JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookshop he inherited from his beloved grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The cat needs Rintaro’s help to save books that have been imprisoned, destroyed and unloved.

Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different labyrinths to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who locks up his books, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publisher who only wants to sell books like disposable products. Then, finally, there is a mission that Rintaro must complete alone . . .

Japanese fiction translated by Louise Heal Kawai, The Cat Who Saved Books is a story for book lovers. At only 217 pages, and published in a small format, this book is a very short read and at its core explores love, loss, family, and the persistent power of books and reading. And with a talking cat, the novel of course dabbles in magical realism and contemporary fantasy.

Whilst this largely seems to be marketed as an adult novel, its appeal certainly expands beyond that readership. Over the course of the story, Rintaro embarks on four journeys to rescue literature, and the episodic structure of the novel is reminiscent of many children adventure stories — the grief-stricken protagonist, a talking animal driving the plot forward, and a friend in the form of a sidekick, keeping the story grounded in reality.

“It was only two days since Sayo and Rintaro had tea together. Rintaro had only replied vaguely to her pleas for him to go back to school, and ever since stayed holed up inside Natsuki Books. Really there didn’t seem any reason to go to school at all at this point.”

Underneath all the adventures, this is a story about an introverted young boy coming to terms with his grandfather’s death. When we meet him in the beginning of the novel, he’s getting ready to shut his grandfather’s bookstore. He’s barely attending school, he doesn’t have any friends and he doesn’t seem to possess passion for anything anymore. By meeting Tiger and embarking on these adventures, he comes to recognise what brings him joy and happiness, and is able to forge on without his grandfather. He learns to let others in, and let some things go from his mind.

“Rintaro took another look at the magnificent gate and the mimosa tree above. Its giant branches were covered in cottony blossoms. That was strange. It was December, which made this a very unusual mimosa indeed. But then again, from the outset everything he had seen today had defied common sense.”

Louise has done a great job with the translation, maintaining the whimsical, quirky nature of Japanese fiction and ensuring the story stays on course.

Admittedly, the short word count means the story does feel a little simplistic at times. It’s quite a clear cut story of good and bad, and does feel more like a novel for children than adults. However, it is a charming and enchanting tale that doesn’t take much time to read.

“Something in the atmosphere changed. Rintaro turned to look at the door. Beyond the darkness a wind had begun to blow. Or rather, there was a wind blowing through the hall, towards the darkness, easing Rintaro and the cat towards the fusuma door.”

Literary fiction with quite a specific audience, The Cat Who Saved Books is magical and wispy and will largely appeal to frequent readers and those who truly love reading. Readership skews 12+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Cat Who Saved Books
Sosuke Natsukawa
September 2021
Pan Macmillan Book Publishers

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated and burned out from her attempts to replicate that moment. And when her long-time boyfriend announces that he wants an open relationship before making a final commitment, a hurt and angry Anna decides if he wants an open relationship, then she does, too. Translation: She’s going to embark on a string of one-night stands. The more unacceptable the men, the better.

That’s where tattooed, motorcycle-riding Quan Diep comes in. Their first attempt at a one-night stand fails, as does their second and their third, because being with Quan is more than sex-he accepts Anna on an unconditional level that she herself has just begun to understand.

However, when tragedy strikes Anna’s family, she takes on a role that she is ill-suited for, until the burden of expectations threatens to destroy her. Anna and Quan have to fight for their chance at love, but to do that they also have to fight for themselves.

Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle is both a contemporary romance novel and commercial women’s fiction novel exploring identity, self-sacrifice and belonging. The second half of the novel painfully explores the role of family expectations and caregiving.

Protagonist and violinist Anna is struggling with her music — after experiencing viral fame, she feels her music is riddled with errors. She’s also struggling to connect with her family, and her sister’s continued disinterest and disregard for Anna’s feelings creates friction between them. Anna’s connection with Qual after an intended one night stand allows her to confront her insecurities and her hesitations (particularly relating to intimacy), and work to understand herself a little better.

“There’s a confidence and relaxed coordination in the way he moves that suggests he’s been in a few fights — and won them. Have I lost my mind that this is intensely appealing to me, that hint of danger?”

Helen’s strength lies in her narration and voice. Written in first person, Anna’s voice offers reflection at key moments. She’s wise and intelligent, and she’s considerate. Too considerate. She puts others before herself, and she doesn’t quite understand how unhappy she is — how she’s not living the life she wants.

For most of the novel, Anna battles with herself as she tries to overcome her music struggles and her family’s judgement of her. When Anna’s psychologist tells her that she’s likely autistic, it allows Anna the chance to understand who she really is, and how she can progress in her personal life and her career.

Many readers will understand that multi-faceted feeling of pressure — from family, partners, career, and society. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy, so it’s nice to feel reassured about who you are and where you are in life.

“Parts of me don’t look quite right anymore. That’s the simple truth and something that I feel I need to explain. There’s also the other thing, the thing that I haven’t told anyone yet, because it’s awkward and it sucks and sometimes it still makes me cry.”

Admittedly, the novel does a bit like a clash between priorities. Is this a romance first and foremost? The first half certainly feels like it, but the second half almost feels like a different story. I’m not saying it’s not enjoyable — I binged the book in one day — but it did feel a bit like a jolt as I made my way through the story. The progression of Anna and Quan’s romance certainly felt predictable, and the ending foreseeable.

Personally, I loved that Anna’s relationship with her sister was left unresolved at the end of the novel. It shows that not everything can be fixed or wrapped up in life, and that sometimes relationships can remain broken.

“His words catch me off guard, and I stare at him for a moment. I need to run, to escape, to crumple up tonight like a ruined sketch and start with a fresh sheet. And he’s telling me not to. Worse than that, he makes perfect sense. And he’s smiling again, taking my breath away and making me stupid.”

Heartwarming with a lot of soul and charm, The Heart Principle is recommended for fans of romance and commercial women’s fiction. I can see YA readers loving this as well. Readership skews female, 20+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Heart Principle
Helen Hoang
September 2021
Allen & Unwin Book Publishers

Cutters End by Margaret Hickey

A desert highway. A remote town. A murder that won’t stay hidden.

New Year’s Eve, 1989. Eighteen-year-old Ingrid Mathers is hitchhiking her way to Alice Springs. Bored, hungover and separated from her friend Joanne, she accepts a lift to the remote town of Cutters End.

July 2021. Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti is seconded to a recently reopened case, one in which he has a personal connection. Three decades ago, a burnt and broken body was discovered in scrub off the Stuart Highway, 300km south of Cutters End. Though ultimately ruled an accidental death, many people – including a high-profile celebrity – are convinced it was murder.

When Mark’s interviews with the witnesses in the old case files go nowhere, he has no choice but to make the long journey up the highway to Cutters End.

And with the help of local Senior Constable Jagdeep Kaur, he soon learns that this death isn’t the only unsolved case that hangs over the town…

Set in the South Australian outback, Margaret Hickey’s Cutters End transports us to rural Australia and centres around a suspicious death thirty years earlier. At the time it was ruled an accident, but what really happened along that deserted and dusty highway? Was the death of Michael Denby really an accident?

This novel falls fairly easily into the rural crime and Australian Outback noir genre, and doesn’t stray too far from the stereotypical elements of the space — the flawed male detective with a troubling marriage, a young woman holding a few too many secrets, a decades-old cold case that remains unsolved, and the desolate town filled with sketchy inhabitants. You’ll know from simply glancing at the cover whether this is novel you’ll want to read.

Cutters End is definitely a commercial novel and will find many valued readers looking for some sort of escapism. This would be a great book to gift for Father’s Day.

“She returned to her papers, indecisive. Since Mark’s visit, and perhaps just before, she sensed that her life was becoming unstuck. Her hand rested on the photograph from the old newspaper clipping. Nothing seemed definite and the resolve she’d enjoyed for a number of years was slipping.”

With all rural thrillers, setting is integral. Get that wrong and you’ve lost the atmosphere. In Cutters End, Margaret captures the thick heat and humidity of rural Australia with ease — the desolate town and its silences, the houses and businesses few and far in between, with plenty of distance and solitude to commit a crime and keep it hidden. Everyone knows each other and secrets can remain hidden for years.

In most rural thrillers, evidence is lacking so the story relies on the protagonist slowly unravelling the crime secret-by-secret, and this usually stems from townsfolk. In Cutters End, whilst some evidence reveals itself over the course of the novel, Mark’s interactions with other characters and his ability to piece together clues helps him solve the crime.

“The phone rang: his mother. Mark felt the familiar pang of guilt that she was calling him and not the other way around. His mother still lived in Booralama, the country town he grew up in. The rose gardens, the long, slow, winding river and the old gum trees — the town never failed to fill him with fault nostalgia for all things young and free.”

Told with a dual timeline, moving between the 1980s/1990s and the present allows Margaret to reflect on each era. In the past, hitchhiking was incredibly common but posed significant dangers for young women. Additionally, women who were abused or hurt were rarely believed, so it was easier for crimes to go unpunished. The present storyline follows a fairly standard kind of procedural pace, with Mark finding similarities between the events in Cutters End and the notorious Milat backpacker murders.

Admittedly, I did feel like a couple of loose threads undervalued the rest of the novel, particularly around TV presenter Suzanne Miller and her interest in the case. She’s in one scene and we barely hear from her again. I felt there was a missed opportunity to incorporate her into the story, because at present it feels like you could cull her and it’d barely make a difference. Secondly, Mark’s relationship with his wife felt thinly developed, and their storyline as a whole could’ve been explored a bit more.

“As the dark paddocks rolled on by, gradually giving way to subdivisions and then traffic, he thought about his own lack of resolve over the years. He seemed to float along; things came to him and he accepted them as par for the course.”

Pacy, intriguing and exhilarating, Cutters End is recommended for fans of rural crime, such as Jane Harper, Chris Hammer and Greg Buchanan. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Cutters End
Margaret Hickey
August 2021
Penguin Random House Publishers

The Echo Chamber by John Boyne

What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a ‘national treasure’ (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.

Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path.

To err is maybe to be human but to really foul things up you only need a phone.

A satirical novel about social media and those trapped in its clutches, John Boyne’s The Echo Chamber follows one self-centred British family who are all well-versed in manipulating others and escaping retribution. The Echo Chamber takes aim at cancel culture from both sides — those ‘cancelled’, and those who cancel.

At the centre of the novel is the revered and respected TV host George Cleverley, who resembles Piers Morgan in his unapologetic, ill-advised commentary on society. His wife, Beverley, is an internationally best-selling author whose works are written by ghost writers but she claims their words are her own. Their three children, Nelson, Achilles and Elizabeth, are flawed in their own right and provide the majority of the entertainment in the novel.

“Although Beverley was sitting in the drawing room of the Cleverleys’ five-floor Belgravia home, trying to maintain a polite interest in the conversation she was holding with a ghost, her mind was far away, soaring 35,000 feet above Europe, on an aeroplane headed for the north-western shore of the Black Sea.”

Written in third person POV and switching between all five members of the family, the humour lands best with Nelson, George’s socially inept son who struggles to talk to women and wears various uniforms to feel comfort and stability. His dialogue with his psychologist is incredibly funny, and his attempts at conversing with women are equally worth a mention.

John’s razor-sharp observation on human and societal interaction takes centre stage with this novel. Prose is stripped back, and the majority of the story is told through dialogue. This shows just how easily John captures a character’s voice, because we have five different characters here and all offer their own unique personality. Whilst I felt that George’s dialogue was overly absurd in some conversations with his family, and he didn’t always feel natural when he spoke, I think John captured the rest of the family members with consistency and reliability.

“The first man he met was a married father of two from Battersea, the indent on the fourth finger of his left hand making it clear that he’d removed his wedding ring on the journey to the pub. Achilles went for a drink with him several times before asking whether he could help him out with a ‘loan’ of $1,000 because, he claimed his landlord was threatening to throw him out on the streets.”

Some people might read this book and find some segments too over the top — they might find the Cleverley family too obnoxious, and edging too far into caricature territory. And I suppose I did feel that in some moments as well. But as a whole, this book offers an entertaining exploration into how social media has shaped our society and how much value we place in our devices.

John’s commentary on social media is devastatingly accurate and rife with clarity. The cover is also a triumph. It’s rare that a novel actually has me laughing aloud, and at times this book even had me snort a little. The Echo Chamber was a joy to read, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

“He counted the items of clothing on his body and it came to a total of five: polyester scrub top and trousers, boxer shorts, socks and a pair of old trainers. Standard hospital wear. And even though he knew that he was probably the least fashionable person in London and the South-East, he appreciated the fact that his outfit made him stand out in the crowd.”

Sharp, observant and utterly enjoyable, The Echo Chamber is recommended for readers of literary fiction and satirical works. Readership skews 25+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Echo Chamber
John Boyne
August 2021
Penguin Random House Publishers

Billy Summers by Stephen King

Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?

How about everything.

This spectacular can’t-put-it-down novel is part war story, part love letter to small town America and the people who live there, and it features one of the most compelling and surprising duos in King fiction, who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. It’s about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.

You won’t put this story down, and you won’t forget Billy.

Stephen King’s latest thriller, Billy Summers, follows an ex-marine contract killer whose final kill turns out to be more complex than originally planned.

When Billy is offered an extraordinary amount of money to kill a convicted killer, he bunkers down in an office building for months under a new identity — he’s pretending to be a man writing a novel, so people won’t suspect him of foul play and he’ll have optimal range when it comes time to make the shot.

But there’s something about this one last job that feels uncomfortable. The escape plan seems foolproof, but Billy has an inkling he’s being played. And soon after he kills his target, it’s about more than just survival. This is where the novel really picks up.

“Hoff smiles. Probably it’s charming when he’s on his game but he’s not on it now. He’s in a room with a paid killer. That’s part of it but not all of it. This is a man who feels the walls closing in, and Billy doesn’t think it’s because Hoff suspects he might be played for a patsy. He should know but he doesn’t.”

Billy Summers is a little slow for the first third, but once Billy completes the kill he was hired for, the pacing quickens, the stakes heighten, and the novel gets very good. We meet a new character, Alice — she’s wounded, broken, complex and she offers something fresh to the novel. It’s hard to talk about the rest of the novel without giving spoilers away, but the story does venture into really dark territory, particularly pertaining to Alice.

She does, however, offer some light in the novel. Together, Billy and Alice compliment each other as they work to deal with the fallout of recent events. The novel would’ve felt a bit limiting or lonely if Billy remained solo for his journey, so the introduction of another major character was no doubt a stylistic decision to keep the story moving in an interesting and inviting way, but also to allow the chance for Billy to grow and reflect as a character. Being around Alice resembles some sort of father-daughter bond, and we witness them both grow over the course of the story.

“At some point during that summer — his season of many identities — Billy re-reads the story of Bob Raines’ death and the hearing that followed. Then he goes to the window and looks out at the courthouse, where a sheriff’s car has pulled up to the curb.”

Admittedly, there are a few moments in the book that feel a little out of joint. King suggests some sort of attraction between Billy and Alice, which doesn’t feel natural — in a post-MeToo era, this element of the book does feel a little dated and inappropriate. And the scene where Billy takes Alice in after she’s been attacked, and then examines her body and describes it to the reader, didn’t feel overly necessary. Lastly, Alice seems really eager to join Billy on his endeavours, despite knowing him very little.

“He thinks briefly of deleting everything he’s written, it’s awful, but saves it instead. He doesn’t know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it’s good. And good that it’s awful, because awful is sometimes the truth.”

Recommended for readers of thriller and crime. Billy Summers is a little different to the horror and fantasy reads that fans of Stephen King will be accustomed to, but I do think his fanbase will enjoy this latest offering. Readership skews male, 25+

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Billy Summers
Stephen King
August 2021
Hachette Book Publishers