Peter Hoeg – Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

Peter Hoeg – Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Rating: 4)

One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop. The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah’s neighbour, Smilla, suspects murder. She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.

Ath Book Club comments:
The Ath Book Club gave special praise for the detailed descriptions of landscapes, the social/historical aspects of Denmark vs. Greenland and also the detailed technical knowledge. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow is a fast moving story where the author maintained the suspension. It is also a very dark story with an unresolved ending. The characters are interesting but all of them have a mysterious side that doesn’t clearly come to the open – Nordic depression perhaps.
The action and violence was raw and fast moving – as if the author didn’t quite know how to write it, being such an interesting and skilled writer in all other aspects. The high rating from the Ath Book Club is for the “feeling for snow” and not that much for Miss Smilla and her actions.

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Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road (Rating: 4)

Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April’s decision to change their lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy.

Ath Book Club comments:
Revolutionary Road is an exposé of American marriage in the 50s and also a shattering of the American dream. The main characters are not very likeable: Frank is weak, self absorbed misogynist and his wife April is irritating, manipulative and unrealistic. Frank and April’s purpose in life was to be an “extraordinary couple”, a goal they didn’t reach that well. The other characters are well depicted.
Yates has managed to write an utterly gripping novel about nobody and nothing. The character building is intricate; Yates builds and dissects their motivations and relationships and skilfully increases a sense of dread. Revolutionary Road is a wonderfully written, relentlessly depressive novel. The Ath Book Club simply loved it!

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Peter Klein – Punter’s Turf

Peter Klein – Punter’s Turf (Rating: 3.5)

Peter Klein’s first book was his racing world memoir, A Strapper’s Tale. He now works in the media as racing manager for Australian Associated Press and, having spent his working life in horseracing and working for some of the top horse trainers, his credentials are good for this crime mystery set in and around the racetrack. John Punter, in his second outing, is a gambler and amateur private investigator who, right from the start, is drawn into an actioncharged scenario when the daughter of a bookmaker friend is abducted in Melbourne. When a young jockey dies under suspicious circumstances, and a local trainer hits a run of rare bad luck, Punter finds himself drawn further into a web of underworld crimes, which prove to be more personally dangerous than he could have anticipated. The book is full of colourful characters, and the realistic racing jargon will appeal to those who keenly follow the form guides. If you enjoy a Dick Francis-style thriller with a healthy dose of the Robert G Barrett style Aussie larrikin hero thrown in, this will do just fine for some light-hearted entertainment.

Ath Book Club comments:
Punter’s Turf is a page turner. The main character, Punter, seems to be almost too smart to be a professional punter. He is also very lucky and sensitive with his investments and almost too reasonable and restrained. If this is believable, none of the Ath Book Club members could say. Oakie, however, was one of the favourite characters as well as the Melbourne setting.
Klein’s writing is straightforward and easily readable. There is some nice humour and affectionate descriptions of racing life identities are done in an enthusiastic manner. Punter’s Turf also gave an insight to a world that is not very familiar to most of the Ath Book Club members.

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Steven Conte – The Zookeeper’s War

Steven Conte – The Zookeeper’s War (Rating: 3.5)

In Berlin, who can you trust? A story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war …It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo’s director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. When the zoo’s staff is drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. At first, Vera finds the idea abhorrent, but gradually she realises that the new workers are the zoo’s only hope, and forms an unlikely bond with one of them. This is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours’ dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted. The Zookeeper’s War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.

Ath Book Club comments:
The war (WWII) is the catalyst and the zoo is an excuse for the people staying in Berlin, but the Ath Book Club agreed that The Zookeeper’s War really is about marriage and survival. It is about adaptation to very difficult circumstances by shutting down of emotions, ethics and morals when you really cannot make your own choices. Conte’s writing style is understated and that matched the bleakness of the story. However he constantly surprises with gems of phrases, such as “The skin had a memory” and “Unacknowledged a kiss might starve.”
The Ath Book Club praised Conti for his first book. The time sequence was sometimes confusing. The last 80 pages were well written, although some members wanted the book to end before the Russians came to Berlin. – Ten Ath Book Club members were in the meeting and the discussion went non-stop. Everybody had an opinion – that makes The Zookeeper’s War a great bookclub book.

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Barack Obama – Dreams from my father

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father (Rating: 4)

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father’s life and reconcile his divided inheritance.Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams from My Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama’s journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

Ath Book Club comments:

The Ath Book Club’s discerning members rated Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father very highly. His language is terrific prose and some descriptive chapters were comparable with Charles Dickens! Especially Obama’s descriptions of Africa and his relatives living there. Dreams from My Father is sensitive, insightful and also an unusually honest account of a man who now is a man of power.

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Helene Chung – Ching Chong China Girl

 Helene Chung: Ching Chong China Girl (Rating: 2)

Warning: Not to be read by convent girls not wearing their gloves.’Ching Chong Chinaman’ girls taunted Helene Chung in her Catholic school playground. An Australian-born Chinese growing up in 1950s Hobart, Helene not only dealt with being different from her blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmates but suffered the shame of having divorced parents. And she kept a shocking secret – her mother, Miss Henry, was a nude model, who also lived in sin with a foreign devil and drove a red MG.Surviving the embarrassment of childhood, Helene discovered the thrill of the theatre, fell into journalism and travelled the world. She became the first non-white reporter on Australian TV and the first female posted abroad by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Ching Chong China Girlis filled with honesty, humour, love and loss, and gives insight into life that traverses cultures East and West.

Ath Book Club comments:

Ching Chong China Girl has all the elements of being a good story. Unfortunately it was not very well told. Helene Chung is an excellent reporter and that shows in her book. Being an autobiography, it was lacking personal feeling – it was written like a report about somebody else’s life and family. However, Helene Chung gave an interesting insight into adaptation of early Chinese immigrants’ life in Tasmania and how she dealt with her own racial issues later, when she progressed in her career.

The Ath Book Club wanted to see more of the personal engagement that is necessary in an autobiography, hence the low rating.

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Peter Ralph – The CEO

Peter Ralph - The CEO (Rating: 3+)

The CEO is a pacy business thriller reminiscent of Douglas Kennedy’s The Job and some of John Grisham’s books, but with a couple of major differences: it is set in Melbourne, and in those novels, you are always rooting for the hero. She may be flawed, but in the end she comes good. In contrast, the ‘hero’ of this book is almost without redeeming qualities. As the blurb states, ‘Douglas Aspine is a cold, calculating bastard.’ The CEO is the story of how this aggressive, greedy and ambitious man lies, cheats and manipulates his way to the CEO position of an underperforming public company, and what he does once he gets there. It’s a tale of mass sackings, intimidation, insider trading, infidelity and unscrupulous behaviour—and that’s just the start.

Populated by thinly veiled versions of Australia’s most notorious white-collar criminals, it’s a page-turner about the dark side of the corporate world, and it makes compulsive reading. As his enemies gather and the desire to see him get his comeuppance increases, it’s scary to see just how much Aspine can get away with. Although The CEO is patchy in parts, and I found the ending just a little unsatisfying, it shows strong potential.

Ath Book Club comments:

The CEO is a good story of good and evil that keeps the reader engaged with the characters right to the end. The name Aspine (a combination of asp and spine?) was a good choice for the main character who, unfortunately, was very believable, and who none of the Ath Book Club members would want to meet in real life. Many of the members did recognise real people and events behind the story.

The ending was disappointing to some members, although it was a suitable punishment for a thoroughly evil character such as Mr Aspine. The alternative would have been a court of law and a possibility of escaping punishment.

Unfortunately the book was lacking a sound proof reading and there were a number of grammatical errors which diminished the pleasure of reading such a good story.

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Robert Hollingworth – They called me the Wildman

Robert Hollingworth: They called me the Wildman (Rating: 4)

They Called Me the Wildman is historian and artist Robert Hollingworth’s captivating reconstruction of Swedish-born naturalist Henricke Nelsen’s solitary life. Henricke lived on a mountain in Victoria’s Tallarook Ranges in the 1860s. Robert Hollingworth has written Henricke’s life story in the form of a prison diary. No imaginary work could arrange a better cast of characters than this meticulously researched story.

Ath Book Club comments:

When reading They called me the Wildman it was sometimes difficult to remember that the book is fiction. It is beautifully written, deliberately kept short and poetic, although there was material for more. Also the artistic cover, dust jacket, paper and binding increased the pleasure of reading this book.

They called me the Wildman scored a couple of “fives” from the Ath’s discerning Book Club – an honour only to be seen very rarely. – Robert Hollingworth has done a lot of research and tenderly given an authentic “voice” to an otherwise forgotten character.

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Kennedy’s Brain

Ath book club November 2008

Henning Mankell - Kennedy’s Brain (RATING 3)

An original and breathtaking thriller surrounding one of the most important issues of our time, from internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Henning Mankell.

When archaeologist Louise Cantor’s son Henrik is found dead in his flat, she refuses to believe it was suicide. Despite traces of sleeping tablets in his system, several clues that only a mother knows lead her to believe something more sinister took place.

However Louise soon realizes that Henrik had kept many things from her and is shocked to learn he had contracted HIV. While looking through his papers, she discovers he was obsessed with the conspiracy theory that JFK’s brain disappeared prior to the autopsy—along with the vital evidence regarding bullet exit wounds. The only lead is a letter and photograph from Henrik’s girlfriend in Mozambique.

Louise’s quest to unravel the mystery surrounding her son’s death takes her to Africa, a continent rife with disease, poverty and corruption. Struggling to cope with the oppressive heat and sickness, Louise sees fear in every face, even unexpectedly in the clinics set up by an American businessman. In Kennedy’s Brain Mankell confirms his status as a master of suspense, and delivers a timely and riveting thriller that will have readers on the edge their seats until the very end. 

 

Ath Book Club comments:

 

Although all Ath Book Club members has a lot of criticism for Kennedy’s Brain, 12 of 16 members turned up in the meeting – a record attendance in 2008. That’s the attraction with book clubs, you never know beforehand which book is most discussed!

 

Henning Mankell’s anger clearly shows in his writing of Kennedy’s Brain. That makes the story jerky, unfinished and unbalanced. Mankell may have used his fame to highlight AIDS issues in Africa, he may have been extremely frustrated about them – however, Kennedy’s Brain needs lots of editing and re-writing. Rating 3 is somewhat a top rating for this book considering all criticism it got.

 

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On Chesil Beach

Ath book club October 2008

Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach (RATING 3.5)

It is June 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from Ian McEwan – a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Ath Book Club comments:

 

On Chesil Beach is an excellent book club book. The discussion was fierce – some of the members were very excited about this book whilst some others were bored to tears. The story is quite Shakespearean and very basic. A young couple, just married and about to spend their first night together as a man and wife. – It doesn’t sound very riveting, but McEwan is a master of words and he gets into the female mind as well as the male. McEwan also masters the art of writing of violence and incest without mentioning them at all.

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