Among Crows has a fascinating fantasy premise.
When Among Crows
Veronica Roth, NewSouth, $22.99
Veronica Roth’s Divergent series was one of the major YA dystopian fictions, alongside The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, that captured the imagination of the 21st century. Her latest novel, When Among Crows, mines folklore from the author’s Polish heritage. Monsters are mobsters in this alternate-world Chicago. Each family has cornered the black market in a different human emotion, and for Ala – a zmora – it is fear she feeds on. Unfortunately, Ala suffers under a curse that will claim her life, as it did her mother before her.
When a monster hunter, Dymitr, offers her a cure, she has reason to be sceptical. Such enemies of monsterkind split their souls to forge weapons against their foes. But Ala is desperate, and so is Dymitr.
He seeks a legend of the monster underworld, the witch Baba Jaga, and his motives might be as dangerous as they are mysterious. It’s slender dark fantasy with abbreviated world-building, but a fascinating premise.
Real Americans
Rachel Khong, Hutchinson Heinemann, $34.99
Real Americans explores the complexities of migration and psychology of class.
Fortune smiles upon intern Lily Chen, it seems, when the unpaid intern is swept up at the turn of the millennium by a whirlwind romance. Matthew is a financier whose family is heir to impossible wealth, and Lily’s life changes completely. She gives birth to a son, Nick, who surfaces later as a teenager, having never known his father – a stroke of luck, or the opposite?
Nick is determined to find out, and his questions steer a course further back into the family’s past, and the story of Mei, a Chinese scientist who fled to the US to escape Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Real Americans touches on a wide range of issues – the complexities of migration, the psychology of class, even genetic engineering – to illustrate how luck is and is not something you make yourself. Escalating social inequality is a major problem, but this novel does beat you over the head with its message in a way that borders on patronising the reader.
Pauline Menczer was a trailblazer who calls out bollocks when she sees it.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Surf Like A Woman
Pauline Menczer with Luke Benedictus, Affirm, $34.99
One of the many wonderful things about this memoir is that the story it tells is bigger than its protagonist. For Pauline Menczer, it wasn’t enough to tap into the joy of surfing, her natural talent and her competitive spirit to become world champion in 1993.
She also had to be a fighter. And she didn’t just fight for herself. Along with her female peers, she changed the face of surfing culture so that the women who followed wouldn’t have to cop the outrageous sexism, lack of remuneration and homophobia that she endured. Hailing from the “badlands of Bondi”, she calls out bollocks when she sees it.
But she’s also someone who is not afraid to be themselves and who knows how to have serious fun, despite struggling for decades with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Above all, she emerges as a thoroughly decent human being whose company it is a pleasure to keep right to the final page.
Tokyo Noir is more than a trip through the Japanese underworld.
Tokyo Noir
Jake Adelstein, Scribe, $36.99
It might be packaged as a hard-boiled, gonzo tour through Japan’s underworld, but this intricate tale keeps unfolding in unexpected ways. Jake Adelstein is an investigative journalist turned private eye specialising in due diligence.
His reporting on organised crime in Japan has helped usher in laws that have short-circuited the influence of the yakuza in Japanese society. And now there’s a contract on his life issued by an ex-organised crime boss. Then comes the 2011 earthquake, and it’s not just the nuclear reactor that goes into meltdown.
Adelstein is diagnosed with a liver tumour and his best friend’s leukemia relapses. Amid all this darkness, love blooms. It’s tempting to call this story Chandleresque, but there’s a depth of feeling and undercurrent of spiritual questing that goes beyond Chandler’s remit. Be prepared for a Zen twist in the tail.
This delightfully silly work is a spoof on a conspiracy theory.
Birds Aren’t Real
Peter McIndoe & Connor Gaydosm, Macmillan, $29.99
To spoof a conspiracy theory would seem to be an oxymoron. Conspiracy theories are self-spoofing – except to those who find them irresistibly convincing. But it may well be that the spoof is more powerful than the debunk – and it is certainly a lot more fun to read. This delightfully silly work is an “expose” of how the CIA eliminated all birds in the US and replaced them with surveillance drones.
The plot thickens when Birds Aren’t Real activists uncover CIA attempts to thwart JFK’s inquiries into their activities and find footage of “a small dark speck” hovering near the president’s motorcade at the time he is shot. The authors argue that the “speck” is a killer hummingbird drone.
Turns out the real reason the US went to war in Vietnam was to get the bauxite required to make the bird drones. Nothing is what it seems. You might want to reconsider that chicken egg you have for breakfast ...
A woman’s disappearance and her daughter’s efforts to find out what happened.
The Lady Vanishes
Alison Sandy, Bryan Seymour, Sally Eeles & Marc Wright, HarperCollins, $34.99
The tabloid tone of this true-crime podcast-turned-book is established in the opening chapter. “Some monsters lurk in the shadows ... but the worst monsters hide in plain sight ... They are your friends, your neighbours.” The Lady Vanishes concerns the disappearance of Marion Barter in 1997 and her daughter’s efforts to find out what happened to her. It also tells of the making of the podcast about this mystery, the journalists behind it and the subsequent inquest. At the dark heart of the story is Ric Blum, a conman with a criminal record and a history of duping women. Whereas a blow-by-blow account of the investigative process is all part of the drama of a podcast, it can become unwieldy when translated into book form. In this case, there is so much emphasis on the podcast and its team of journalists, and so little regard for narrative compression that the real story gets swamped.