Folio Friday

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Book Review

Crikey!  That week came around quickly.

Description


I have been meaning to read this book for a long time.  Let me say that again ...a loooong time.  When I worked at Gold Coast Libraries there was an author talk which I would have loved to have attended and I think that was last year.  Yes, this book was published in 2019.  Isn't the cover great?  Yes, I am very shallow and always judge a book by its cover.  Sorry.  But all hail to the marketing people.  I reckon they got this right.

I finally borrowed it from Brisbane City Council Library service and it came in reasonably quickly.  I wanted to read it so I could make a sensible vote in the Queensland Literary Awards which are on again very soon if I haven't missed them already. Drat! I haven't missed them, but I have missed out on voting for the People's Choice.  Sorry Melanie! I hope you win :)

So as you've probably guessed from the cover, this book is set in WWII Brisbane and was a real delight for me to read.  I grew up down south with vivid stories of the sub coming into the Harbour in Sydney.  Brisbane's experience of the war was a whole other story.  Any of you who have been to the Macarthur Museum smack bang in the middle of the city have some appreciation of what it must have been like.  Exciting but scary, all rolled into one.

We can only imagine what it must have been like to live through a World War.  The author has taken a kind of "Sliding Doors" approach to telling the story, weaving a contemporary story of a student completing a doctoral thesis researching women's experiences of WWII in Brisbane with the stories of the women she is researching. As a family history researcher, I found it as mesmerizing as the research itself.

Author

You can read all about the author on her website here.

For and against

I really enjoyed this book.  It's a mystery but also a historical novel grounded in great research and with compassion for the challenges young women faced then and now.  What more could a family historian ask for?  

The book comes in at 260pp which is the perfect length as far as I'm concerned.  

If there were any criticisms, it would just be that sometimes the transition from the past to the present was sometimes rather jarring.  I would have read a couple of paragraphs and then say to myself "Hang on, they didn't have DVDs in the 1940s" and realise that I was back in contemporary times.  But I think that's my fault rather than the author's fault.  I was so engrossed in the tale-telling that I lost track of time literally.

Oh and one annoying spelling mistake- Macarthur's hoards rather than hordes on Page 159.

This was more than made up for by Myers description of Edith's visceral response to the violence during the Battle of the Canteens two pages later.

I loved how Myers captured contemporary Brisbane - the cafe in Paddington and the Antique Centre and an excellent description of the reading room at the State Archives.  There is a bit of me that does wonder if other readers who weren't so interested in research would find this as interesting though.  

This book should come with a warning.  Much of the subject matter is about sexual assault so you might want to give this a wide berth if that disturbs you.  It's not to the point of gruesomeness but it should probably just be flagged in this day and age.

I have to say that I think Myers has done an excellent job dovetailing these kind of issues into the contemporary side of her story.  Something that we wish we could say is buried and gone forever, still rings true today.  Just today on the news we had another story confirming that some things never seem to change.

Rating?

Despite the grim matter, I liked this book so much that I want to read it all over again and that is VERY rare for me.

I also want to put together a map of all the places that Myers talked about so that I can go and check them out for myself: the hostels, the dance halls, the munitions factories etc.

8/10 from me.

What have you been reading?

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