booksellersdiary's Reviews (246)

Room For A Stranger is a touching and kind read about two lonely strangers who connect in unlikely circumstances.

Andy is an international student who rents a room from Margaret. Slowly and with some misstarts they grow closer, despite their cultural differences. Simply written, Cheng shows a mastery of character development as these two push their way into your heart and stay there. With tender insight, Cheng shows us that we can never really know a person. I liked the gentle touches of small details that lent me the ability to vividly imagine the house, and feel as thought I was a part of the story.

Hard to believe this is a debut, but McPhee-Browne has given us a novel that will leave you aching. Rich in detail and emotionally heart-wrenching, Cherry Beach is an intimate portrait of the closeness of female friendship, the devastation of unrequited love, the pain of mental illness and the vulnerability of first love. The narrative perfectly captures the intensity of youth, and the feeling that love is supposed to overcome all things and last forever. Until it doesn't.

Reading this made me angry and despondent, truly this is a novel that will stay with me for some time.

Trigger warnings: suicide, psychotic episodes, and allusions to domestic violence and emotional and sexual abuse, as well as drug use.

'I was eleven when everything started and twelve by the end. But that's another way maps lie, because it felt like the distance travelled was a whole lot further than that.'

Fred's family is a mess. Fred's mother died when she was six and she's been raised by her Pop and adoptive father, Luca, ever since. But now Pop is at the Rye Rehabilitation Centre recovering from a fall; Luca's girlfriend, Anika, has moved in; and Fred's just found out that Anika and Luca are having a baby of their own. More and more it feels like a land-grab for family and Fred is the one being left off the map.

This #LoveOzMG debut is at once sweet and a little sad. Fred is a highly likeable protagonist, displaying intelligence and compassion far beyond that of a regular tween girl. She has her faults, but ultimately she learns from her errors and has some rad adults guiding her. She has some truly profound moments, there are lessons in this book that some adults I know IRL could do with learning.

Fred and her friends and family immediately make the reader feel comfortable in joining their journey. The detail of local colour in this is wonderful, since I moved to Melbourne reading books set in and around the city and the Bay have been a priority for me. From the title, it’s no surprise that the geography of the local area would come into play - I could smell the briny sea, hear the rumble of the 787 bus and I knew what Fred’s house and street looked like.

I loved that Fred’s parents play a prominent role in the story, often in Middle Grade and YA the focus is solely on the child protagonist and the adults are conveniently cut out. It was really good to have Fred’s insight to some very adult themes and scenes. Kids pick up on more than we realise, and having the adults be allowed to exist in her world allowed for explanation of those themes.

Middle Grade isn’t my usual read, most of you know I am a #LitFic snob. But when a middle grade novel fights through the internet algorithms for me to stumble across it, then I know it’s worth the read. Binks does a tremendous job at dissecting themes of compassion, racism, community, grief and family.

The House of Youssef is a collection of short stories detailing the migrant experience in Australia, exploring the lives of Lebanese migrants who have made their home deep in Sydney's western suburbia. The collection circles themes of isolation, family and community, and nostalgia for the home country. This is an interconnected exploration of relationships, the customs and traditions which both create and complicate them, the unwavering bond between parents and children, the dark secrets of marriage, the delicate bonds between friends and how easily they can be shattered.

Told with extreme minimalism, Kassab has no problem in breaking the hearts of readers with a vignettes barely two pages long. If anything, her efficiency with words serves only to heighten the emotional impact on the reader. These are the stories of the ordinary person, and are unfailingly relatable, simple and unglamorous in their telling. The understated style of Kassab's writing isolates tiny details and highlights the anxieties of her characters. To read this collection is to feel grief, sadness, longing, nostalgia and rebellion.

With The Coconut Children Pham has accomplished what many more experienced writers attempt and fail. This is a sweet and gritty coming of age love story, set against a background of racism, mental health struggles, abuse and neglect. This is a gentle but emotional debut novel, full of the tiny details of the Vietnamese migrant life in Australia. Pham is an accomplished story teller, with an evocative style and talent for character development and depth. There are great moments of humour, which were used at perfect moments to break tension and relax the reader. I look forward to more work from Pham, and seeing her writing grow and evolve.

Osbourne-Crowley has packed an almost unmanageable amount of emotion, trauma and investigative work into such a slim volume. I Choose Elena is a powerful and deeply personal essay about trauma and violence and how untreated traumatic events can lead to chronic physical pain and illness. The road to recovery has clearly been long and not without setbacks, but this memoir does not read like one still in need of more work in that area. The writing is clear, concise and unflinchingly honest - some of the early sections are particularly painful and triggering to read. Toward the end she does drift a little into a more stream of consciousness style, there is little in the way of structured thought here but this isn't a disservice to the essay. Instead, the concluding pages read like someone still striving for recovery, someone still sick, still traumatised and still in pain - but someone who is day by day getting through it and making choices about what will define her moving forward.

It took me a while to connect with this, but once I did I was lost in the characters and the relationships between them. Time is fragmented, with many shifts in perspective. I loved that some chapters were told by characters that were peripheral to the main familial characters - it lent well to the feeling of being outside watching this family pull itself apart. This is a work of literary genius, I was sceptical given my less than enthusiastic response to Hope Farm. But in Islands, Frew ripped out my heart in the same way Georgia Blain did with Between a Wolf and a Dog. Without doubt, this is Frew's best work yet. I remain shocked that this didn’t make Stella longlist for 2020, but I am thrilled to see its inclusion for Miles Franklin