Ship Kings 02 Voyage of the Unquiet Ice

Review

I love this series. The Ship Kings is fast becoming one of my favourite modern children's series, along with Michelle Lovric's The Undrowned Child, and Helen Dunmore's Ingo (sensing a sea theme, anyone?) The second installment in the Ship Kings, Voyage of the Unquiet Ice, had me enthralled from the get go. If you seriously want adventure - good, old-fashioned adventure, but at the same time modern and fresh - then Ship Kings are the books for you.

Andrew McGahan is a great writer - he knows how to enthrall, how to invoke emotion, how to write beautiful passages that portray a character's feelings, without being pretentious and flowery. Voyage of the Unquiet Ice also benefited greatly from upping the pace a bit: one of the things I thought the first book had working against it. This book, however, is pretty much a non-stop adventure - it is thrilling and dangerous and pushes the characters to their very limits, and it perfectly captures the wonder Dow feels setting out on his first real adventure at sea.

Once again the descriptions of the ocean, and the connection people have to it, are wonderful. The descriptions in general are wonderful - once we get to the 'unquiet ice', McGahan throws us into the cold, the wet, the eerieness, the stillness, the danger, the terrible beauty of the icebergs. The atmosphere leaks onto the pages. The way Dow's life on the ship is described is very informative, but never dry.

I really enjoyed the characters in Voyage of the Unquiet Ice. They are a terrible, brutal, and fascinating bunch, and Dow is a great character to navigate the waters around them. I also found the political side to the story (something which generally loses me in fantasy) easy to comprehend and extremely interesting. Having ship kings politics play out in the background while Dow embarks on his adventures gives the story urgency and weight.

Read these books. Do it. You may struggle to get into them at first because they are quite dense - but persist, because they are fabulous. I haven't enjoyed such a well-written book since I read Seraphina last year. Can't wait until the third one.

Lost Voices by Sarah Porter

Review

Mermaid fiction is one of my guilty pleasures when it comes to reading, and Lost Voices has been high on my list of ‘to-reads’ for aggggeeeees. I finally found it available in Australia through one of our smaller publishers, when I was uploading the new release files at my bookstore. Yet another reason why working at a bookstore is totally amaze!

Lost Voices is a unique mermaid story, quite different to the usual fare you get with YA paranormal fiction. There is no big love story, or triangle (although I believe that will be developed in future books), the premise of ‘becoming’ a mermaid is unique, and the story is pretty much entirely set in the ocean – i.e., the mermaids are not half-human, and don’t get around on land, and can’t go to school and all that YA-ish stuff. I really, really, loved the choices Sarah Porter made when constructing her story. The mermaids also do mermaid-ish stuff – sink ships, covet and steal human treasures, drown seamen by singing to them, live in caves. I think Porter obviously really loves mer-mythology, and that was what primarily kept me reading.

I would like to see, in future books, the mer-world expanded on though – I would like to be taken deep within that oceanic world, as Porter’s descriptions of sea-life are interesting, but mostly pretty and harmless. I would like to meet some more mer ‘tribes’, and I am interested to see how pear-shaped things get when humans begin to learn of the mer existence.

My big gripe with Lost Voices is that I really disliked, or didn’t enjoy, most of the characters. They are all mostly vain and shallow and silly, as I guess teenage mermaids should be, but I think there is room to go deeper, as is hinted at with the mermaid Kat. I REALLY couldn’t stand the ‘so hip’ way a lot of the mermaids talked, and personally I was glad at the end of the book when Luce decides that maybe that tribe isn’t for her. The best parts of the book are when the mermaids are in action, doing their mer-thing, instead of talking like Mean Girls rejects and squabbling over designer clothes.

Lost Voices certainly piqued my interest to read the rest of the series – if only it would build on the darkness, the haunting loveliness that appears in flashes, then I would be completely sold.

First published in July 2011

In Australia, November 2012

Night Beach by Kirsty Eagar

First published by Penguin, 2012

It was important to me, that this book be brilliant. Kirsty’s Raw Blue is still one of the best YA books I’ve ever read. Night Beach covers similar territory - teen angst, identity, the beach, very Australian. I was so ready for her lovely writing, characters and story to sweep me away.

I admire the ambition of Night Beach. I think its gothic inclinations are rather beautiful – the imaginative ideas, the way they gel with the contemporary story. But I feel as if it wasn’t a successful melding, and I can’t really say why. I don’t know, I think it’s a mix of being a little too overwrought, a little too long, maybe even not feeling Eagar’s confidence with what she was doing. It might be that I think it all got a little indulgent? Whatever it is, I found (in the second half of the book especially) that it all got a little overdone and overworked, and all the single lovely things I’d enjoyed about the first half of the book all got a little eaten up by the complexities of the second half.

There are some Raw Blue moments that I really loved. Some of Abbie’s thoughts, the way the atmosphere builds and heightens, especially in a terrific scene that simply involves Abbie in her house, trying to walk upstairs. Wow. The gothic-flavoured moments of dread are electrifying. Of course, being a lover of the sea, I enjoyed once again the idea of Abbie drawing comfort from the ocean. Sometimes even I can’t explain my emotional connection to the sea, but hey, Eagar does it for me. She really gets that unknowable, sometimes terrifying power the ocean can have, and it heightens the atmosphere in the book.

I think Night Beach could have done with an extra edit. I would have liked to see all the little sub-plots (the baby-sitting, the Hollywood thing, her Dad and the new baby) tied together, or worked into the gothic narrative a bit more. The painting sub-plot is really the only thing that is worked fully and successfully into the supernatural elements. Also, the whole mystery surrounding Kane and the boys and what happened on the island – perfectly plausible, but I think I wanted something more.

I understood where Abbie was coming from; that deep, consuming ache for someone. But I wanted to shake her a little. I did find her a bit tedious at times; Carly in Raw Blue was full of emotional baggage but she was never, er, pathetic. But I understood her attraction to Kane, and I think her longing was captured realistically.

Hmm. An ambitious, unique, and frequently lovely book. Not 100% sold though.

The Coming of the Whirlpool (Ship Kings 01) by Andrew McGahan

First published by Allen & Unwin, 2011

How to describe this book? It is quite unlike any book I’ve read in a while – not quite fantasy, not quite YA, not quite children’s, not quite a high seas adventure tale. It is a mixture of all these and more.

It is quite literary. You have to be quite dedicated to reading it. At least I did. I have picked it up and put it down since the start of the year. But the last quarter I read in a couple of days. The last quarter is where it all pays off – for me, where the story all comes together. I wasn’t sure about the book or the style or the story until the last quarter, when The Coming of the Whirlpool did indeed sweep me up in the awe and the adventure of the sea and sailing and Dow’s world. Somehow I forgave the slow pacing and ponderous nature of the first half to two thirds, the relatively little action, because the end of the story feels so rewarding, and I get the feeling McGahan knew exactly what he was doing all along.

In an interview with Fancy Goods, McGahan says The Coming of the Whirlpool belonged to the type of fantasy that concerns itself with the wonder and adventure and mood of its own strange world, and less about the complexity of its politics or relationships. The world he has created here feels wonderfully unique, and is focused upon the power and intrigue of the sea. This sense of wonder is palpable. Not only because of Dow, because he is so strongly attracted to the sea himself, but also just because of the way McGahan writes about the ocean. I have my own fascination with the ocean/sea, and McGahan just captures so well the frightening power of it, its terrible beauty, its secrets and mystery. This is the kind of writing where you really can hear the sounds and see what is being described – it is all so vivid and immediate.

I love that there is a map included at the front. I love maps. I love checking places off against a map, of tracing the character’s journey and movements. It is also a beautifully designed book.

Not everyone will enjoy this – the pacing is slow, the mood is reflective, the language can at times be quite archaic. But as you read along the writing and the atmosphere creeps under your skin, and then kind of bursts out at the end. To me, this book went from a two star to a four star book by the end, and I am actually (very rare for me) intrigued enough to read the next in the series – The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice.

Siren, by Tricia Rayburn

First published by Penguin in 2010

I’m not one to normally jump on book fads or ‘next big things’, but I will jump on the mermaid bandwagon. Except perhaps it isn’t really jumping, because I have always read mermaid books ... there’s just a whole more lot of them at the moment, and many, I’m sure, to come. You can see more of my thoughts on mermaids by clicking on the ‘mermaid’ tag at the bottom of this post. But if you didn’t – and I know you probably didn’t: who cares, right? ;-) – then I guess I should say again: I love mermaids. They have always been my favourite fantasy/mythological creature, even perhaps one of favourite things. Who doesn’t love an outrageously irresistible beauty in a sea-shell bra?

Siren turned out to be better than I was expecting. Quiet, afraid Vanessa loses her sister Justine in a freak cliff-jumping accident while on holiday at their vacation home in Winter Harbour. Everyone assumes Justine’s death was accidental. But then other bodies, all men, start washing up around Winter Harbour. They are all grinning from ear to ear. Vanessa, with the help of would-be lover Simon and Justine’s grieving boyfriend Caleb, does some investigating. What is the conclusion she comes to? You guessed it – mermaids. And as the body count rises, Vanessa comes closer and closer to the truth about herself.

I liked the setting. It held the story together, it was an effective set-piece, it was slightly ominous and claustrophobic and Rayburn got the holiday vibe just about perfect.

There was a good ration of mermaid to human action. There was even some scenes below the waves, which is, I imagine, hard to do. Often I feel mermaid books don’t use the ocean enough, use the power of creatures lurking beneath, of a whole other world existing. It is all speculative in the mind of the heroine. But I felt I got my money’s worth in Siren. Even though I knew exactly where the story was going, there was a nice atmosphere of mystery about ‘what lies beneath’.

I quite liked the writing. The prose is nothing special but it does what it should and I kept my cringing to a minimum. Of course there are typical para-romance tropes but that’s to be expected. I didn’t quite believe the plot point about ‘freezing Winter Harbour’. And I didn’t like when Vanessa’s Mum told her she was always the beautiful one, she has always had it all but just couldn’t see it; guys have always loved her etc etc. That felt a little bit indulgent. Some reviews I’ve read had expressed discontent with the way Rayburn doesn’t always tell us everything and how Siren jumps from scene to scene, often with no explanation. I didn’t mind. It’s good for the reader to have to work a little sometimes.

No real strong feelings about Vanessa. She was a bit nothing to me. So was Simon. I did like that the real relationship focus was on Vanessa and her sister, and even to some extent with her parents, rather than just being all about Simon. That’s refreshing.

All in all, not too bad. Pretty harmless and a satisfying read for a lover of mermaids. I might even read the next in the series.

Literary Musings

"It's a bit magic, the sea, I think; put its call in you, and forever after it can tweak you by the nose, by that smell, any time."

Undine by Penni Russon

First published in 2004 by Random House Australia

I really love Penni Russon. I have done a few writerly things with her and found her a really fantastic teacher; seen her on some panels and regularly check in with her lovely blog, http://eglantinescake.blogspot.com/. Despite this, I have never actually read one of her novels. I’m not really sure how that happened, but I saw Undine at the library about a month ago and snatched it up.

Undine is a coming-of-age story that mixes contemporary YA with some magical elements and a little bit of mythology. Undine is sixteen, and going through a bit of a rough patch with her usually beloved mother, Lou. She keeps hearing a voice: Undine, Undine, it’s time to come home. She has also found herself the recipient of some unusual and frightening powers, and with the sudden attentions of not one but three guys. Her best friend and next-door-neighbour Trout is the only one who really fully understands her powers and can help, but the unreciprocated crush he harbours for Undine makes things a bit complicated. When Undine finally follows the voice, she finds it harder and harder to not give in to the power inside her ... which may just have consequences for everyone.

Russon is a lovely writer. Her prose here is dreamy and whimsical and matched quite perfectly to Undine’s experiences. It is also quite elemental, by which I mean the prose kind of snatches bits of the sky and the earth and the air and sensation and feeling and loops them in and out of the paragraphs. There is an ease to reading this book.  A few times I thought it was a little overdone, specifically with how Undine was feeling, but then again it does mimic that kind of angsty disconnection of the teenage years.

There are some cute characters – I love Trout and his endearing awkwardness and I loved little Jasper – he was so very cute without being annoyingly cutesy. Undine’s other two love interests were okay but I kind of wished that not every boy Undine encountered fell in love with her. I understood why Russon may have written it that way but stories where the main character has to deal with all these people being in love with her (gosh, that’s just so darn hard ;)!!!) do tend to annoy me a little bit. Lou was quite fabulous, though – great portrayal of conflicting emotions and not just stereotyping her as a ‘mother figure.’

A nice little coming-of-age story, paired very well with the magic elements and an overall theme of water and the ocean. I agree with some other reviews that the plot could have been filled out a little bit more, and the way Undine’s magic actually works, but I guess that’s what the second and third books are for.

The Secret of the Lonely Isles, by Joanne van Os

First published by Random House, 2011

I really wanted this book to be awesome, because I have a burning desire for just about every Australian kids or YA book to be a roaring success and excellent writing and awesomely mind-blowing. A few of them do end up being just that (and I inevitably end up raving about them on my blog). Others try valiantly to get there and almost do and I become quite fond of them. But then there are some that just prove disappointing on all accounts, and this is how I feel about The Secret of the Lonely Isles, Joanne Van Os' offering of a boy who goes on a sailing adventure with his Aunt to discover family secrets.

My feeling is that this was meant to be a tale of adventure aimed at children, except it lacks that feeling of excitement and danger. It feels by-the-numbers. It feels a little too simplistic and contrived. There is way too much set-up for too little pay off, and when ‘the adventure’ actually begins we are just about halfway through the book already, and by that time it feels like the author has already run out of ideas.

If this book was meant to be an adventure story, it should focus on the adventure – the thrill and hardship of sailing, that sense of secret and discovery, of the quickened pulse when you know that stakes have just got a whole lot higher. Adding in all the family problems at the beginning of the book does not bring much to the story, and once again it all just feels unoriginal and contrived – all the boxes have been ticked. In my opinion it would have been better to put them all on the boat to begin with and have the problems festering and causing tension and becoming claustrophobic within the confines of the boat. Having those first few chapters as just a basic info-dump of Jem’s family problems kind of feels like a cheap attempt at emotion-grabbing, and then it is all just resolved so simply and easily in a few pages at the end. This is not rewarding for the reader.

Also, writing dialogue/dialect exactly the way the characters sound and speak is annoying and hard to read. I didn’t enjoy and think there are ways around it so it isn’t so obvious to the reader. For me, the dialogue didn’t ring true to begin with – it seems to be aiming for something that it doesn’t quite reach.

I don’t think The Secret of the Lonely Isles is bad or the writing lazy, I just don’t think it quite achieved what it was trying to be – I think perhaps it just doesn’t understand its intended audience? Good potential, particularly for a school/educational readership, but I wouldn’t recommend.

Raw Blue, by Kirsty Eagar

Published by Penguin, 2009

Loved this book – it has become one of my favourite reads of the year. Once I started reading I didn’t want to put it down. Very deserving of all the praise I’ve seen heaped on it (and what encouraged me to finally pick it up and see what all the fuss was about).

Carly has dropped out of uni. She feels like a disappointment to her parents and moves away, working a monotonous kitchen job so she can devote the rest of her time to what she really loves – surfing. In the ocean, Carly feels like she belongs, and doesn’t have to think about what happened to her two years ago at Schoolies. Except then she meets local boy Ryan, and his presence in her life means she will have to face up to her problems, or let the past prevent her from truly being happy.

This is a great young adult novel that is authentic and involving. It has trauma and anguish but the story and emotion is always wonderfully controlled. There is a quality of self-assurance to the writing – it is clear Eagar knows what she wants to say and has tapped into the best and truest way of saying it. This is not a sentimental book, and that’s because the focus is on Carly’s anger. It  is the anger that provides the fuel for the story – it sets up the pacing, the themes, the prose. Despite all the emotional brevity, Raw Blue feels lean and whipped into shape. There is an urgency to it that is quite addictive – I was drawn in by how far Carly could push herself and let others push her until she just completely cracked.

I grew up with the beach, and I love it, and Eagar too seems to have an obvious affection for the ocean, the surfing culture, and the people who are a part of it. This really shines through in her writing. Personalities are quickly drawn and dominate the pages in much the same way they dominate the ocean. Their nuances, the way they speak, their attitudes – I feel like I know these people. I do know these people. It is fascinating to see these familiar types observed and brought to life so realistically (and fondly, even if they are a total ass).

I just love this book because it really does feel so honest and real – the people and the situations are ones I have come across a million times before. And yet they are never boring or lazy; they are written in a way that makes me come to them with fresh eyes. I also think Eagar has excellently captured how it is to work in a kitchen, or ‘behind-the-scenes’ at a cafe or restaurant. I remember working in a few as a teenager, and I swear I could have transported myself into the pages of Raw Blue and I would hardly notice the difference.

Not a great deal happens in this book, and there is no big climatic moment. Carly just sinks deeper and deeper, and the good things that happen to her are really only distractions in her seeming intent to self-destruct. The last few chapters show the slow re-emergence of hope and recovery. And yet something about the story made me keep turning and turning the pages. I don’t often really come to ‘care’ about characters, but I did with Carly. I think it’s because despite all the crap and moping about, she doesn’t feel sorry for herself – she just gets on with it, using all her anger to drive herself forward.

A last two things I love about Raw Blue – the distinct Australian tone of it, and the fact that it deals with a university-aged teen. It was a refreshing change from YA that revolves around high school, and actually an age group that I feel in fiction often gets overlooked.

Merrow, by Ananda Braxton-Smith

Published by Black Dog Books, 2010

Let me begin by saying that I just love Black Dog Books as a publisher: their attitude, their enthusiasm, the children’s and YA titles they produce. I first discovered Merrow whilst browsing their site, and knew straight away it had to go on my reading list; I’m a sucker for a good coming-of-age story, but one possibly about a Merrow? That put me very much in the realm of The Little Mermaid, which is one of my favourite stories (book and film) ever. After reading it was also seeped in Manx folklore - another fascination of mine - I begun to have very high expectations.

Were they fulfilled? Yes. Ananda Braxton-Smith has written a charming little tale and I found it a delight to read from beginning to end.

What is a Merrow? If I have my Irish folklore correct – and I’m pretty sure I do, because as a teenager I very nearly cleared out the Celtic mythology section of the town library – it is the Irish equivalent of a mermaid. The females are beautiful, the males are not (!). They can also shape-shift between merrow, human and animal (mostly cattle) form by means of a red feather cap, sometimes a cape. Offspring of a marriage between a merrow and human will often be covered in scales.

This is the dilemma facing Neen: marked by her scales, she is both an outsider in the community and a young girl eager to reclaim the truth about her family and her self. This is what feeds the story and gives it an emotional brevity – we all want to know where we fit in the world.

And it is a wonderful  world Braxton-Smith creates. I love the way the characters speak; their vernacular, their quirks, and the stories they tell. I was familiar with many of the little folk tales that sprung up, courtesy of Ma Slevin, and it was great to see them getting page space. I love the relationship between Neen and Ushag and the way it develops. I love the way Neen views the world, and I love that the emotion here is raw and real and yet filtered through something distinctly otherworldly. I love the clash of the old and new worlds  and I love the way Merrow is so stubbornly unique.

Most of all I love the way Braxton-Smith uses words to evoke time and place and feeling. There are some very beautiful passages that make you feel the heat, the lethargy, of the summer, the movement of the ocean, or the sound of Scully’s fiddle as he plays deep into the night.

I loved this book. I think the best way I can describe it is imperfectly perfect.

"I looked upward and pictured how it might have been to sink forever into this dappling light; how its air would rise as the body sank, falling slowly, face to the sky, and all above just hair and bubbles."