Welcome to RRL Reads, a collection of reviews by RRL library staff. To see more of what our library staff are reading and listening to, follow us on instagram or facebook.
The Way it is Now by Garry Disher
If you have enjoyed Chris Hammer and are looking for your next read, may I recommend another great Australian crime writer, Garry Disher.
In The Way it is Now we meet Charlie Deravin, a cop who has returned to his childhood holiday home on forced leave. This is the place where his mother went missing 20 years earlier. He now has the time to look more deeply into this unsolved case to hopefully clear his father, an ex-policeman. Then the skeletal remains of 2 people are discovered, and it is now essential that Charlie finds out what happened.
Like Chris Hammer, Garry uses the book’s location to great advantage – here it is a small, coastal, beach shack Victorian town – filled with interesting characters, often flawed.
I enjoy a story when you can see the development of the main character throughout the story. In this book it is masterfully done by Charlie reluctantly attending counselling sessions. By the end we see the benefits, so kudos to Garry for including this in the narrative. Toss in a range of other topics, including a little virus that has popped up in China, and there is plenty to keep the reader interested and engaged.
This was the seventh book I have read by Garry Disher and I am sure it won’t be my last! – Cynthia, RRL
Tell No One by Brendan Watkins
This compelling story sparked my interest after hearing the author being interviewed by Richard Fidler on ABC Conversations. The episode motivated me to seek out the book in our RRL collection because I thought it would be a brilliant title for a Book Club.
Brendon Watkins was 8 years old when his parents told home he was adopted. It wasn’t until his late 20s when Brendon and his partner wanted to start a family that he started searching for his birth parents. He first discovered that his birth mother was a catholic nun and then decades later with the help of DNA testing, Brendan discovered he was the son of a priest – a celebrated outback missionary who had travelled the world, had an audience with the Pope and who less than a year later, impregnated Brendan’s birth mother. She was a devout 27-year-old woman with limited education and non-existent financial resources who could not consent to a sexual relationship with her worldly 57-year-old priest, Father Vincent Shiel.
This book describes the incredible journey that Brendan undertook in an effort to uncover the truth behind his biological heritage. Decades of searching and obstruction from the Catholic church finally revealed the whole truth.
This was a very well written and fascinating book which I found difficult to put down. It made me angry at the secrecy of the church, sad for Brendan’s grief and life interrupted as he searched for answers and alarmed at the fact that there exist thousands of priests’ children around the world.
To quote from the book, “the children of priests are the sleeping giant that the Catholic church prays will never fully awaken”. – Tracey Luhrs, RRL
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Firstly, this book is all kinds of wonderful.
Wonderful is what many people expect from Ann Patchett, but this story is so cleverly woven together it’s like a masterclass in how to make an ordinary life into a beautiful artwork.
Lara is 57 and married to a cherry farmer named Joe. She is savouring having all three of her twentysomething daughters back on the farm during the pandemic. As they pick cherries, Lara tells the story of the summer she dated a movie star before he was famous.
That movie star was Peter Duke, and they were performing together in a summer production of Our Town at Tom Lake. Lara was brilliant in her role as Emily, but she never acted again. Finding out why she gave up her promising acting career to marry a cherry farmer is one of central questions of the book.
As a mum of three girls, I was fascinated by the relationship between Lara and her three daughters. Patchett cleverly interweaves the story she tells her daughters with the details she will never tell her daughters. The pandemic setting, handled so lightly, feeds perfectly into a story about appreciating the life you have and taking joy in the people and places around you.
But as one character cherishes the life they have built, another self-destructs. Tom Lake is a book that invites you to reflect on your own choices, the kind of story that can steer your life in one direction or another and help you see the way ahead more clearly. – Katrina Roe, RRL