JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

The Easy Way Out by Steven Amsterdam

The Easy Way Out is a poignant, moving novel about a legal suicide assistant named Evan who is tasked with handing out cups of Nembutal to patients wishing to end their life. Steven Amsterdam has crafted a novel that fictionalises euthanasia and forces readers to ask questions that prove quite difficult to answer: if you could help someone in pain, would you? Would you help someone end their life?

Steven’s latest novel explores a world where euthanasia is accessible for those who have need for it, thanks to the development of ‘Measure 961’. Evan’s job is legal, but he keeps it a secret from his friends. He is closely monitored by hospital authorities. His actions are filmed, and when he hands his patients the cup of Nembutal, there can be no hint of coercion and no evidence of emotion in his face. He is not allowed to intervene in the process.

But over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that emotional detachment is impossible when you’re in this line of work.

Evan seems in over his head, and he struggles to hide his compassion and care for the people he meets. Sometimes, Evan is the last person to be with them before their life is ended. Evan questions his own morality and the intentions of those closest to him, and he realises that the path he’s on might not be what he wants.

Evan is someone who keeps secrets. His friends don’t know about his job, and he keeps his personal life private from his ageing mother Viv, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. As Evan’s mother is coming closer and closer to the end of her life, Evan’s home life starts to parallel his work. He starts to consider the cost of his role, and whether he’s really happy with his role at the hospital. The Easy Way Out is a multi-layered novel centred around Evan’s role as a suicide assistant, but it is also centred around his relationship with his mother.

Steven Amsterdam’s characters are compelling, brilliantly-developed and realistic. Evan is in a relationship with Lon and his partner Simon, but he keeps this private from his mother. And his relationship with his mother is frayed and strained.

At times the story felt slow, with not enough plot happening to propel the reader forward. I found my reading pace slowing, waiting for some kind of focused direction. This was a reflective novel that is designed to encourage discussion and questions, but at times it did seem to lag and tire the reader.

The Easy Way Out is a thought-provoking novel that readers have to be mentally prepared to tackle. Steven has crafted an enjoyable read that I’d definitely recommend to others.

Eleanor by Jason Gurley

Jason Gurley’s Eleanor is a literary fantasy novel that follows the lives of identical twins Eleanor and Esmeralda, whose lives are affected not only by misery, tragedy and unlikely circumstances, but they are moulded by otherworldly, fantastical events.

Don’t be discouraged by the fact that Eleanor is classed as a fantasy novel. At first I was deterred and didn’t know what to expect. But Jason Gurley has constructed wonderful prose and a lot of this novel is set in a contemporary, American town.

The novel travels across a few different time periods so that the reader can understand numerous tragedies that befell the Witt family. At the beginning of the book, we’re introduced to a young five year old girl called Eleanor, who’s mother enters the ocean for an evening swim and does not resurface. But the novel is not about this Eleanor, but her granddaughter, also named Eleanor.

Years later, in 1985, the granddaughter Eleanor is in a car accident alongside her mother Agnes and her twin sister Esmerelda. Her twin sister is unfortunately killed, and over the next eight years, Agnes’ guilt, resentment and shame drives her to become a withdrawn, alcoholic mother who blames Eleanor for the death of Esmerelda.

What begins as a beautiful, heartbreaking coming-of-age novel about Eleanor taking care of her sick mother and trying desperately to still live a normal life soon becomes quite a different novel. Eleanor’s life is disrupted when she starts disappearing in front of her family and friends, losing time as she is transported to another world. In this other world, Eleanor meets Mea, who lives in a fish bowl where she can see all of time and space. The reader is also introduced to The Keeper, a woman who holds omnipotent power over a grey forest and resents Eleanor for invading her domain.

At first, Eleanor’s disappearance and transportation to these other worlds seems to be conceived by an unrestrained imagination. But as the reader delves further into the book and the complex make up of the family timeline, we realise that Eleanor really is being transported to a ‘limbo’ world in which her sister Esmerelda ended up when she was killed in the car accident eight years earlier.

Jason Gurley has crafted a dysfunctional family with smooth, easy to read prose. Eleanor’s family is fractured over the eight years since Esmerelda’s death, and when Eleanor is unknowingly transported out of her contemporary, ordinary world into the strange and dreamlike world that her sister now inhabits, she is confused and doesn’t know what is happening to her. She is injured quite significantly every time she is transported back to her world, and so much time has passed that she finds it extremely difficult to explain her absences.

Despite being a beautifully written, well-rounded novel, the alternate timelines and the interchange between worlds forms a disjointed narrative. The reader is left confused at times, uncertain about the hidden meaning or significance of certain plot points. Some sections of the novel, particularly the chapters following The Keeper, seem undeveloped and the constant interchange between worlds jolts the reader and disinterests them. The story did feel like it dragged on a little bit, and I found myself wishing it would end about 100 pages before it actually did.

Eleanor is a novel that plays with time, and it explores grief, circumstance, consequences and family. It is certainly an intriguing, daring novel with both literary elements and fantasy fiction tropes. The characters are engaging, dimensional and raw – I’d recommend Eleanor to fantasy readers and also literary fiction readers who aren’t deterred by the fantastical elements woven throughout.

Rembrandt’s Mirror by Kim Devereux

Rembrandt’s Mirror
Kim Devereux
September 2015
Published by Atlantic (Allen & Unwin in Australia)

Rembrandt’s Mirror, set during the Dutch Golden Age, brings artist Rembrandt into the limelight. The book takes place during the painter’s later years, plagued by a long series of personal and financial losses.

The novel is anchored by the three women in in his life. Firstly, the reader is introduced to his wife Saskia, who dies in 1642 and leaves Rembrandt paralysed by grief. Secondly, Geertje, his housekeeper and lover. And finally, we are introduced to Hendrickje, a young maid who becomes his last great love and muse.

Rembrandt and Hendrickje’s love affair is a gradual start, with Hendrickje internalising a lot of her doubts to the reader. The author has deliberately focused on the women in the book so as to not give away much of what Rembrandt feels or thinks. He remains a mystery throughout the whole book, seen through the eyes of others.

The master’s other great gift is to make people love him

There is a sense of voyeurism in this novel. Even before Hendrickje and Rembrandt begin their relationship, she watches him and observes his affair with Geertje. Their affair is rough and not based on love. Geertje and Rembrandt meet every night in his room and Hendrickje follows and watches, surprised by their sexual relations outside of marriage and surprised by the almost animalistic nature of their night-time rendezvous.

Hendrickje grows intrigued by their affair, and through that, the reader first starts to understand her as a character. She’s naive and young, but she’s also extremely observant and intelligent. This book is set in a time where women were either a wife, a widow, a virgin, or they were a whore, and Hendrickje’s budding relationship with Rembrandt’s is a catalyst for her sexual awakening. She lusts after him, but is also mortified by the prospect of being with a man that she is not married to.

Although Rembrandt’s Mirror felt a little dry at times with slow pacing, it was a well-written character-driven novel set during a time period that I hadn’t read much about before. Each chapter is named after a painting and the stylistic prose of the book is both visual and artistic.

Kim Devereux was able to take a historical figure known to many, and allow readers to better understand who he could’ve been. She still allows a lot of mystery surrounding Rembrandt, but I think the whole point is that not a lot of people really knew who he was and what he thought. This is a rich, insightful fiction novel that I’d recommend to others.

The Courtesan by Alexandra Curry

The Courtesan
Alexandra Curry
June 2016
Published by Allen & Unwin

The Courtesan is a historical fiction novel set during the Qing dynasty, and the book follows Sai Jinhua’s life during the extraordinary twilight decades of this dynasty. This novel was inspired by the real-life courtesan Sai Jinhua, who to this day, is still considered a legend in China.

It’s hard to believe that this is a debut novel for Alexandra Curry – she has crafted a tale that takes the reader from the depths of the Chinese empire to the palaces of Vienna. In 1881, seven-year-old Jinhua is left an orphan, alone and unprotected after her mandarin father’s summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth. Jinhua is sold to a brothel-keeper and subjected to horrible torture at the hands of the men who visit her. She struggles to understand where her life is now headed, but she holds on to her father’s legacy to remain headstrong to survive.

Soon after she is brought into the brothel, a troubled scholar takes Jinhua as his concubine (mistress) and she becomes enthralled in his tumultuous relationship with his first wife, who is extremely jealous of Jinhua.

San Jinhua is a determined, strong character. She’s smart enough to understand the world she inhabits, but confident enough to try and break the mould and adapt her life to suit her needs. She stays strong, even when she shouldn’t. She is able to reminisce on her bond with her father to get her through some rather tough circumstances, and even though this book can be quite distressing to read in some parts, it highlights a part of Chinese history that some may have since forgotten.

The Courtesan is a raw, moving and inspired tale of loss, survival and determination. We follow Jinhua through her worst moments and watch her build herself up as a survivor amidst a large amount of death and defeat. There are particular scenes in the novel that Alexandra thankfully decided to skip over. We don’t have to read about the horrific, painful process of Jinhua’s feet being bound, only the lead up to it as the brother keeper prepares Jinhua for the process. Again, we don’t have to read too many detailed scenes of Jinhua’s sexual assaults, but we do read about her recovery and how each experience affects her afterwards.

The Courtesan highlights the history of China’s relationship with the West and distills Jinhua’s journey of untold miles to discern what is real and what is abiding. I really love historical fiction and this novel didn’t disappoint. It’s masterfully crafted and exquisite in detail and description. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys adult fiction or historical fiction.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

The Passage
By Justin Cronin
May 2011
Published by Hachette

The Passage is a novel that I’ve tried to read many times before. It’s intimidating length of 950 pages and not the actual story was always what deterred me from finishing it previously. And now that I’ve finished it (after what felt like a really long week of reading), I’m glad I revisited the series and picked up the book again.

Published in 2010, Justin came up with the premise of the story after he asked his daughter Iris what he should write about. ‘A girl who saves the world,’ was her answer, and thus The Passage was born. The Passage is the first novel in a trilogy, preceding The Twelve and the recently released City of Mirrors. It’s about a viral outbreak of vampires in California that soon spreads all over the world. What starts as twelve vampires, soon turns into an apocalypse.

We meet the main character, Amy, when she is abandoned by her mother at the age of six. She is then pursued and imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind the government experiment ‘Project Noah’. But she is no vampire. She can hear the others’ thoughts, and the thoughts of their victims, and she doesn’t age. She stays the same age for years after the outbreak and becomes a vital character in the series. She is the key to saving the world from this viral apocalypse.

The novel is broken up into eleven parts and starts right at the beginning of the story, detailing Project Noah and how the experiment went nightmarishly wrong. We are then thrust almost 100 years into the future where a group of teenagers are trying to survive in post-apocalyptic America, avoiding Virals and trying to stay alive. And then the teenagers cross paths with Amy, who is still the same age she was at the beginning of the book. The teenagers soon realise that Amy holds the key to everything.

This book is just as fantastic as it is long. Justin has a talent for weaving sentences together that paint a strong visual. He has written so many main characters into his tale, and yet every one of them is important. Their stories all intersect at the right moments and there isn’t one thread that could be removed from the equation. I imagine this is why the book never made it to a film, but would be fantastic for our television screens.

The Passage explores survival, devastation, mourning, regret, and friendship. This isn’t a typical vampire novel, and in fact the word ‘vampire’ is only mentioned half a dozen times in a joking manner. Justin has taken vampires and adhered them to the ‘apocalyptic’ narrative to make this book something new – something original. The characterisation in this book is brilliant. Justin gives us so much about their backstory and their thoughts, doubts and dreams, that the reader feels like they know all of these characters better than the characters know themselves. The author has left us wanting more, and even though it feels like we know everything about them, I can tell that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Justin Cronin is an extremely talented writer. His writing is fluid and realistic. Some might say this book is too long for what it is, but to reduce the word count would reduce the quality of the characters and the story. Their interactions and their struggles throughout this story are what make up the book, just as much as the plot does. This is the perfect example of both a plot-driven AND character-driven novel.

The Passage is an epic tale of catastrophe and survival, and introduces an amazing cast for the trilogy. There are many questions left unanswered at the end of the novel, prompting readers to hurriedly read book two. This book, if you can survive it’s length, really is worth the time.