This sounded doable. I really did want to be reading more again. Reading had been a core part of my personality ever since I was a kid devouring Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books by the stack, throughout my college years as the only English major to ever actually read everything that was assigned in literature classes, and into my adult life. But my kids were little, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a book with more words than pictures. And, I was a novelist, dammit! How could I not be reading?
In 2025, the notion that I should feel bad about eating candy or drinking a can of soda feels particularly outdated. It’s not like this is the 16th century and I have to worry about some overzealous cleric coming to drag me off to a convent in punishment for the sin of gluttony. What I do feel bad about, though, is the idea that there are people out there learning the same bullshit diet-culture lessons I was taught in the 1990s, and feeling actual guilt around the eminently human pursuit of consuming and enjoying sugar — or fat, or salt, or whatever the health bugaboo these “guilt-free” products purport to solve.
When is a novel like an archive? Or is it the other way around? On the most basic level, each represents a storage-and-retrieval system for information and memory. And yet, what does that mean in terms of narrative? Both the novelist and the archivist, after all, are storytellers, seeking patterns in the data and the details they have gathered. Both fulfill a necessarily subjective function in that regard. As Stacy Nathaniel Jackson observes in his first novel, The Ephemera Collector, “impressions aren’t that difficult to manipulate if you try hard enough.”
“Sour Cherry” is beautiful and harrowing. With a writing style that had me mesmerized from the first page, Theodoridou has an amazing talent for storytelling that’s so effective that the ending — while predictable and maybe even unavoidable — still stunned me and moved me to tears.
Rawson’s stated objective in writing this book is: “to interrogate how that shaping has happened, where it hides from view, what its consequences have been and whether uncovering its workings might help us change.” She succeeds in that goal, proffering a fresh understanding of reality – via deep insights into the present and penetrating pointers to a better future.
Unsettled: A journey through time and place results from Grenville’s wanderings through her family history. It is a beautifully written exploration of geography, spirituality and settlement. Those who come to Unsettled looking for the sparks of beautiful characterisation that make history visceral in her fiction, however, may be disappointed. In her attempt to grapple with history, Grenville prioritises a careful examination of the past that is often more concerned with systems of power and linguistic history. This makes Unsettled more of a thought piece than an intimate journey, as Grenville trips across New South Wales and records her observations and research.