Books Reviews

Tell Her She’s Dreamin’
Simone Amelia Jordan (Hachette Australia, available now)

Tell Her She’s Dreamin’ is the memoir of Simone Amelia Jordan, a Lebanese-Cypriot Australian woman on her journey to becoming a successful hip-hop journalist.

This is a conversational memoir. Jordan speaks to the reader like a younger sister or friend. In the book’s three parts, we follow Jordan from her childhood in the inner west of Sydney (From Down Under) to the ‘concrete jungle’ of New York (…To Uptown) and then home to Australia (…And Back Again). It’s a loose, simplified hero’s journey structure. Jordan explores her biggest successes, lessons and mistakes, including—perhaps most valuably—ruminations on being a woman of colour in a male-dominated industry.

Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin, available now)

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s tenth novel, is a triumph. It follows the unnamed narrator’s stay at a nunnery, a cloistered setting that reinforces the novel’s gentle pace. Readers take this journey with her as she becomes accustomed to the monastic stillness, the ‘incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding’.

The narrator’s choice is an act of resistance, a refusal to partake in the busyness and productivity of modern life. She ‘escapes’ to the nunnery, retreating from her marriage and her job as a conservationist, overwhelmed by the futility of attempting to protect the natural world. Reading the novel feels the same, a temporary reprieve from the demands that exist outside of its pages. But even in the book, the effects of the climate crisis make themselves known. The nunnery is beset by a gruesome mouse plague, a consequence of changing weather patterns, shortly after the narrator’s arrival. Despite laying poison and traps in every room, the mice keep coming. Piles and piles of their rotting corpses accumulate until they are buried, echoing the sense of futility the narrator had been trying to evade.

A quiet novel that solidifies Charlotte Wood as a writer of rare mastery and brilliance.

The infestation and the arrival of Helen Parry, a ‘celebrity nun’ form the novel’s major plot points. Helen is a figure from the narrator’s school days, a source of shame, a reminder of adolescent inaction. While Wood’s Stella-winning The Natural Way of Things explored the lateral violence between women under patriarchy, this story is more concerned with how we can forgive each other and ourselves. The narrator seeks Helen’s pardon for being a bystander as Helen was bullied, but the experience meant ‘nothing’ to Helen—the rest of her life, it seems, was much worse. Yet she demonstrates enormous grace to even her most enduring abuser—her own mother: ‘[S]he tried, as much as she was able, to love me.’

Despite its location, the novel’s focus is not religion. Instead, it is an invitation to slow down, to find meaning and purpose in smaller (secular) acts of service, and to consider the path to redemption. Wood’s vivid and carefully crafted prose gives weight to each moment of the narrator’s experience, from the mice, ‘their stink, their rapaciousness and skittering feet’ to her reflection that ‘with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there […] insisting, seeping across the past and the future’.

Stone Yard Devotional is a quiet novel that solidifies Charlotte Wood as a writer of rare mastery and brilliance.

—Laura Pettenuzzo

Strangely Enough

ed. by Gillian Hagenus (Midnight Sun, available now)

In case you haven’t heard, weird is in. After decades of grim ‘bush and beach’ realism, Australian writers and publishers are embracing speculative, playful and genre-bending fiction—and the short story mode is the perfect vehicle for experimentation. It’s fitting, then, that an anthology born from the Australian Short Story Festival would dedicate itself to, in the words of editor Gillian Hagenus, the ‘strange, ugly, tangy fruit’ of Australian writing. Strangely Enough isn’t a speculative fiction anthology per se—submissions were themed only on the word ‘strange’—and so this collection of twenty-one stories, most only a few pages long, traverses a plethora of genres.

The opening story in the collection, Victoria Griffin’s ‘The Builder/Dreamer’, blends the sanitised language of corporate surveillance with an erratic mystery in the style of Elizabeth Tan. Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario’s ‘Out of the Cauldron’—in which a woman’s perpetual stew births a strange ethereal life-form—is a dreamy, bubbling meditation on grief, loneliness and how ‘witches’ are constructed; in Sam Mayne’s Kelly Link-reminiscent ‘Every Beast, Every Creeping Thing’, a young woman must navigate a world filled with increasingly esoteric monsters and shadowy figures, all taxonomised in a strange omnibus that grows new pages and entries from its spine.

Most impressive is the breadth and originality of ideas on display.

The collection’s final two stories, Leo Alder’s ‘Fingers in the Dirt’ and Deborah Frenkel’s ‘Cat/Lady’—both writers’ debut published short fiction—shift more towards deliciously visceral body horror. The former is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which strange finger-like tubers are the only things that grow; in the latter, a woman undergoes an unsettling metamorphosis with Roald Dahl-esque bemusement.

The quality of writing across the collection is very strong, though as to be expected from a collection of this many writers, in which many are early into their writing careers, there are weak spots—some intriguing premises run out of puff while other ideas are too big for their flash-fiction housing; narrative momentum can be impeded by too-clever wordplay.

Most impressive is the breadth and originality of ideas on display. Even where themes echo across stories—there are recurring images throughout of witches and cauldrons, strange cats, and children lost in dark forests—the varying perspectives on familiar tropes serve to enrich the whole.

It is worth noting that outside of one story (Matthew Hooton’s ‘Visions of the Afterlife’, which finds an Ancient Egyptian crocodile god in a suburban sewer), the pieces in the collection largely explore Western/European fairytale tropes and folk imagery—on a story-to-story level these are executed well, though as a curated collection there’s scope for more non-Western and First Nations approaches to storytelling and legend, to showcase how these elements influence Australian fiction today.

But as something of a genre sampler, a trove of quick bursts of imagination that will transport you to other realms in the time it takes to wait for a coffee, there is a lot to enjoy here.

—Alan Vaarwerk