lewis covers a lot of ground in introducing her world, there’s so much more that could have been explored emotionally. While Lewis has introduced a diverse cast of characters, she’s done little to explore the intricacies of race, gender and sexuality. Tommi suffers from internalised racism, which is hardly surprising considering the narrative that her mother forced her to grow up with. But Tommi seems wholly unaware that she even has this issue, so there’s no point at which she tries to address the problem. While I kind of get it, I also kind of hate Tommi for being triggered by someone as gentle as Poc while not being fazed by white men crawling into her bed in the middle of the night, attacking her as part of her training, and also kissing her pretty roughly.

A lot of the elements introduced in Who’s Afraid? are a refreshing change from many of the urban fantasy or paranormal novels I’ve read. The introduction of themes such as the Maori culture, and growing up mixed-race in a white community and a white family work brilliantly in making this novel memorable. I’m hoping that future novels in this series will have Tommi reconnecting with her father’s family.

Who’s Afraid? has the potential for a fascinating new series. It will be really interesting to see where the next few books take Tommi and her friends.

 Who’s Afraid? – Maria Lewis

 Hachette (January 2016)

 ISBN: 9780349411149

Stephen Dedman

Stephen Dedman is a writer, book reviewer, and tutor. He’s previously been an actor, a manuscript assessor, an academic and legal WPO, an editorial assistant for Australian Physicist magazine, an experimental subject, and a used dinosaur parts salesman.

The Best Australian Science Writing covers a wide range of topics, from the mating habits of prehistoric fish to plans for a future Mars mission financed by reality TV; from the quintessence of dust to the complexity of the human brain; and to mapping the universe. Some of the essays are horrifying, some amusing, but all are very readable to anyone with a fairly basic level of scientific literacy. I don’t remember there being a single equation in the entire book, nor an explanation that I found tedious or redundant.

After a foreword by Adam Spencer and an introduction by editor Bianca Nogrady, the volume begins with one of the most interesting pieces: Elmo Keep’s essay on Mars One and the West Australian selected to be one of the astronauts on this one-way mission. It’s written in an entertaining style, but seems aimed at dashing the hopes of anyone dreaming of crowd-funded interplanetary travel in the foreseeable future. This is followed by Fiona McIntosh’s The Vanishing Writers, which is – to my relief – not about the death of the author (that favourite fantasy of structuralist critics), but about the search for the insect responsible for the markings on Scribbly Gums.

Next is the first of three essays on the future of robotics and AI, before Jesse Hawley explains how we feel wetness despite having no nerve endings that recognize it (this is one of the few pieces where I can vouch for the findings; while I was reading this on a plane, the child sitting next to me spilled a cup of water on my leg!). Wendy Zukerman gives a brief sketch of the evolution of genitals. Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax converts an extract from an old Dictionary of Photography into a poem, the first of two in the book. Bridie Smith’s Playing God concerns applying triage principals to endangered species to determine which we should concentrate on saving – one of many rather depressing pieces on the probability of the next Great Extinction Event occurring in your lifetime.

Many of the essays on medical matters are even more disturbing: Christine Kennedy’s The Past May Not Make You Feel Better, on Huntington’s disease, is so grim that I twice had to take a break from reading it (and I’m a horror writer!) and David Roland’s How I rescued my brain isn’t a bundle of laughs, either, though Trent Dalton’s Beating the Odds, about a new design for an artificial heart, is considerably more optimistic.

On a lighter note, Alice Gorman gives us a job description for an interplanetary archaeologist, Ian Lunt speculates on the potential for interactive apps to replace paper field guides, and Jenny Martin proposes new metrics for ranking universities and suggests implementing a “no asshole rule”. Lauren Fuge praises Pickering’s mostly forgotten “computers”, the underpaid women who did the hard work of mapping the universe with 1880s tech; Nick Haslam and Gina Perry re-examine Stanley Milgram’s experiments; John Long describes the sexual position favoured by Microbachius dicki; and Tim Dean peers into The Mind of Michio Kaku.

Whichever field of science interests you, you’ll almost certainly find something worth reading in this collection. And if science doesn’t interest you, maybe you should read this anyway.

The Best Australian Science Writing 2015

Edited by Bianca Nogrady

Newsouth. 298 pp.

Alayna Cole

Alayna Cole is an MCA (Creative Writing) candidate who loves to write stories when she’s not studying.

There are some stories that leave a bittersweet hole inside you. For me, In the Quiet is one of them.

In the Quiet is a simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-warming story about Cate Carlton, who has recently died. She lingers near her family, watching, remembering, and through her eyes we see snippets of how her life once looked, how her family grieves and—eventually—how they begin to move on.

These snippets are part of what makes this novel so clever. Cate’s story is given to you a few pages, a few paragraphs, or a few lines at a time, and you move through a kaleidoscope of the past and present until you learn enough to piece together the story. This process feels organic, reflecting the way we think about our own lives, how one event can remind us of another, and how we don’t recall our memories chronologically.

You learn about each of the characters in a natural way, hearing stories of their past and future in equal measure until they seem rounded, deep, and complex. I could easily relate to aspects of each character: Cate’s love, Bass’s desire to protect his family, Jessa’s stubbornness, Rafferty’s teasing humour, Cameron’s sensitivity, and the ways of dealing with isolation, vulnerability, and loss demonstrated by each friend and family member. Empathising with each of these real and relatable characters was easy. Too easy.

I cried on-and-off through the last hundred pages of the book. Not because anything particularly devastating was happening—though, sometimes, that was also the case—but because I could see myself so clearly in each of the characters that even their minor turmoils and successes affected me. I quickly fell in love with these people, for their beauty and their flaws, and cared about what happened to them.

The interaction between the characters of In the Quiet feels as remarkably raw and honest as the characters themselves. How they talk to one another, how relationships change over time, and how feelings and connections are conveyed through actions more than words, reflects reality, as well as the novel’s title.

The title, In the Quiet, is referenced many times throughout the book, in the way characters sit in silence instead of speaking over dinner, the way Cate remembers not responding to a question asked while she was still alive, and the way she is now unable to speak to her family when she is desperate to. Cate’s husband Bass is said to have ‘the quiet’ in him as he sits and stares soundlessly, with actions and feelings resonating with him more than words.

These carefully woven references are everywhere. The author, Eliza Henry Jones, is a master of foreshadowing. Every memory reveals something or adds something to the overall picture. Little hints slowly become larger stories, but characters never say too much. This restraint allows a patchwork to form like the fields where the novel is set.

In the Quiet depicts an image of country life that is easily one of my favourite literary interpretations of rural Australia. It never feels forced—as representations of the Australian outback sometimes can—with symbols and imagery as careful and deliberate as character development and plot progression. Both the country and city spaces, as well as the suburban inbetween, is made to seem beautiful and interesting in its own way, and the relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit are as important as the relationships between characters.

Everything about In the Quiet screams sophistication, so it’s hard to believe that this is Eliza Henry Jones’s debut novel. I’m holding my breath for her next masterpiece.