Australian Women Writer’s Challenge 2016 – Wrap up

This is the third year that I have participated in the AWWC and while I didn’t meet my nominated challenge, I loved every book that I read.

I committed myself to the Miles Challenge – to read 6 books and write reviews for at least 4 books.

I read 4 books written by Australian women authors, and wrote 2 reviews. I am sad not to have met my nominated challenge and it wasn’t for a lack of love of reading or a lack of good books. I simply lacked the time to write reviews. I read a vast number of books this year as a part of doing research for my honours project, but most of the texts weren’t by Australian women writers. While I love my honours topic and the texts I have read have been very enlightening, I have sorely missed reading literary fiction this year! I hope to have some reading time over the Christmas break.

The books I read this year are:

1. The River House by Janita Cunnington
2. The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland
3. More to the Story: conversations with refugees by Rosemary Sayer – This is a fabulous book that delves into what it means to be a refugee – the real life circumstances of trauma, torture, pain and suffering that are the impetus for people leaving their homeland, family, friends and culture, to risk everything out of the simple desire to live. To live, to have a chance at a normal life. The stories are told through the refugees’ own voices and make for powerful reading. For more information, see Margaret River Press
4. Wildlight by Robyn Mundy – is a touching story of loss and love, as seen through the eyes of teenager Stephanie West, who is grudgingly facing several months on Tasmania’s Maatsuyker Island (where her mother spent her own youth), and missing out on her final year of high school, parties and fun times with friends. But as Stephanie comes to terms with her confinement on the island, she learns to love the lighthouse, the weather reports that she monitors, and the rugged wildness of the Tasmanian landscape that surrounds her. She also meets a young fisherman who will change her life. For more information see Pan Macmillan Australia.

I plan to take up the AWWC again in 2017 and look forward to having time to explore new women writer and their literary tales.

 

THE ANTI-COOL GIRL by Rosie Waterland

Intensely touching, deeply emotional, confronting and at times horrifying, Rosie Waterland recounts her troubled childhood, difficult teenage times and early adult years in The Anti-Cool Girl.

Raw, honest, brutal, her narration is conveyed with a sense of humour and self-awareness that prevents the story from becoming overwhelming. Without these touches of humour, the story would be too traumatic to read. Basically, Rosie’s life sucked; she has experienced the most shocking childhood that I’ve ever read about, and this is no novel – this is real life, so there’s no switching off to those actions, to the pain that she suffered, the harrowing events that she endured, along with her sisters. But, it’s not all pain and agony, there are moments of joy, and her humour in retelling of some events shows her strength and courage in the face of such difficult circumstances.

There are some really great lines and insights into Australian culture and dating that made me laugh, such as:

“The wedding was a stunning piece of Aussie lower-class perfection… The reception was in a brightly lit hall on the side of a busy main road, so the ambience was obviously just gorgeous…”

There’s this gem describing a bad kissing experience:

“It was like a fat slug rolled around in mucous and was now trying to mate with my tongue… I had no idea that a tongue could be soft like an oyster and hard like a tampon at the same time… This guy needed help, and if I didn’t offer it to him, he might subject some poor other girl to his oyster tampon.”

Rosie and her sisters were often shuffled from family member to friend and back again due to her parents being addicts and her mother constantly searching for love, finding it briefly with a new man and then chaos would erupt destroying the relationship. The girls never had a stable home.

“We stayed with an uncle for a while. We stayed with our birth grandma for a while… But nobody seemed to want to keep us. Whatever test you needed to pass to be a kid that adults wanted around, we were just not passing it. We were told that all three of us might be split up – that three girls together was too much of a commitment for most carers.”

At one point Rosie and her sisters are put into foster care and are molested repeatedly by their very wealthy foster father, over the course of a year. The man in question sexually molested several foster children, after Rosie left, and despite complaints being made he has never been formally charged. There are obviously serious flaws in the screening process and the system if sexual predators can be awarded foster parent status, especially if their wealth somehow plays a part in them being perceived as better than others or more charitable. Rosie’s story highlights that flaws in the public health system and the foster system make already vulnerable people even more vulnerable to abuse and neglect.

Something that really stood out for me was how the public health system and the foster system failed Rosie and her sisters, and most certainly other families like them. Her mother is bipolar but never received treatment; her father was diagnosed with schizophrenia but never received treatment. The lack of understanding of mental illness and the stigma attached to mental illness meant that Rosie’s parents lived traumatised lives themselves, and by never being treated they inadvertently went on to severely damage the lives of their children. Her parents were also addicts, which complicated and amplified their behaviour issues.

Deeply intense and dark in sections, The Anti-Cool Girl is also about hope, about having dreams, and about finding yourself and believing in yourself despite having been to the darkest of places. Rosie always wanted to make people laugh, and even as a child she would write winning Oscar speeches. Those desires, that dream stayed with her, and she found her way to a second-rate drama school, and then went on to complete a degree in creative writing, and from there, combined with her love of watching TV, she accidentally stumbled into a writing role for an online women’s website. Through all of that she not only achieved her goal of making people laugh, but also of being one of the ‘cool’ people, only to realise that she didn’t want to be cool; she wanted to just be herself.

It is Rosie’s realisations and self-reflections that make this book such a powerful autobiography. She exposes herself completely, and it takes courage, bucket loads of courage, to talk so frankly and openly about your own life like that. She could have edited sections, kept some of the darker, unpleasant bits to herself, but she didn’t – she is upfront and totally honest, and that’s admirable and makes for potent reading. She tells all about her eating disorder, her nude acting role attempt, her enjoyment at sitting at home in her underpants drinking wine and watching TV, and her weird Tinder date with the guy who wanted her to get to know his ‘little me’ more intimately.

She talks intimately about her battle with obesity:

“Gaining ninety kilos was the experience that taught me to love myself. To really love my myself.”

And about what’s most important in life:

“I realised that as soon as you stop listening to what everyone else wants from you, and start listening to what you want from you, your life will get easier.”

Ultimately, hers is a story of courage, of facing her pain so that she could then begin to heal. Profoundly touching, The Anti-Cool Girl certainly puts life into sharp perspective.

Rating:   5/5

 

The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland (Fourth Estate 2015)

ebook ISBN: 9781460705223

Want to know more about Rosie Waterland? Then check out Rosie’s FB page.

THE RIVER HOUSE by Janita Cunnington

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that struck such a deep note of nostalgia in me. The River House stirred awake in me long-forgotten teenage memories of days spent at the beach swimming in a teal blue ocean, of that same ocean turbulent with steely grey waves capped with white froth that skittered up the beach during an approaching storm, of the vibrantly alive bushland that made up the areas surrounding Maroochydore and Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast.

Perhaps I’m not looking hard enough, but I find it rare to find a book of this calibre that brings Queensland coastal areas to life in such a rich and fervent way. (Readers, if you have suggestions for other titles about Queensland that I should read, post your ideas in the comments section below).

But, it’s not just my personal nostalgia that makes this a good book. Janita Cunnington has crafted a richly evocative novel about growing up, about life spent on the river and near the ocean, about the passing of time and how just as the river’s path changes, meanders, sandbars appear and disappear, and deep channels are cut by the flow of the ocean and currents, so too life changes, there are bumps in the road, and at times all we take for granted is swept away.

The story begins in the late 1940s with four-year-old Laurie Carlyle immersed in an endless summer at the family’s river house, on the banks of the Broody River, near the small holiday town of Baroodibah. For young Laurie, the river house is a place of enjoyment, a wonderland of sights and smells, plants, animals and sea creatures.

“The wind made the tents across the river flap gaily. Sometimes it blew so strongly they all clapped their canvas sides as if they were an audience and they liked the show. Laurie liked it too: the river patched with lime and mauve; the boats bucking at their anchors; the white frill of the surf on the bar; the she-oaks sighing; the sea howling distantly; the pelicans getting up above the wind as high as small aeroplanes, up into the blue.”

But something happens at the river house that summer that changes things in the family. A crack in the family unit slowly grows longer and deeper as the years pass by. During this time the Carlyle families live in Brisbane but holiday on the Sunshine Coast, at the fictional Baroodibah, which involves long road trips from the city up through the Glasshouse Mountains, and to Nambour, past sugar cane fields and bushland. The one constant in Laurie’s life, through her teen years, young adulthood and then motherhood is the river house and all the nostalgic memories it holds for her. When her brother, Tony, deeply in debt, threatens to sell it, Laurie is devastated. She’s not ready to let go of the river house; she always imagined it would be there forever. But, nothing lasts forever, and ultimately she is faced with losing that which she loves most dearly.

The River House spans from Laurie’s early childhood through to 2005, when she is a grandmother. This timeframe is handled well, with fragments of Laurie and her family’s lives swelling to the fore and then receding again. Throughout is an underlying tension of dreams lost, of desires never quite fulfilled, which are balanced by achievements, trips back to the river house, reconnection with the river, and of love lost and renewed. The narration ebbs and flows, and meanders, much like the flow of the river or the tide of the ocean, and this makes for captivating reading.

There is one section that drags on a bit, when Laurie and Tony are in university and Tony develops strong political ideals and these ideals are discussed in detail with much fervour. But then, perhaps that’s the point? To highlight the depths of passion that politics can trigger in people, and for some it becomes their life mission. It also sets up Tony’s character for who he becomes later in life, and so while the political detail was a little much for me, it serves a valid purpose. The one area that baffled me a bit was that Laurie’s son, Vit, gets very little airtime compared to his younger sister, Cora. But then, he’s a bit of a disappointment and so perhaps his absence is purposefully constructed to this end. For me, these observations are mere trifles, and certainly do no detract from the power and beauty of the overall story.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed The River House, its charm, its vivid descriptions and the compelling story of Laurie’s life as seen through her eyes.

Rating:          4/5

The River House by Janita Cunnington (Bantam 2016)

ISBN: 9780143780182

NOTE: I received my copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.