JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Fancy Meeting You Here by Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus

Sometimes the man of your dreams is standing right in front of you… only ten years in the past. A charming and unconventional love story about trying to rewrite history.

Evie Berry is a thirty-year-old wannabe screenwriter who spends her days managing a London cinema bar and making the podcast Pasta La Vista with her best friend Ben. She’s also obsessed with Hugo Hearst. Have you heard of him? Of course you have. He’s only one of the most influential and not to mention swoon-worthy bestselling writers of his generation.

When Evie’s not hooking up with her on-again, off-again booty call ‘Ever-Ready Freddy’ (and sometimes even when she is), she fantasises about what might have been if she’d met Hugo years ago, when he was just a struggling writer.

After Evie interviews a psychic to the stars on her podcast, her life is catapulted ten years into the past. But the grass isn’t quite as green as she remembers . . .

Romantic comedy Fancy Meeting You Here by Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus explores what it’d be like to re-live your twenties, and pursue the relationship and the life you always felt you were meant to have.

Struggling screenwriter Evie has been ‘writing’ for almost a decade, but hasn’t gotten anywhere. And she’s obsessed with the local – and incredibly famous – writer and actor Hugo Hearst. When she is unexpectedly catapulted ten years in the past, she has the opportunity to meet Hugo while he’s writing his infamous debut novel, and the two spark a connection.

“Evie felt as if she were walking on air on the way home. Apart from her excitement at actually meeting Hugo, and how well they’d seemed to get on, she also felt bolstered by what he had said about his writing process.Her obsession with getting every single word perfect was not only exhausting, but also preventing her from making any real progress.”

Charming and enjoyable, Fancy Meeting You Here is a comfort novel and one that can be devoured in a short sitting. I’m sure all of us have wondered how our lives would alter if we could go back and re-do certain years, and so there’s a universality about this book that readers can relate to. It’s also quite a quirky read — the time travel, the eccentric characters, the novel within a novel.

The premise feels unconventional and unique, so fans of this genre will enjoy the story. Despite being written in third person and solely focused on Evie’s perspective, the book feels intimate and introspective, almost as if it were written in first person. The authors capture the relationship between Evie and Hugo incredibly well — the ups and downs, the chemistry and the tension. Both Evie and Hugo possess insecurities that threaten to throw a spanner in their achievements and career trajectories, and the authors manage the delicate balance of showcasing these characteristics and crafting them to be believable and realistic without appearing over-the-top.

“When she had snuck in well after eleven o’clock, her mum and dad had been on opposite sides of the couch sipping their respective glasses of wine, the tension in the air thick with hurt and disdain.”

There are a few moments in the novel that felt overtly pointed and therefore unnecessary, for example, when Evie is back working at the cinema and feels it’s important to educate her customers and colleagues on feminism and MeToo. This felt too didactic and preachy, borderline cringe. And it was a little too coincidental that a young Freddy would appear at the cinemas while Evie is working there.

Additionally, the ending was predictable but rushed, particularly Evie’s friendship with Ben. There is not as much character development for Evie as I would’ve liked — dating Hugo feels a bit manipulative and resembling entrapment, given how obsessed she is with him and how much she knows about him in the future. I’m not sure she fully registers how unsettling her behaviour is, although I do recognise it in a lot of women’s fiction.

“Hugo looked up at Evie and her heart skipped a beat. His face was so open, his eyes serious. At that moment, he didn’t look like the swanky, celebrity Hugo Hearst. He looked like an insecure man in need of affirmation. In fact, he seemed just like her.”

Punchy and fun, Fancy Meeting You Here is recommend for readers of romance and contemporary women’s fiction. Readership skews female, 25+

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

Fancy Meeting You Here
Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus
December 2021
Allen & Unwin Book Publishers

Devotion by Hannah Kent

Prussia, 1836
Hanne Nussbaum is a child of nature – she would rather run wild in the forest than conform to the limitations of womanhood. In her village of Kay, Hanne is friendless and considered an oddity . . . until she meets Thea.

Ocean, 1838
The Nussbaums are Old Lutherans, bound by God’s law and at odds with their King’s order for reform. Forced to flee religious persecution the families of Kay board a crowded, disease-riddled ship bound for the new colony of South Australia. In the face of brutal hardship, the beauty of whale song enters Hanne’s heart, along with the miracle of her love for Thea. Theirs is a bond that nothing can break.

South Australia, 1838
A new start in an old land. God, society and nature itself decree Hanne and Thea cannot be together. But within the impossible . . . is devotion.

Hannah Kent’s third novel Devotion centres around a Lutheran family in Prussia who flee religious persecution, boarding a vessel to South Australia. A queer love story set in the early-to-mid 1800s, our main character Hanne is considered an eccentric but odd girl – she doesn’t conform to what’s expected of her. And when she meets young neighbour Thea, the two form more than just friendship. Whilst there’s heartache in this novel, there’s also hope and optimism.

Separated into two distinct eras, the novel follows Hanne and Thea not only as they leave their hometown and venture afar with their villagers, but the novel also follow them as they come to understand what it means to love and be loved.

“The wind blew us to the forest. Hand in hand, skirts buffeted against our legs, hair stinging out into the air above, we let ourselves be carried to the only cathedral we had known together. As soon as we stepped through the shield of pines, into their soft shadow and quiet green, I felt the holy in the air.”

Devotion is structed around tragedy – before and after. Whilst we’re not quite prepared for the tragedy when it arrives, Hannah expertly weaves us through the journey as we lead up to it and also as we grasp the aftermath on the other side.

A significant portion of the novel takes place on the ship to Australia, a harrowing journey that takes six months and leaves many dead and unwell. The boat is not crafted for that many guests, and the food is scarce. When sickness takes hold in the ship, it ravages through the population.

The pacing is deliberately slow, taking the time to build tension and companionship between Hanne and Thea. Hannah’s description and writing style are her biggest strengths; she carves incredibly beautiful sentences that evoke imagery and emotion. She can capture connections between characters with the fewest of words.

“Night is unfurling herself now. The wind has picked up and clouds have blown in over the rising moon. It is growing dark. Through the trees I can make out lights winking across the valley floor. I imagine that I alone remain outside at this hour. Everyone must be at their dinners or prayers now.”

Admittedly, the final third of the novel – as the ship nears South Australia, and then as the village settles on their new land – was my least favourite section. Hannah dabbles in supernatural elements that felt quite removed from the initial tone of the novel. The voyeurism felt too removed from the original story, and the characters too disjointed for the love story to feel authentic anymore. Sometimes the perspective didn’t feel quite as concrete and I got confused whose story we were witnessing.

I suspect this part of the novel will be divisive for readers, particularly given how unexpected the shift felt. Regardless, at that point in the novel you’re so invested in the characters I suspect all readers will venture on.

“It has been a long time since I held a Bible. Scripture I once knew by heart has become adultered with my own words so that it speaks to a truth I know more keenly. But if I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of my family’s black book in my hands.”

Intricate, wholesome, lyrical and crafted elegantly, Devotion is recommended for literary readers. Readership skews female, 25+

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

Devotion
Hannah Kent
November 2021
Pan Macmillan Publishers

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerizing world of contemporary Seoul – a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret ‘room salons’ to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession, and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.

Navigating this cut-throat city are four young women balancing on the razor-edge of survival: Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive ‘room salon’ is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client; her flatmate Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite; Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy; and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.

Set in contemporary South Korea but with the atmosphere and tone of a dystopian novel, Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face explores the price we’d pay for beauty and adoration. In a city where it’s more common to have had surgery than to not, we meet four women struggling against the demands of society. If I Had Your Face explores inequality, poverty, consumerism, classism, wealth and the patriarchy.

If I Had Your Face is reminiscent of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, showcasing how hard it is for these characters to progress above their status. And to arise requires much sacrifice.

“But I do have to admit I feel a pinch of pride when someone asks if I have had surgery and I can say no. Our department head has gone so far as to make me promise not to cut my hair, which is really torturously unmanageable now that it hits my waist – MIHO.”

One of the things that I love most about Frances’ work is that you feel as if every scene launches mid-correspondence. You’re thrown straight into the story – the world – even from the beginning. There’s no unnecessary world-building or explanation. There’s no exposition that is plonked into the prose.

And whilst some may argue it’s jolting, like perhaps they don’t they have enough time to ease themselves into each character, I think this stylistic technique allows the novel to really pack a punch. Sitting at around 250 pages, the novel isn’t overly long, and the pacing is quick. We move between four different perspectives and each chapter cuts through time like one leap after another. There’s no time to dawdle in this story.

Admittedly, these characters aren’t supposed to be viewed as heroes of the story. They drink, cheat and deceive each other with what seems like little hesitation. They’re constantly comparing themselves to others, even if the act of doing that won’t achieve anything. If I Had Your Face shows us what society could resemble if our beauty was above all other priorities.

“Up close, I could see that her face was devoid of surgery – her eyes were single-lidded and her nose was flat. I would not have been caught dead walking around with a face like that. But clearly, from the way she walked and held her head, she came from the kind of money that didn’t need any – KYURI.”

Admittedly, the four different perspectives didn’t seem divergent enough to stand out. I found myself having to flick to the blurb quite a bit to remind myself who was who. Did we need all these characters? Wonna felt the weakest to me – the most isolated from the other characters. There was definitely scope to expand the other stories if the author dropped one POV.

Overall, I did feel like there wasn’t much of a storyline in the book. Because we jump between four different characters, and the book isn’t very long, it means we don’t spend a lot of time with each character and so each storyline feels underdeveloped. This is definitely a character-driven story over a plot-driven one.

“My grandmother often got into bitter fights over money. Sometimes it was with a shopkeeper who said she had cheated her, or sometimes it was with her sisters, who looked and talked like her and were just as nasty. Her only brother – the youngest of four siblings – had married a poor girl, and the abuse my grandmother and her sisters heaped upon her over the first few years of their marriage caused them to run away to China – WONNA.”

Punchy and bold, If I Had Your Face is recommended for literary readers. Readership skews female, 25+

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

If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha
July 2021
Penguin Random House Publishers Australia

The Survivors by Alex Schulman

Benjamin sees the shape of his two brothers trying to kill each other. It’s no worthy finale, but perhaps it’s also no surprise. How else had they expected this to end?

Three brothers return to the family cottage by the lake where, more than two decades earlier, a catastrophe changed the course of their lives. Now, they are here to scatter their mother’s ashes.

Benjamin, the middle son, drives the three of them down the old gravel road to the house, through a familiar landscape but also through time. Here they are as boys, tanned legs and hungry eyes, children left to themselves by remote parents; here they are as young men, estranged but bound together by the history that defines them, their lives spent competing for their father’s favour and their mother’s love in a household more like a minefield than a home.

In the intervening years, Benjamin has grown increasingly untethered from reality, frozen in place as life carries on around him. And between the three brothers hums a dangerous current. What really happened that summer day when everything was blown to pieces?

Translated from Swedish, Alex Schulman’s literary novel The Survivors centres around a dysfunctional family reunion between three brothers, congregating at their family lake house decades after a tragedy ripped the family apart.

Written in third person but following the perspective of middle child Benjamin, the novel follows two parallel storylines and moves between past and present – it is both a coming-of-age novel and a reminiscent tale that tackles long buried family secrets. Growing up, their parents don’t seem to hold much concern for their children – the parents are aloof, emotionally manipulative and distanced. Their mother is quite the complex character – easily angered, quick to blame Benjamin, limited emotional expression. The last Summer they spent at the family cabin proved deadly, and the family were never the same again.

“Mom was staring at him from halfway up the stairs. Her open robe, hair on end, pillow creases on her cheek. He couldn’t believe it, it was impossible. How could she suddenly just be there, without any warning at all? It was as if she’d never gone to bed last night, as if she had spent the night on the stairs, sitting there in the darkness and waiting in silence for the dawn, for this moment.”

Benjamin appears to be the most scarred by his childhood, so it makes sense that he’s the pivotal character in this story. Alex Schulman dances around the catastrophic events of their final holiday, circling back to it for moments of introspection and then thrusting us into another moment. It should feel jolting to the reader, but it works well in this context.

Naturally, the ‘present’ storyline doesn’t hold as much tension or anticipation as those chapters set in the past, but it does allow for an in-depth exploration of sibling relationship and familial dynamic. Guilt and repressed memories are running rife in this family, and it isn’t until the end that we come to understand the magnitude of what happened the last time this family went on holiday to their lake cabin.

“Benjamin stands down by the lake with a bouquet of dried buttercups in his hand. His brothers stand beside him. Nils is holding the urn. It’s heavy, and he constantly adjusts his grip on it, an increasingly baffled expression on his face, as if the weight of Mom has taken him by surprise.”

I do wonder if the twist comes too late in the novel. No spoilers, but there’s quite the surprise in the final few pages of the novel and then all of the sudden the book ends. If the twist were to be revealed a bit earlier, I think there would’ve been more capacity to let the reader sit with this news – we would have more time to question everything we’d just read throughout the story. Instead, the novel concludes, and it feels like an abrupt finish.

Additionally, the story itself is quite convoluted and sometimes hard to follow. The present storyline goes back in time, but the past storyline works in linear fashion, and I found myself having to re-read sections because the plot felt rather confusing. And until we hit some of the tense moments between the brothers, the pacing felt quite slow and drawn out.

“Nils shoves the urn with full force at his brother. Pierre isn’t ready for it and it lands on his chest. From the crack, Benjamin knows immediately that something has broken inside Pierre’s body. A rib or his sternum. Benjamin has always been able to see three steps ahead of everyone else.”

Tense and atmospheric, The Survivors is psychological suspense best suited for literary readers. Readership skews female, 25+

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

The Survivors
Alex Schulman
October 2021
Hachette Book Publishers

The One Impossible Labyrinth by Matthew Reilly

THE END IS HERE

Jack West Jr has made it to the Supreme Labyrinth.

Now he faces one last race – against multiple rivals, against time, against the collapse of the universe itself – a headlong race that will end at a throne inside the fabled labyrinth.

AN IMPOSSIBLE MAZE

But the road will be hard.

For this is a maze like no other: a maze of mazes. Uncompromising and complex. Demanding and deadly.

A CATACLYSMIC CONCLUSION

It all comes down to this.

For it ends here – now – in the most lethal and dangerous place Jack has encountered in all of his many adventures. And in the face of this indescribable peril, with everything on the line, there is only one thing he can do.

Attempt the impossible.

After seven books, Matthew Reilly’s The One Impossible Labyrinth is the final tale in the Jack West Jr series. After a 17-year long journey, this final book offers a satisfying conclusion to the series and will please fans who have been following along with each novel.

As usual with this series, The One Impossible Labyrinth picks up where the last book — The Two Lost Mountains — left off, with Jack and his team arriving at the last puzzle in an attempt to stop the collapse of the universe. We’re immediately thrust back into the action of the story.

This final novel speeds through obstacles and puzzles, weaving in historical storylines and the potential for alternate scenarios. Jack West Jr must once again think outside the box to save the day.

“Down in the shaft, Jack snapped up at the shout. And saw a silverman falling right at him! Suddenly, a strong metal hand — Smiley’s — pulled Jack aside and the falling silverman whistled past, missing Jack by inches — before plummeting further down the shaft.”

The One Impossible Labyrinth is a classic Matthew Reilly novel — quick, compelling storylines with imaginative and engaging puzzles. The book is filled with fast-paced action and authentic, realistic dialogue. Additionally, like all other novels in this series, the pacing is break-neck and consistent. Readers won’t feel like there are any lags in this latest one.

The villains in the novel have carried across from previous reads, so it allows for three-dimensional characters that truly feel like antagonists. Jack and his team must utilise the skills and knowledge they’ve acquired over the previous six books in order to defeat the enemy.

“Each of the obelisks was huge, easily forty feet tall, and they ran in pairs down the length of the bridge, creating a striking avenue. Lily and Eaton came to the jagged void in the bridge’s middle. Two obelisks stood at its edge like posts for a missing gate.”

Admittedly, the ending was slightly predictable — whilst some of our favourite characters were killed dramatically throughout the novel, the ‘bad guys’ all got their comeuppance in the end (although, admittedly, that does suit this genre).

Apart from the that, I felt there was definitely scope for a longer, more developed novel. Each stage of Jack’s journey felt a bit thinly described to keep the pace quick, but it meant I was left feeling like the action could’ve been fleshed out a bit more. Perhaps I just feel like this because I’ve been following the series for 17 years and was sad to see it ending.

“Even though it had a parachute, the seat landed hard, and as it hit the side of the mountain, the impact sent the three men on it scattering: Aloysius and Alby tumbled down the rocky hill, while Rufus was thrown onto a nearby ledge. Alby was knocked out cold. He slumped to the dusty ground.”

Since this is the final book in a 7-book series, it’s pretty clear that the intended audience are readers who are up-to-date with Jack West Jr. If you love action and thriller, and something easy to read perhaps on holiday, I’d definitely recommended picking up the first book — Seven Deadly Wonders — and giving this series a go. Another nail-biter from Matthew Reilly, the readership for this book skews male, 16+

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

The One Impossible Labyrinth
Matthew Reilly
October 2021
Pan Macmillan