Lovely conscious Australian novel with an international flavour and a familiar setting ( )

I loved this book, but then again I love everything Charlotte Wood writes. I find her writing so vivid - her descriptions of this Australian family and the environment just take me home every time, although I hope not to have any sort of experience similar to that which appears in the book! It is just so wonderful to be able to read novels set in this decade, in my own country. Woods prose and her ability to place you in the story are outstanding. Nothing else matters for the hours/days it will take you to read her books. The characters have stayed with me months later, especially Mandy; the vivid portrayal of life as a war correspondent and the way the author captured the family dynamic of her characters, the undercurrents within the family, without actually spelling them out is a talent few writers possess. I believe Charlotte will become one of our country's great authors. 2016 update: still love it :) Although, to be clear, my family is more in the lower range of dysfunctional. So far. ( )

I found this book a very compelling read. It centres on a family whose father has been hospitalised - the three children return home. One of them is a war correspondent, and it is her story that becomes the central source of narrative tension. Her unhappy marriage and her increasing alienation from her family were fascinating. What drives her to 'bear witness' to the ugliest aspects of life was explored both sympathetically (she hates social pretence) but also very darkly (it's become an adrenalin addiction for her and it makes her a kind of monster or outcast from others). Another point of view character is Tony, a man with poor social skills who has developed an obsession with her and thinks they are 'the same'. This is a disturbing relationship and it comes to a very dramatic conclusion. I found this very cleanly written without self-indulgence - there was a freshness and honesty to it that made me race through the work. ( )

Interesting novel examining the relationships in a family when they are brought together by tragedy. How the baggage of previous years surfaces is examined in a recognisable way. ( )

I really liked reading the core elements of this book: the relationships between the children and with their parents, their feelings and thoughts about the small country town in which they grew up. I reckon Wood has done an excellent job of capturing an image of small town Australia in the late 20th and early 21st century. She knows about the subtle interactions between siblings. She paints a picture of an entirely believable context in which a father's head injury brings people together physically, but where they are psychologically a long distance apart.

It's probably just me, but I think the plot elements that Wood introduces which are external to the family don't actually contribute to the quality of the story. I found the subplot involving a hospital wardsman to be particularly unrewarding. His character and role was rather unbelievable to me. I thought maybe Wood had been advised to add this sub-plot to increase the reader's interest and the tension of the novel and make it a more marketable product. Clearly Wood has tried very hard to link this to the main plot, but this reader found that it detracted from the whole. To me there's plenty of 'meat' already there....but I am the type of person who thinks Marilynne Robinson's writing is 5-star! ( )