2019

Impossible Causes, Julie Mayhew

Andrea Thompson — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:57:50 +0000

REVIEW

Impossible Causes, Julie Mayhew

Review Written By

Andrea Thompson

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Choosing the remote island of Lark to relocate to is a decision made by the Kendricks in the wake of enormous loss. Viola and her mother Deborah will never be the same again now it is only the two of them, and the safety offered by the tiny community of Lark seems heaven sent at just the right time. Lark, population 300, is only accessible by sea twice a year and rarely approves new residents to its shores.

Teacher Leah, who regularly seeks the wisdom of the tarot via her spiritual neighbour Margaritte, is joyed to discover that one of the three new residents of Lark is not only to be a new teacher at her school, but is also an unattached man. Leah’s foretold ‘Knight of Cups’ is soon to arrive and as always, news of new residents stirs up talk amongst the Larkians as only fresh and shiny new things can.

The ‘eldest girls’ of the Leah’s school are as close as teenage girls can be. The island of Lark has a long history of paganism and the circle of stones that the eldest girls now visit has always been considered a place where men are not welcome. The suspicious eyes of the island community fall on Anna, Britta and Jade-Marie as girls coming into their power as women are considered to be fraught and dangerous creatures. The three girls become more of a force now with the addition of a fourth – newcomer Viola, who wants nothing more than to be near the mysterious creatures that are the eldest girls. It is Viola who discovers the body of the man, lying amongst the ancient stones of Lark.

It won’t take much for the reader to figure out what is going on in Lark but it does take the novel a heck of a long time to be precise in its description of such. Without giving away any spoilers the clues as to what is the true horror of Lark are all there from the beginning. The reader merely needs to push on and see how it will end.

Impossible Causes presents the perspectives of the adult Leah and the child Viola, the threat to each being similar but tackled differently, as islander and mainlander. The passages of Leah are more fully realized, with it being possible to feel empathy for an otherwise intelligent adult who seems to have had her head well and truly in the sand as to the suffering around her.

Impossible Causes plays out its sadness in beautiful isolation, and waves goodbye to the young as they grow older and wiser to the poison both preached and practiced on Lark. This theme of moving on and loss, or escaping the frying pan by jumping into the fire (if you prefer) pervades, and the learned helplessness of those that you encounter in this book is depressing to experience. It does get more unbelievable as the novel progresses that so little action is taken, and being set in the current time is at odds with how the island of Lark lives, even taking into account its geographic isolation.

This is a moody and meandering novel that struggles at to maintain reader interest as there is no real sense of pace or urgency until the final chapters. You can’t help but feel if this novel was set say in the 1960’s, it would feel more in sync with the era.

Book Source Declaration

I received a copy of this book from the publisher or author.

BOOK DETAILS

BOOK INFORMATION

Author

Julie Mayhew

ISBN

9781408897027

Year of Publication

2019

BLURB

Four elements. Four seasons. Four points on the compass. Four teenage girls.
And one body.

Black-haired, pure islander, Britta. The alpha female of the so-called Eldest Girls.

'Half-blood' Jade-Marie, her missionary father long drowned.

Blonde, angelic looking Anna - the moral compass of the trio.

And then red-headed Viola. Viola, the newcomer to the island, escaping tragedy and desperate to belong. Viola who turns three girls into four, and completes the set. Viola who finds the man's body, lying in the stone circle. Viola who has watched and waited for her opportunity to become one of the inner circle, whatever it takes.

In Julie Mayhew's mesmerising and compelling thriller, a remote and deeply-religious island with a history of paganism is riven when a man is found dead. As rumours spread and tensions rise, and fog descends, sealing the island off from the mainland, the four teenage girls of Lark Island find themselves accused of witchcraft - and murder.

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Last Ones Left Alive, Sarah Davis-Goff

Andrea Thompson — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 06:05:19 +0000

REVIEW

Last Ones Left Alive, Sarah Davis-Goff

Review Written By

Andrea Thompson

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Pandemics, post-apocalyptics, zombie dramas, dystopians – choose your preferred choice of genre labelling here – generally seem to go all out large or small and intense. If you are one of those readers who simply must have delivered a very finite scientific explanation of how the world all goes to hell, you may find that you tend to read novels which pan out to take in all the global devastation and resultant anarchy. These works generally involve shadowy government agencies, roaming gangs of survivors intent on creating violent dictatorships, lots and lots of guns etc. LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE instead narrows its survival tale focus down to three women who have formed a new family together since the end of civilization reached their small Irish community.

Orpen knows only the now and has no memory of the world as it was in the before. The world fell from grace well before Orpen was born, leaving Orpen’s Mam to face the danger of birthing and raising a child in a world now infested with roaming altered humans who seek only to kill. Orpen’s whole existence until now has been a tiny island off the Irish coast, safely isolated from the hungry and monstrous skrakes on the Mainland. Orpen has been taught to be mindful that the larger world is not what it once was and that she must keep up her levels of physical fitness and fighting tactics to evade anyone who seeks to harm and threaten the four of them – Orpen, her dog Dagger, her mother Muireann and her mother’s partner, Maeve.

Venturing out beyond the safe confines of their small island, Maeve and Orpen are still dealing with the recent death of Muireann when Maeve herself is bitten. The ethereal knowledge of Phoenix City, a newly emerged safe town somewhere on the Mainland means that Orpen must keep Maeve with her, even as Maeve slides in an out of consciousness and the feral reality of becoming one of the ravenous skrakes. Orpen is convinced that Maeve knows exactly where Phoenix City is and cannot let go of her only opportunity to find a way to safety and the support of others.

There are so many different rules with ‘virus’ post-apocalyptics that it can be difficult to find a new take on the premise. Each writer needs to at least in part work around such rules written and set by all the pandemic writers that came before them. The commonalities of infection via bite, what the undead most crave and how to kill them (again) are broadly accepted to be the same from book to book, with the variants being the scale of the horror and how society adapts to its brave new world order after all advancements in culture and civilization are erased.

Debut author Sarah Davis-Goff has written a thoughtful and precise novel of how one person, born after the fall, comes to the end of the line when she is finally alone and must seek out the company of others. It is not a matter of one just becoming lonely, it is an urgent matter of needing other people around you in order to survive. How it is to negotiate a world that has moved on from such knowns and protections of government authorities, medical assistance, community infrastructures etc is explored through the viewpoint of a teenager, who like every teen before her, has always been expected to question what she has been told. LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE gently takes the reader through what it indeed one day might be like, as we approach the end of our violent and uncertain times.

Like all dystopian novels hitting the shelves right now, LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE is uncomfortably easy to accept as a possible take on our near future. Tautly but simply written in the first person, this novel does veer off into a little lore which doesn’t do much to add to the storyline, but which inclusions might alleviate some of the bleakness of its otherwise harsh landscape for the reader.

Book Source Declaration

I received a copy of this book from the publisher or author.

BOOK DETAILS

BOOK INFORMATION

Author

Sarah Davis-Goff

ISBN

9781472255204

Year of Publication

2019

BLURB

LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE is the story of Orpen, a young woman who must walk on foot across a ravaged Ireland in the desperate hope of saving herself, and her guardian Maeve, from the zombie-like menace known as the skrake. Sarah Davis-Goff's strikingly original debut will appeal to readers of dystopian literary fiction such as STATION 11 or THE END WE START FROM.

Watch your six. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives.

Growing up on a tiny island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen's life has revolved around physical training and necessity. After Mam died, it's the only way she and her guardian Maeve have survived the ravenous skrake (zombies) who roam the wilds of the ravaged countryside, looking for prey.

When Maeve is bitten and infected, Orpen knows what she should do - sink a knife into her eye socket, and quickly. Instead, she tries to save Maeve, and following rumours of a distant city on the mainland, guarded by fierce banshees, she sets off, pushing Maeve in a wheelbarrow and accompanied by their little dog, Danger. It is a journey on which Orpen will need to fight repeatedly for her life, drawing on all of her training and instincts. In the course of it, she will learn more about the Emergency that destroyed her homeland, and the mythical Phoenix City - and discover a starting truth about her own identity.

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2019 Ngaio Marsh Awards Longlist

Karen — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 01:07:48 +0000

2019 Ngaio Marsh Awards Longlist Karen Thu, 13/06/2019 - 11:07 am

Young offenders, criminal histories:

Ngaio Marsh Award longlist revealed

An extraordinary literary tag-team is among several tales inspired by historic events to be named today on an eclectic longlist for the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.

“It’s surreal and strangely fitting that in our tenth season of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, and almost forty years after Dame Ngaio’s passing, our judges are considering a story that she began writing herself during the Second World War,” says founder Craig Sisterson.

The Dame faces plenty of stiff competition for this year’s prize, with several award-winning authors on the longlist for the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.

“Our international judging panel faces quite a challenge this year, that’s for sure,” says Sisterson. “Along with Stella Duffy’s brilliant resumption of Inspector Alleyn, we have superb fictional explorations of real-life crimes from another local Dame and a past Ngaios winner, exciting new tales from past finalists, and several hard-hitting stories about young people.”

The Ngaio Marsh Awards have celebrated the best New Zealand crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing since 2010, and this year’s longlist runs the gamut of settings from rural New Zealand to New York City, time periods from the 1940s to modern day, and themes ranging from teen bullying to societal discrimination and the verisimilitude of memory.

The longlist for the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel is:

NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU by Nikki Crutchley (Oak House Press)
CASSIE CLARK: OUTLAW by Brian Falkner (OneTree House)
THIS MORTAL BOY by Fiona Kidman (Penguin)
MONEY IN THE MORGUE by Ngaio Marsh & Stella Duffy (HarperCollins)
THE QUAKER by Liam McIlvanney (HarperCollins)
CALL ME EVIE by JP Pomare (Hachette)
THE STAKES by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
MAKE A HARD FIST by Tina Shaw (OneTree House)
THE VANISHING ACT by Jen Shieff (Mary Egan Publishing)
RAIN FALL by Ella West (Allen & Unwin)

The longlist is currently being considered by a judging panel of crime, thriller, and suspense writing experts from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

The finalists will be announced on 2 August, along with the finalists for the Ngaio Marsh Awards for Best First Novel and Best Non-Fiction. All the finalists will be celebrated, and the winners announced, as part of a special WORD Christchurch event on 14 September.

For more information on this year’s longlist, or the Ngaio Marsh Awards in general, please contact founder and judging convenor Craig Sisterson, craigsisterson@hotmail.com