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I’m frustrated that we require ‘women who did well in their respective fields’ articles and blogs, occasionally even allowing myself to wonder how much we still need them or how useful they are any more. But then our ‘prime minister’ and, worse, ‘minister for women’ (and yes, I’m using those rabbit ears extremely deliberately—I called […]

That ebook data records who does and doesn’t get through books isn’t surprising. That this data’s only just being tabled now is. The Guardian has just reported that Kobo announced that Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch—the bestselling book that won that a Pulitzer in 2014—was completed by less than half the people in Britain who bought […]

There are far, far worse ways to spend the steamy Sunday before Christmas than attending the preview of a film due to be released on Boxing Day. For starters, it’s great to see anything before its official release. It’s even better when you do so while simultaneously escaping the crowds and the heat. Into The […]

I have a love–hate relationship with best-of book lists. I find sometimes people try too hard to seem clever about what they’ve chosen and not hard enough about including honest-to-goodness good reads. But I am simultaneously unable to abstain from perusing said lists. I feel an innate need to gauge whether or not I think […]

Book Three of the His Fair Assassins series both aided and abetted my desire to take refuge from my overwhelming work and study load and alleviated and exacerbated my anxiety around ever successfully wrestling those work and study things into line. But I’m done reading the gripping historical fiction series now, I think, for there […]

The only upside to sustaining significant damage in the frankenstorm that swept Brisbane last week was that two books I was desperately waiting for arrived on the Friday, a day written off by power outages and clean-ups. Unable to face the damage to my apartment from 150 roof tiles being wrecked, and that now will […]

I’ve spent a lot more time than usual poring over and considering children’s books of late. That’s in part because friends are starting to have babies and I am a giver of books as presents for any and all occasions that require (even if that makes me the un-fun ‘auntie’ in these early years). I’ve […]

You know those days/weeks/months that are so bad you just want to go to bed, read a book, and block the world out? I’ve had one/all of those. So, despite having more deadlines than I can actually keep in my head and the reminders of which fair nearly inspire a full-blown panic attack, I took […]

I took a punt ordering children’s picture book Chicken Cheeks while on my everlasting quest to find great books about chickens. I am, after all, far from being in the book’s target audience. It was the title and the cover image that sold me. I mean, who can go past the words ‘chickens’ and ‘cheeks’ […]

I turned up to watch the Mockingjay: Part 1 film today, its official day of release, without any prep. I’d like to say that’s because I deliberately withheld re-reading the book or reading advance film reviews, but the reason is much more pedestrian: I’ve been so otherwise occupied with speedbumps I’ve hit in life that […]

It’s that time of year when we turn our thoughts to what the heck we are going to source for our loved ones without having to set foot in a physical, upselling store amid millions of similarly harried customers who may or may not have experienced or dished out some carpark rage on their way […]

Deeply personal, yet so public and permanently writ, book dedications always intrigue and more often confound me. Sometimes they’re so extraordinarily touching I’m dying to know the backstory. Other times they’re so obtuse I’m frustrated I don’t understand to what they’re referring. Often one of the last things written before the book goes to print, […]

It’s fitting to review a cookbook entitled Easy Weekends* while indulging in a rare, phone-less, relatively easy weekend myself. This recent-ish cookbook by award-winning and celebrity chef Neil Perry** arrived on my doorstep with perfect timing: it was late in the work week and I was yearning for a quiet couple of days in. With […]

Watching The Fault In Our Stars movie for the first time in public on a long-haul flight and without having read the book—and therefore not having been forewarned of its heart-wrenching plot twists—is arguably among one of the more foolish things one could do. In my defence, I didn’t crack and watch the film until […]

The ‘do something you love so you’ll never work a day in your life’ edict is both trite and too often touted. But in the case of Phillip Johnson, it’s probably the one time the saying should be applied: the award-winning landscape designer slash horticulturalist seems to truly have found his perfect-fit career. In the […]

If the author being the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee—and winner—isn’t impetus enough to warrant seeing what this memoir is about, nothing arguably is. Famous for advocating for education for all—male and female, all around the world—and for surviving a roadside assassination attempt by the Taliban, who were unimpressed with her efforts, Malala Yousafzai is […]

We’ve reached the book pile time again: the time where I have to wade through the teetering, nearly toppling pile of books next to my bed to pluck out a few suitable for a long-haul flight. This is starting to feel like a semi-annual blog post, but one that I feel is necessary as the […]

It’s B Day, or rather Bee Day! By the time you’re reading this, it will be Bee Day (unless you’re at home reading this on a Friday night, in which case I say more power to you). After a year of reading research, three beekeeping courses (first for native bees, then one each for langstroth-based […]

I’m sure the Germans have a word for when you get two pages into reading a book and realise it’s the second one in a series instead of the first. Whatever that word is, it applies to me, having just experienced that with Jeffrey Brown’s Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan. The ‘return’ should probably […]

Bespoke print magazines are undergoing something of a quiet-but-steady resurgence. At least, that’s the way it looks to me, admiring the works of such magazines as Cereal, Another Escape, and Smith Journal, and a few in between from afar. (I mean, if you haven’t been following what’s happening with Bristol Independent Publishers (BIP), you’re missing […]

Anyone who even vaguely knows me knows I recently adopted some former battery hens. (If by some fluke you’ve missed it, you can follow along via the #OperationChooken hashtag.) We’re coming up to celebrating one year of Randall and Coo (as I’ve named them) being cage-free (on 3 October it’ll be one year with me, […]

The book this post features—and therefore this post—is not safe for kids. It’s also not safe for work. The book’s about invaluable subject matter: grammar and punctuation. But it’s delivered in a far-from-the-traditionally-dry fashion. Penned by Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen, the co-authors of a similarly entitled blog The F*cking Word of the Day, The […]

Book covers are something of an obsession for writers, editors, and booksellers. A good cover sells itself, achieving the almost elusive combination of intrigue and aesthetic that makes you itch to pluck the book from the shelf to read its contents. Creating such a cover is, of course, part design skill, part muse-inspired, and part […]

You know you’re excited about a book’s impending release when you’ve literally instigated a countdown calculating the time until its release. And you’re emailing a friend and co-fan who happens to be in Europe for four months, telling her if she’s in doubt about returning to Australia, rest assured: the book will help smooth her potentially bumpy I’m-not-in-Europe-anymore arrival.

Silver Shadows, Book Five in Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy* spin-off Bloodlines, has just been released (Still with me? The series and spin-off and book titles can be confusing and I have to admit I still refer to everything as a Vampire Academy book).

It picks up where Book Four left off—if you haven’t read this yet, now’s the time to do the reading equivalent of lalalalala, AKA stop reading this blog post). That is, Alchemist extraordinaire Sydney Sage has been kidnapped and imprisoned by the Alchemists in an underground ‘re-education’ facility. Moroi lover Adrian Ivashkov is losing his mind with grief and frustration as he tries to use mental-health-destabilising spirit find out where she’s being kept.

With Sydney trapped in a seemingly-impossible-to-escape prison, I truly expected Rose and Dimitri to feature heavily in this tale (in truth, I expect that every book). But Mead surprised me and again kept them to cameos—she really does seem to mean what she said about being done with following their stories. That said, the way the book finishes has me convinced that the next one will surely see them come to the fore (in truth, I’ve thought that every book too).

The Silver Shadows contains less sassy repartee than previous books, but that’s both because people are trapped alone in various locations and in their heads, which makes the requirement of having someone to trade repartee with rather troublesome. Besides, the subject matter—torture, prejudice, and mental health and alcohol issues—makes for some reasonably bleak reading. In the most gripping, tale-inhaling manner, of course.

There are a few moments, though, such as when Sydney first encounters her uptight, Type A roommate, AKA ‘the Sydney Sage of re-education’. There’s also some banter about which car Adrian and Marcus should take on a roadtrip to find Sydney: a Mustang or a ‘lame yet highly fuel-efficient’ Prius that would require fewer stops and, therefore, hasten their mission.

The book touches on some more adult themes. And by adult, I mean challenging, life-changing stuff such as battling deteriorating mental health and grappling with feelings-suppressing alcohol addiction.

It handles it in a way that’s respectful, demystifying, and de-stigmatising, which is all you could ask of a young-adult text. (Forgive me for getting my responsible adult hat on, but hopefully the young adults and not-so-young adults reading the series will feel a little less hesitant to ask for help sometime if they ever need it.)

Overall, though, not a lot happens in Silver Shadows. At least, not compared with other Vampire Academy slash Bloodlines books. But the tension around Sydney’s circumstances and whether Adrian, who’s self-destructing, will be able to hold it together, propel the story tensely forward. It’s also setting the scene for a bigger shebang, which Mead cruelly (and by cruelly I mean niftily) drops on us in final words on the final pages.

Which means that, having inhaled the book that answered the year-long what’s-going-to-happen-to-Sydney-in-re-education-camp suspense, that suspense has now been replaced with what’s-going-to-happen-with-[I’m not going to issue that spoiler so soon after its release—suffice to say, the plot twist and its ramifications are big] agony.

What I am going to say is that Mead had better been well on her way to writing Book Six. Let the countdown begin.

*As a side note, the covers continue to be terrible. I’m glad someone’s finally shifting the Vampire Academy titles to a more generic VA. They need to do similarly with the Bloodlines series. Pouting generic blondes and brunettes don’t cut it. For starters, Sydney Sage wouldn’t pout lustily at a camera…

I was fortunate enough to attend a literacy forum yesterday at which Jane Caro was the keynote speaker. I’ve long admired her from afar (mostly through my TV as she appeared on The Gruen Transfer and through the recently released Destroy the Joint: Why Women have to Change the World book she steered to great success).

Caro is, as I was discussing with my colleague at morning tea, the kind of woman I’d love to grow up to be. That is, incisively intelligent, pragmatic, and cutting a firm but fair line between warm and fuzzy and necessarily angry (an extreme too many of us are at either end of, rather than combining the two for best effect). Oh, and she’s funny. Just when we were deep into theory, Caro lightened the mood and drove her point home with some brilliantly timed humour.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Caro was there to discuss literacy and, in a wide-ranging speech, managed to blow our metaphorical socks off. I’m still grappling with getting my ahead around much of it, but here were my favourite parts and takeaways:

• ‘a life live literately leads to a well-stocked mind’ (this may be Caro’s quote or someone else’s, but either way I like it)
• equity and wellbeing are key to ensuring literacy. Put another way, before children can perform well in school, they need to feel a sense of wellbeing
• our current system sees children as ‘vases you stuff with information’; the one who regurgitates it best wins. Caro advocates subversion rather than compliance will see people succeed in the long run
• a ‘user pays’ society is more aptly expressed as ‘youse pays’
• literacy acts as the ‘keys to the kingdom’ in an increasingly information-led society
• Australia is the third-lowest funder of public schools (only Chile and Belgium are behind—and Chile’s working to change that now)
• we’ve created a ‘publicly funded arms race’ whereby private schools must do ever-increasing peacocking to attract desirable parents and students. It doesn’t equate to better education
• it’s important to know the business you’re in. Her message to the largely librarian audience was that they weren’t in the business of loaning books, but one of providing ideas, imagination, information, learning, and inspiration. She also showed us this brilliant, brilliant add by The Guardian, a newspaper that understands it’s not in the business of selling newspapers, but instead providing the whole story, information, analysis, and more.

That list doesn’t do her eloquence and inspiration justice, and I’d recommend seeking her out to hear her speak on this topic and, frankly, any other. I’m not sure how soon that will come about again for me, but I am inspired to pick up a bunch of her books and devour them, stat.

That includes the aforementioned Destroy the Joint: Why Women have to Change the World and fresh-off-the-printing-press The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education. Two light reads they won’t be, but invaluable ones that strike the right balance between outraged and incisively witty they will be, I’m sure.