Roberta ‘Bertie’ Lightfoot suffers from polio as a child, and is helped through it by her tough-minded mother, along with the paper and pencils given to her by her father. The paper and pencils are a way into art, and from this point on there will be a struggle between the young artist and her beloved but overbearing mother. The family moves to Port Moresby in 1955, where a whole new world awaits. Bertie claims she can see ‘colours’ (auras) and so can often tell the truth about people, but this ability is also stifled. The Beloved is a vivid bildungsroman with believable characters and intense dramatic events. Tension arises not only from the relationship between Bertie and her mother (and the reader’s empathy for both of them), but the relationship between Bertie’s parents, and some of the immediate dangers of the Papua New Guinea environment. Annah Faulkner, winner of the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Award for an Emerging Writer, handles her characters’ desires and secrets tenderly. The novel is about two strong identities coming up against one another, the way passion (and art) can overtake a person’s very being, and the damaging effects of ‘wanting the best’ for a child who already knows who they are and what they want.
Angela Meyer is a writer, blogger (literaryminded.com.au) and former acting editor of Books+Publishing magazine. This review first appeared in the July 2012 issue of Books+Publishing magazine. View more pre-publication reviews here. This book was longlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Dorothy Forrest is seven years old when the Forrests move from New York, with dwindling money, to New Zealand. At the opening of the novel, Frank, the father, is capturing his children on a movie camera, trying to make them participate in a special effect. The children run off in different directions, bored of their father’s instructions. But a fragment, a celluloid memory, is captured, and as the novel skips forward in time with each chapter, the past—and the figures in it—hover at the edges of Dorothy’s life.
Yearn is a collection of fun, imaginative and sexy stories by the author of Tremble and Quiver, Tobsha Learner. Learner’s stories are not purely erotic, but romantic and often other-worldly. Fate and magic have their parts to play in this collection. Highlights include ‘Pussy and Mouse’, about an overweight and insecure woman who is a BDSM goddess in the online world of Second Life; ‘Weather’, about a woman who believes the TV weatherman is her soul mate; and ‘Fur’, about a realistic nightly apparition who may have something to do with the protagonist’s new cat. The stories are pure fantasy— not just the sex and romance, but the wealthy and artistic lives of some of the protagonists. In terms of the writing, there are some awkward sentences and shifts in point of view. The erotic elements are various and well described, though all in the realm of heterosexuality. While this collection was enjoyable, I’m not sure it provides more substance than your standard erotic fiction kept in another section of the bookstore. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of imagination at work here, and enough to entertain and titillate a mainly female, popular-fiction readership. Male readers also have no reason to be deterred.