Good Reads Lately...
The Anti Cool Girl (Rosie Waterland) - I listened to Rosie Waterland get interviewed on a podcast where she (or the podcaster, I forget) read an excerpt of her book and I was hooked...went looking for it that night on my Kindle and read it in 2 days. She grew up with two alcoholic parents and spent a lot of her time just trying to make sense of a world turned upside down regularly. She talks about everything (the day the housing commission kids found a dead guy in the bushes...who was her Dad; being abused in foster care; her bond/rivalry with her eternally cool older sister; dealing with anxiety and an eating disorder; navigating adult life/sex/employment/household cleaning without life lessons that others take for granted)...all of it with brutal honesty, humour and raw emotion. It might be too much detail or a bit harrowing for some...I had to keep reading so I could leave her in a happier place when I closed the book covers. I laughed, I cringed, I looked at experiences of my own in a different way.
Luckiest Girl Alive (Jessica Knoll) - About a girl who appears to have it all, and is hanging on to her perfect life with a vice like grip when an experience at a schmancy boarding school in her past re-surfaces and threatens to take everything she's worked for away. Read it because it was advertised as the next Gone Girl...it didn't make me want to throw the book across the room like the end of Gone Girl did :)
Primates of Park Ave (Wednesday Martin) - Real life account of a mother moving to the upper east side of NYC, and trying to fit in to what she discovers is almost another planet compared to her previous life merely a few boroughs away. Often segues into anthropological/scientific analysis of the trophy wives and their behaviour...I skipped through most of those parts. I was just interested to have a peek into an insanely different life where the height of your heels indicates your social status (flats = walking, crazy heels = you have a private driver)...how appearing to have it all to everyone else often covers a lot of sadness and dissatisfaction...how a woman of a higher statuses will physically charge into another woman walking towards her on the foothpath to assert her dominance in ranking...bonus points for brushing a Birkin bag against the lower status female who steps aside to let the matriarch pass. Unhinged yet fascinating.
The Girl on The Train (Paula Hawkins) - I've often imagined about the lives of those whose backyards face the Bendigo to Melbourne train line. For that reason I picked up this book about a girl who does just that on her trips to and from London, and happens to see something that the police are very interested in when a resident of one of those backyards goes missing.