Happy reading, Mum

LITTLE GODS

by Jenny Ackland (Allen & Unwin, $33) Reviewed by Maggie Trapp In Little Gods, Australian writer Jenny Ackland gives us a rich account of family, love, loss and long-held secrets. This is the story of Olive Lovelock during the summer she turned 12. Smart, determined and a little lost, Olive — “trapped in the savage act of growing up” — is beginning to realise there are secrets her family has not yet figured out how to tell her.

That summer, her world is all about climbing trees, collecting wishbones, devising secret hideouts with her cousins, diving off the high dive into the neighbourhood pool, first kisses and avidly consuming books about oddities of the natural world such as “how in 1977, 500 dead and dying blackbirds and pigeons cascaded to the streets of California for hours and hours”.

She is forever immersing herself in worlds of wonder and drawn to books detailing grotesqueries.

Olive watches the neighbourhood bully’s extended family in an attempt to make sense of his world and becomes preternaturally attached to a raven she communes with. She names the raven Grace and Ackland’s gorgeous prose shimmers as she shows us the bird the way Olive sees it.

Olive is also entirely taken with an old ouija board she finds at her aunt’s house and hounds her eccentric relatives for answers to her pressing questions about the family’s past. She knows her mother is strangely distant and she turns to her two aunts for comfort and answers. But she doesn’t get the answers she’s looking for.

In fact, during this summer she finds out that not only are answers elusive; often she doesn’t even understand what the questions are. Olive has set out to discover something about her family and this novel, which begins as a seeming caper story of an ornery, persistent, charming 12-year-old-girl, becomes more than that. It is a complex story of love, connection, and forgotten or never acknowledged facts that forever change lives.

Ackland’s is a novel about secrets and wonder. The book invites us into Olive’s world and we come to realise that this sensitive, peculiar girl is only just becoming aware of the secrets the adults in her life are working to forget.

WHISTLE IN THE DARK

by Emma Healey (Penguin Random House, $37) Reviewed by Maggie Trapp When we think of the typical mother-daughter storyline, we assume it’s the daughter who’s misguided and lost; that she’s the character who will experience some sort of crisis leading her to re-recognise, re-appreciate and renew her connection with her mother.

Emma Healey, who won the Costa Book Award for First Novel with Elizabeth is Missing, turns this trope on its head in her second book, Whistle in the Dark. This is a novel whose central fact seems to be the mysterious disappearance and reappearance four days later of 15-year-old Lana. But readers come to realise that the more lost character is Lana’s mother. Jen seems unsure of herself, her assumptions steer her off course and her neediness gets in the way of seeing who her daughter really is.

The novel opens just as Lana has been found. The first words we read and that Lana hears when she regains consciousness are from her mother: “This has been the worst week of my life,’ Jen said.

Clearly, something is terribly amiss with Lana. Was she abducted? Did she run away? But even more clearly we can see something is also alarmingly amiss with Jen. Her daughter has returned safely from a harrowing experience and the first thing Jen thinks to do is to consider herself and to engage in blame and guilt. This is a mother who might be just as troubled as her teenage daughter. We see Jen loves Lana fiercely and we also see that Jen, like anyone, sometimes chafes under the weight of her feelings. We come to know and love Jen in all her failed, frenetic, well-intentioned blunderings. She’s certainly not a perfect mother but someone in whom we can all recognise a part of ourselves. Healey’s story is a reminder of the complex of feelings that both mothers and daughters are mired in.

The magic of Healey’s novel is that we come to love both Jen and Lana. Both mother and daughter are complicated, irritating, yet endearing characters who each learn to grow up and we leave the novel surprised by the ways in which the mother-daughter nexus is strengthened.

THE LACEWEAVER

by Lauren Chater (Simon & Schuster, $35) Reviewed by Bernadette Rae Lauren Chater’s first historical fiction novel is a heartbreaking war story in which two young women fight for survival against Stalin — the man and his terrible mission — and the appalling Baltic invasion by Hitler’s Germany that follows. It is 1941 and Katarina is growing up on a farm in rural Estonia among family, friends and the knitting circle where women preserve their country’s heritage in the exquisite patterns of their traditional shawls.

Lydia lives in suffocating luxury in Moscow until her dramatic escape in search of truth and her mother’s Estonian past brings her to Kati’s home town.

Traumatic violence and loss eventually bring the two close in the forest camp where they and other straggling survivors face the harsh realities of their ripped-apart lives, finding a desperate kind love in the arms of two heroic young men and uncovering a unique connection through the patterns of their scarves.

Chater’s strictly narrative style and great attention to detail makes for a slow start in the reading but the sheer drama and skin-crawling action of her skilful storytelling is ultimately gripping.

Her account also brings a haunting feminine perspective to the ravages of war. The power to bring comfort and the continuance of the knitting at every stage of the story is more than symbolic of women’s birth-right to nurture and preserve in both material and spiritual ways under almost unthinkable conditions.

An epilogue, dated 1953, gives Katarina has the last word:

“One day we will go back.

“Until then, we sing songs and tell stories to our children. We knit together in the darkest hours before dawn, when the silence is too great to bear alone. One stitch at a time.

“That’s what I say to Lydia when she appears at my door, her hand balled around the yarn. With every stitch we heal ourselves.”