Half Moon Bay – Helene Young

Half Moon Bay
Helene Young
Penguin Books Aus
2013, 360p
Copy courtesy of the publisher

Ellie Wilding has spent the last two years running from the pain and guilt of losing her older sister Nina in Afghanistan. A photographer, Ellie has worked around the world, avoiding home. But it seems that she can’t run any longer – some neighbours have asked her for some help in fighting a corrupt mayor who wants to ignore a former resident’s wishes and sell off the land she left to the town to highest bidder. More than that, there’s some suspicious funds transfers going on and even more suspicious activities in the fishing trawlers who don’t seem to mind going out when there isn’t anything to catch.

Nicholas Lawson walked away from the Army after the incident that killed Nina Wilding. He knows that Ellie doesn’t remember him from that day she organised a medivac to get her sister out of the hellhole of Afghanistan so when they cross paths again, there are no happy reunions. Ellie wants to get to the bottom of exactly what Nicholas is doing in her home town and why his employers won’t take no for an answer about building their resort on a patch of land deemed for a community center. Nicholas wants her to butt out, lest she find herself embroiled in something far more dangerous than she can even imagine.

As Ellie gets deeper involved in this fight to save her small town from being taken over by a huge resort and who knows what else, she finds her life in danger – and her heart. She can’t trust Nicholas Lawson because his character inconsistencies and thinly veiled threats tell he that he’s up to no good. But she can’t deny the attraction she feels towards him either and Ellie has felt precious little in the recent years. And the more she digs, the more she feels like there’s something Nick isn’t telling her about her sister.

Half Moon Bay is Helene Young’s fourth novel and the first one in which she strays away from far north Queensland and the border security organisations. Instead we are introduced to Ellie Wilding, a photographer who was working in Afghanistan with her sister Nina, a journalist. Ellie left briefly to undertake another assignment and when she returned it was to find Nina in a coma from which she was not expected to survive. In the two years since, Ellie has been travelling the globe, running away from the memories and trying to avoid the grief and pain. Only a threat to Half Moon Bay, her beloved home town on the north coast of NSW, calls her home.

Ellie’s grief is so heartbreakingly palpable – she’s not just devastated at losing her sister, she blames herself for leaving her to take the other assignment. Saving Half Moon Bay is just another way to distract Ellie from the guilt and grief that has plagued her, even though being back here brings up so many memories of Nina. When she crosses paths with Nicholas Lawson, she has no recollection of him being there on the tarmac with her in Afghanistan as she prepared to get her sister out. But she has other reasons to distrust him – he’s attached to the new project designated for land that should’ve been used to benefit the community. The Mayor is lining his own pockets and the town isn’t happy but they need someone with connections, someone who can blow the whistle – Ellie.

Unfortunately for Ellie, the only man that’s interested her in years, she feels she can’t trust. Nicholas Lawson is up to his neck in this development – cosy chats with the mayor about funds and a schmoozing ability to cut a swathe through the opposition with his dark good looks and smile. When a journalist friend of Ellie’s tells her that Nicholas was in Afghanistan at the time Nina was killed, Ellie has even more reason to distrust him. After all, he hasn’t mentioned anything about knowing her sister. It further fuels her suspicions and further makes her reluctant to become involved with him. But that proves to be easier said than done as she continues to get closer to him, despite her best intentions not to.

The chemistry between Ellie and Nick is fraught with unresolved tension, both sexual and otherwise. Ellie wants to find out what secrets he’s keeping and Nick wants her to stay the heck away from all of this. His attempts to dissuade her make his actions seem all the more suspicious, especially as he attempts to threaten her in order to attempt to keep her safe. As far as threats go, they aren’t really Nick’s strong point and Ellie pays about as much attention to them as she does to a fly. But when it seems that her safety (and possibly even her life) might be in danger she has to wonder just how dangerous Nick might be. Is he what she thinks he is? Or is he in this for an entirely different reason?

I really connected with the setting in this novel – I grew up a couple of hours south of where Helene Young has mostly based this book (and the rest of my family still live there and I visit that area as often as I can) and the local small towns and communities are very familiar to me, as are the sights and scenery. I can understand the locals desire to protect their small haven as well as implement services they believe that the community will need and I can also understand how the temptation to succumb to boosting the economy can war with this. I don’t want to give too much away about the plot and what the link between Afghanistan and Half Moon Bay is but I enjoyed the way in which it all came together when it looked as if it might be drawing a long bow at the beginning at the novel.

It’s hard to top the love I have for Burning Lies, Young’s third novel but Half Moon Bay does come quite close. It’s a tightly knit story with some fantastically drawn characters. There’s a lot to uncover and it’s done with great timing. My only (tiny) criticism – I’d have liked Ellie to throw caution to the wind a little earlier. I know why she didn’t, because the story had to unfold. But I’m impatient that way.

9/10

Book #114 of 2013

Half Moon Bay is the 48th novel read and reviewed for my participation in the Australian Women Writers 2013 Challenge.

Cry Blue Murder – Kim Kane and Marion Roberts

Cry Blue Murder
Kim Kane and Marion Roberts
University of Queensland Press
2013, 210p
Copy courtesy of the publisher

Celia and Alice met on facebook and the two girls quickly exchange email addresses and begin writing back and forth. They are the same age and they share their fears of a serial killer in Melbourne who is abducting young girls. The victims are found some time later, murdered via poison and shrouded in a handwoven wrap.

Celia is especially worried as she goes to the same school as some of the victims and one of them was the older sister of her younger sister’s best friend. She pours out her troubles to Alice, who is incarcerated in a boarding school in the state’s north, due to excessive family troubles. Slowly the two girls become closer, sharing more and more, becoming enmeshed in each other’s lives.

But who can you trust at a time like this? In an age where entire friendships can be formed and maintained online, where you give out the most private information that you’d never tell someone face to face. How do you know who is genuine and who isn’t?

Cry Blue Murder is a modern-day epistolary style novel that is almost fully comprised of emails and letters sent back and forth between Celia and Alice. It also contains police statements and witness recountings in order to give the reader a little more knowledge about what is happening to these girls who are being abducted from Melbourne’s streets. This style of telling a story hooked me in right away – I love novels written like this and the added police extras just served to fully draw me in to the horrific things that were happening.

I’m 31, so I remember a time when the internet didn’t exist. I was 16 when my parents got a computer and a little 28.8k modem and we began using the internet at home. I’d already experimented in school in chat rooms and the like and I look back now and think that I was probably relatively clueless. I gave out far too much information about myself or I pretended to be someone else and inevitably forgot details of my persona. ICQ and MSN were just beginning and you could chat with random people from all over the world, something that seemed so exotic at the time. There was no way of knowing whether or not they were just some 40 year old weirdo in a house a few doors down who might’ve overheard your handle one day. Such things weren’t really considered back then! Now of course the dangers of giving away too much personal detail to strangers on the internet are well documented. And never before have I read a book which deals with that danger quite like this one.

This is one of those books where it’s really hard to write a decent review examining all of my thoughts because I don’t want to spoiler anything. It’s not a long book and it’s so easy to read. I started it at bedtime, thinking I’d read a few pages – ended up reading it straight through to the end and was sitting there, staring at the wall, heart racing. The end was not what I expected starting out and as I got deeper and deeper into the story, a little thread of fear began to grow in me that this was where the story was going. It’s one of those books that delivers the unexpected slap in the face and some people might be deflated by the end. The end is deflating, but it’s what makes it so incredibly powerful and that’s what has the huge impact on the reader. I was still thinking about it days later – I told my husband all about it because it’s one of those books that made me want to talk about it and I didn’t know anyone else that had read it! I think it’s the sort of book they should give teens to read in school – a book that encourages them to be careful about what they share about themselves. There’s nothing wrong with interactions online but this book goes to show that even though it seems as though they did everything right here, bad things still ended up happening.

I’m a parent as well and from that perspective, this story scares the hell out of me even more. There’s only so much you can do to protect your kids and I felt for the parents in this story (although they were mostly only depicted through the eyes of teenagers, who railed on them for their strictness and caution when the girls kept disappearing). You can think that you’ve done all the right things, that you’ve protected them and in the end, you can find out that no matter what you did, it still wasn’t enough.

I could say I loved this book in spite of the ending, but I think that ultimately, I loved it because of the ending. It dared to go there and if it had’ve resolved some other way, it would’ve made me question to decision to go the soft road and it would probably have felt unrealistic.

9/10

Book #108 of 2013

Cry Blue Murder is book #47 for AWW2013

Thanks to the people at UQP, I was given the opportunity to invite Kim & Marion onto the blog and ask them a few questions.

Q1). Hi Kim and Marion and welcome to my blog. Thank you very much for taking the time to answer some questions for me. Congratulations on the publication of Cry Blue Murder. Could you tell me how your journey to publication came about?

Hi Bree – Thanks for your interest in Cry Blue Murder.  We were both published authors prior to this project which made finding a publisher a whole lot easier.  However, as the book was very different from the tone of our previous novels it still took a little time to find a publisher who would represent it. As we initially pitched it for children rather than teenagers, most publishers wanted a happy ending, or wanted Celia to outsmart her circumstances. The whole point of the novel for us, however, was that sometimes smart people don’t actually outsmart their circumstances. We wanted to explore the interior relationship between victim and predator and the factors that predispose vulnerability. Luckily UQP shared our vision for that.

Q2). I always am very interested to know an author’s process. However this is the first time I’ve been able to ask two people who co-wrote a book to share theirs. How did you each contribute? Did you write together or separately? 

We wrote the book almost completely via email and over the phone. We had very few physical meetings, mostly because our schedules didn’t allow it. The first draft of the novel was a flurry of email ping pong each working up our character voices but not really paying much attention to plot or structure. There was energy and excitement in the writing and before we knew it, we had a lot of words and a strong idea about who our characters were and could then set about crafting the novel to make it work as a thriller.

Q3). Cry Blue Murder deals with a subject that becomes more relevant and more frightening with each passing day – internet predators. Was there anything specific that happened in your own pasts that sparked this topic? Or was it all taken from the news?

Neither of us have had any personal experience with on-line predators although we had heard of plenty of instances over the past few years of instances in the media. It’s only details of the actual event, however, that is reported – the abduction, kidnapping or murder – and not the circumstances leading up to that event. This was what interested us the most – the lengths predators will go to to build enough trust to eventually manipulate their victim into the car. Even though we did research certain crimes, the crime and the criminal we concocted were both very much our own and we worked hard to ensure we had a chilling crime committed by a criminal with a feasible MO. 

Q4). What was the most difficult part of writing the book?

Definitely our conflicting timetables.  Marion had day time work commitments and while we both had kids they were at very different ages so even our ‘home’ times did not coincide. Kim’s twins were very young so when they went to bed at night she had time to work on the book, whereas Marion’s kids were older and she wouldn’t be free in the evenings until well after 10pm – not a great time to try and get the creative juices flowing!! It was not uncommon for us to be on the phone until one of us fell asleep, going over and over…and over changes.

The book seemed to get harder and harder as it went along as we both kept coming up with ideas to improve it which would then mean a total re-write.The difficult thing about writing an epistolary novel was that alterations to one email necessarily meant subsequent changes to most of the correspondence after that.  It was a house of cards and we both needed to be part of the reconstruction.  

In earlier drafts, the novel consisted of just the emails between the two characters. It was really difficult to create and sustain suspense in this format as the entire story could only be told through two character voices. It also felt very claustrophobic. We then came up with the idea to add a textural element that was outside the girls’ realities and fed in the ‘formal’ documentation – witness statements, police interviews, forensic documents etc. This took masses of research and lots of new writing and plotting to incorporate the background elements of a police investigation into the work – something the reader was aware of but not our characters. While we based our legal/formal documents on real research we also needed to keep them succinct and literary so we chopped and changed a few things here and there. Ultimately Cry Blue Murder is a work of fiction so we weren’t super concerned about making the documentation completely authentic but it did still need to ring true.

Q5). Kim, you’re a lawyer by trade. How much did this background help to get the details of an investigation right in Cry Blue Murder? And how much liberty did you take in order to further the story?

 I was a corporate lawyer rather than a criminal lawyer for ten years, but a corporate lawyer with a passion for detective novels, true crime and forensic TV. Marion is not a lawyer but shares a complete obsession with crime. A legal background, however, certainly helped with understanding legal procedure and drafting documents in plain English, however, as Marion has said, we did then alter these  to suit our literary needs. I did draw on my interest in criminal law and evidence at Uni and remembered things we had learnt about police responses to criminals, witness unreliability and latent racism all of which fed into the criminal culture we created. So, a legal background was definitely helpful but not as helpful as our shared obsession with true crime.

Q6). I’d like to ask about the ending – but without spoiling it! Was that always the ending you had in mind from the beginning or were other possibilities considered? Did you think about the possible negative effects on the way it might make a reader feel?

Right from the very beginning, we set out to explore the relationship our reader finds in the novel. We hope there is some level of ambiguity in the ending —  and yes –- we did consider the negative effects on our readers.  We also tested a couple of versions on readers and were very thankful for their feedback. Kim’s teenage cousin Georgia, actually helped us change the end in one of the very last drafts.

We think Cry Blue Murder offers a level of hope that is ‘outside’ the story in the book and ‘outside’ the ending. At the end of Cry Blue Murder, for all the shock, we know the killer has been finally captured and charged.

Q7). What are your five favourite novels or authors (both Kim & Marion).

 

MR:

1. Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
2. When you Reach Me – Rebecca Stead
3. Patchwork Planet – Ann Tyler
4. The Ghost’s Child – Sonia Hartnett
5. How to be Idle – Tom Hodgkinson

 

KFK: I hate these questions as I love so many books at different times for different reasons!  I love Hartnett, but I think it’s hard to go past ‘Thursday’s Child’. I love Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, especially the first two in the series. I love Siobhan Dowd — especially ‘Bog Child’ and ‘The Monster Calls’ (Dowd’s idea written by Patrick Ness). Ooooo, Alan Garner, ‘The Owl Service’, Phillipa Pearce’s ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’, Ursula Dubosarksy’s ‘Abyssinia’,Dodie Smith’s ‘I Capture the Castle’ and a number of books written for adults with a younger narrator such a Sybille Bedford’s ‘Jigsaw’.  I adore Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Wolf but also contemporary writers like Nicole Krauss — ‘The History of Love’ — and Jennifer Egan’s ‘A visit from the Goon Squad’.

Q8). Lastly – what is next for you both? Do you plan to collaborate again on more novels? Any possible solo projects?

MR: Working with Kim was a lot of fun as well as very difficult logistically. Cry Blue Murder took a little longer than we had anticipated so we both have solo projects we need to attended to in the short term.  I’d be more than happy to collaborate with Kim again.  It was wonderful to break up the loneliness of working solo for a change and have another person to bounce ideas off and from which to gain input. I honestly don’t think Cry Blue Murder would have been written by either of us as a solo work so we are really happy to have this ‘product’ that we generated out of a friendship. We feel oddly ‘married’ now – and really hope our ‘baby’ will be okay out there in the world. It’s been great to share the ups and downs with Kim

 KFK: For all the problems of collaboration, there are so many lovely things about it — the fact that there’s always someone enthusiastic about the project when you’re feeling bleak, it’s a joy to workshop ideas with another mind and it’s different from a normal workshop as both authors are properly invested so they’re thinking up solutions to problems as they swim/shop/shower. So, no, not in the short term (I am shamefully behind schedule on my next novel) but if we get another good idea…

Kim & Marion, thank you both so much for your time and best of luck with Cry Blue Murder and your future works, be they solo or collaborative.

 

 

A Stranger In My Street – Deborah Burrows

A Stranger In My Street
Deborah Burrows
Pan MacMillan AUS
2012, 337p
Read from my local library

It is 1943, the Second World War is still in full swing. In Perth Australia, US troops have landed and are making life just a little bit more bearable for the local young women. The men are generous, always bringing things such as food like meat and fresh fruit and vegetables and little gifts to express their thanks for the hospitality whenever they are invited anywhere. They have access to far more in the way of rationed items and are far better paid than their Australian counterparts. They are also friendly and happy, always willing to take a girl out for a meal, or dancing, often with little in the way of return. Many are just seeking some company, a night of fun to forget the horrors they’ve seen and been a part of. And many young women are very happy to be that distraction.

Meg Eaton isn’t one of them. This war has brought upon her nothing but pain, first stealing the man she loved away from her and then keeping him when he was killed in action 18 months ago. Since then Meg has done very little, just gone to work and come home again. On a hot Perth summer’s day, she meets her former fiancé’s brother Tom, who is looking for a woman who lives in Meg’s street – a married woman who, with her husband away in the war, has taken to hanging out with the American officers. Meg is disconcerted to finally meet Tom, the man Peter admired so much and it’s not long until she sees him again – when the two of them find the dead body of Doreen Luca, the woman Tom was looking for.

The immediate suspect is her jealous husband, home on leave but Meg, who knows Frank and Tom, who definitely knows more than he’s letting on, aren’t so sure. Despite Meg’s grief and Tom’s engagement to a chilly society type, they find themselves spending more and more time together. It is a way for them to talk about Peter as well as try and figure out exactly what is happening in their neighbourhood. When a young boy from their street goes missing, Meg is even more desperate for answers – anything to distract her from her growing feelings for the very taken but also very troubled, Tom Lagrange.

I saw a lot of reviews for this book last year – lots of bloggers I follow and admire and trust had glowing reviews and really enjoyed it and so it was kind of hovering around at the back of my mind, always on my radar without me ever really going out of my way to hunt it down. The other day I went to pick up a book at my local library – they have a ‘recently returned’ shelf which often has some great books sitting on it and I always browse there just before I pick up my holds. This book was the first one I saw on that shelf the other day so I immediately snatched it up.

I have to admit, when I read novels set during the war, they’re rarely ever set here. I’ve read quite a few books set around WW2 and just about all of them have taken place in Europe. It was refreshing to read something set close to home and get an idea of what life was like for Australians while the war was going on. Perth wasn’t entirely removed from the action and the arrival of the American troops helped greatly, which is only partially why they were so well received. The Americans are fun and lively and do a lot to bolster community spirits although it does send up a bit of a friendly rivalry (or perhaps not-so-friendly) with the local boys who perhaps can’t shower as many luxuries! I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, story wise but this novel was a tightly written mystery sprinkled with a believable war time feel and a forbidden romance.

I felt for Meg, she had found such a lovely happiness and then had it snatched away from her by a conflict on the other side of the world. Despite the fact that the war has taken from her, she retains her compassion and the ability to see people as who they are, not where they are from. When Doreen Luca is found murdered, many locals suspect her husband Frank, an Australian born Italian. Italians faced prejudice and even incarceration in Australia during WW2 as “aliens”. However, Meg never suspects Frank, knowing him to be more than just his stereotypical background.

I really liked the way in which things developed between Tom and Meg – Tom is her dead fiancé’s brother and at first he’s just a person she can reminisce about Peter with. The two of them are thrown together after discovering the body of Doreen but they seem to find solace in each other’s company. Tom has demons that Meg doesn’t even know about, having been captured by the Japanese and tortured horrifically. He’s employed as a liaison officer between the Australian forces and the Americans and definitely knows more than he is letting on. He and Meg meet often for lunch (which causes gossip, not least because Tom is engaged). There’s also a noted class difference between the two, which Meg has already faced when she briefly met Peter’s parents when they were dating. They’re wealthy whereas Meg is definitely lower middle class, living with her mother and her sister, the three of them pooling their resources to get by. They’re not starving, but there’s definitely very little money for luxuries. Apart from spending time with Meg himself, Tom convinces her to begin to live again, to go out and have fun and Meg begins to accept dates with some of the American soldiers and learn that life does indeed, go on. However she soon finds that the one man that really interests her seems to be the one that she can’t have.

This was a very enjoyable book – I just wanted to keep reading all day until I was finished. I know that the author has another book out and now I’m very keen to read that too. It’s going on my list.

8/10

Book #130 of 2013

A Stranger In My Street counts towards my participation in the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013. It’s book #55 read and reviewed so far.

 

We Bought A Zoo – Benjamin Mee

We Bought A Zoo
Benjamin Mee
Harper Collins Publishers
2012 (originally 2008), 313p
Read from my TBR pile

When Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his wife and two children from their lives living in France, it was to move them to an even more unconventional situation. He and his family decided to pool their resources and buy a run down zoo in Devon, England with over 200 exotic animals on the premises. Although once a thriving business, a lack of attention to detail in recent years and the growing age of the owner meant that the park had been in a steady decline. Benjamin and his mother as well as several of his siblings decided that they could all breathe new life back into it.

His dream was to reburbish the zoo in the winter off season, fixing up all the things that needed doing and reopening for the bumper summer season. However even he underestimated just how much would need to be done and just how much it would cost and even worse, how hard getting finance would be. Over the time the family first looked at the zoo until they finally took possession, they were offered numerous loans by banks only to have them withdrawn. Selling the family home and pooling their inheritances allowed them to purchase the zoo and then they needed even more money to fix enclosures, do up the restaurant and take care of all the bits of pieces such as feeding the animals and paying the wages. They also needed to hunt down new staff, preferably with good connections in order to participate in trading programs with other zoos and prove how they were going to act in conservation in order to secure their license to exhibit. Without that it’s just a farm with a lot of exotic animals.

As well as the stress of getting the zoo ready to open, Benjamin also has personal stress and worry to deal with. His wife Katherine had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma (one of the most common and aggressive brain cancers) before they purchased the zoo and had surgery and chemotherapy which had been successful. However, as they were warned, these types of tumors always return and Katherine was no different. Benjamin faces living his dream but without the support and love of his courageous wife.

I first heard about this book when the movie was released – last year I think? I bought the book with a voucher that my husband gave me last year for Mother’s Day and finally read it this year on Mother’s Day. I thought it sounded like so many dreams come true – being able to buy your own zoo and live on the premises! But it sounded like an awful lot of work and with the likelihood of hemorrhaging money as well in the bargain. I have to admit that the story within these pages is not exactly what I was expecting.

For a start, there’s a lot of stuff about banks and finances and rules and regulations – which is fine, obviously there are strict rules before you can operate as a zoo, there are rules about enclosure size and herd size and what animals you can have with other animals and all of that sort of thing. There are rules about the structure of the enclosures and the veterinary rooms and the feeding and clearing of waste, etc. And obviously you need a lot of money to feed 200 animals and employ people to care for them. But what should’ve been a smaller part of the story seemed to take up far too much of the narrative. I was more interested in the actual animals – from the over 200, we’re only introduced to a handful. And although some of those anecdotes are amusing (like the time Benjamin’s brother runs into the house and yells “CODE RED! ONE OF THE BIG CATS HAS ESCAPED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” and then runs out again) there aren’t really enough of them. So much of the story is bogged down in rules and stuff that it leaves little time for getting to know the animals and getting a real feel for what it must be like to live with them.

Overall I expected more emotion and humanity from this book, whereas instead what I got was a very dry narrative that often rambled about all over the place with no real structure. I didn’t get the sense of what it was like living and working with these animals, fixing up their enclosures. Mee’s kids were rarely seen from or heard, only mentioned here or there, not really a contribution to the story when I would’ve expected them to feature much more, particularly around the time that Mee devotes to Katherine’s cancer returning. Although a writer/journalist by trade who writes articles, this skill hasn’t seemed to translate particularly well to writing a full length book. There are times when Mee mentions “more on that later” (one time in particular about his dog and possibly several other times as well) but then never goes back to finish what he started. Even his mother, who sells the family home and moves into this big house on the property with Mee and his family, barely rates a mention as well. If it wasn’t for her they would never have even been able to purchase the zoo but after that I’m not entirely sure what she does. Overall I think I’d liked more focus on the people and the animals and less on the red tape that it took to get there. I think it’s good to include that stuff so that the reader gets an idea of what had to be done but it seems to end up weighted that side which for me, just detracted from the whole experience. I’d still like to see the movie, even though I know that they changed a lot of the details, just to see how that compares.

6/10

Book #126 of 2013

In Her Blood – Annie Hauxwell

In Her Blood (Catherine Berlin #1)
Annie Hauxwell
Penguin AU
2012, 261p
Copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley

When Financial Services Agency investigator Catherine Berlin gets a tip off about a loan shark operating in London, she arranges to meet with her privately – something that breaks all the rules. Since the global financial crisis, the London banks are lending to no one. Those that are desperate for cash are forced to go elsewhere, often trapping themselves into an endless cycle of repayments without ever being able to fully pay out the loan. Failure to make a payment often results in blood loss.

Berlin is told by those above that the file is to be closed and to cut ties with her informer but no real reason is given. Then her informer is found floating in the Limehouse Basin with her throat cut and Berlin is suspended pending an inquiry for continuing an investigation that she had been told to forget and meeting an informer alone, flouting the rules.

Elsewhere in London, a GP is murdered in his practice – one of the few GP’s legally allowed to dispense pharmaceutical grade heroin to addicts who manage their addiction by taking a controlled dose daily under medical supervision. Catherine Berlin has made the trip to this particular doctor’s offices every day at the same time for years and years and since his death and the theft of the drugs he kept on the premises, all other GP’s legally license to dispense the drug have been forbidden from doing so. Berlin faces utter panic – she has no way to get the drug she needs to continue to function and the fear of being without it threatens to derail her. She knows that anyone in the medical profession that she does go and see will just tip her into a methadone program and that isn’t what she wants and it won’t work for her.

Berlin finds herself an unwilling co-investigator in the case of the murdered doctor – blackmailed by an unorthodox officer who, for her assistance, will see what he can do about getting her a regular fix to keep her on the straight and narrow. And while she’s reluctantly playing her part in that, she’s also looking in to the murder of her informant, which haunts her. Even though she seems unlikely to keep her job once the inquiry is all said and done, that isn’t going to stop her from doing what she can to get to the bottom of the murder and the loansharking and see if she can’t find some justice in it all.

A heroin-addicted investigator is certainly a conflicted protagonist and definitely a type that I’ve never come across before. It was certainly an interesting element to add to what can be a bit of a tired cliche – the troubled copper type with the demons they chase down with shots of scotch or bourbon, whatever their poison. Catherine also has quite the affection for scotch herself but first and foremost, she is ruled by her addiction to heroin which we find more and more as her uncertainty about her future supply begins to consume her. For years, Catherine has managed her addiction with a simple daily dose administered by a qualified practitioner who has carefully experimented and come up with the perfect dose. She no longer experiences the ‘high’ that many street junkies do, but a calm clarity. Without it, the edge begins to seep in, the shakes, the chills, the headaches. Her supply is tenuous – she does manage to secure some but then it is destroyed and her thought processes become more disjointed and fractured the longer she goes without a hit.

I really enjoyed the setting in this book – London in the grips of a harsh winter. It’s bleak, wet and grey and seems to contribute an awful lot of atmosphere, backing up Berlin’s helpless situation. She trudges around in the slush, trying to find clues that will lead her to the loanshark she’s supposed to not be investigating, finding refuge in dimly lit pubs to warm herself with a belt or two of good quality single malt. Hauxwell doesn’t shy away from the violence either: grisly acts litter this book, each one a little bit worse than the one preceding it. The seedy underbelly of London society, the dregs of junkies, petty thieves and those desperate for money end up marrying into the upper former-moneyed class and prove that in the end, people are all pretty similar when it comes to money and needing it. 

I think that on one hand, the addiction breathes fresh life into what is quite a well-trodden path but at the same time it also makes it rather difficult to connect with Catherine and feel anything for her – except perhaps pity. She’s a functional addict, which means she manages to hold down a good job, pay for a flat, live a life much like anyone else, apart from the fact that she injects herself with heroin once a day. Because her supply is threatened here, her thought processes tend to revolve around how she might get more – she approaches a street dealer, she asks a shady figure to help her, she steals. It’s quite disconcerting to imagine someone in a position of power and authority approaching dealers in sinister underground tube stations. I’m not entirely sure why she has gone the route of shooting up for the past 20 years instead of attempting detox – all that seems to be clear is that she has no interest in quitting her habit or switching to the more socially and politically acceptable methadone program. Given what happened to her at the end of the novel, I look forward to seeing where she is at with her addiction management in the second novel, A Bitter Taste.

6/10

Book #124 of 2013

Although born in London, Annie Hauxwell came to Australia with her parents when she was a teen and currently still lives here, so I’m counting this novel for participation in the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013. It’s book #53.

 

The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Harvill Secker
2011, 387p
Read from my TBR pile

The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there when yesterday it was not….

Cities all over the world await the arrival of a special circus - Le Cirque des Rêves. It arrives out of no where, the white and black striped tents springing up out of thin air. It is open only at night – sundown to sun up. In each tent is something different – an illusionist, a hall of magic mirror, a land of clouds. One night is not enough and many patrons go back night after night until one day when the circus is simply gone, springing up somewhere else in another city.

Behind the scenes of the circus, a great competition is underway. Celia is the daughter of a great illusionist known as Prospero who has performed all over the world. She didn’t meet him until she was 6 when her mother, tired of waiting for him to return, sent her to him. Prospero sees a great potential in Celia, who seems to possess the same gifts that he does. He contacts an old friend, determined to pose a familiar wager.

And so Celia is her father’s instrument, his friend Alexander must locate and train his own and he finds a young orphan named Marco. The battle is yet to be decided, in an unknown location but it will continue until there is a winner. Celia doesn’t know who her opponent is, or even really what the game itself is. She carries on the way she has been taught by her father: when he deems her ready, she joins Les Cirque des Rêves and performs night after night for the patrons, her illusions breathtaking.

Marco has known who his opponent was from the moment he laid eyes upon her but he has as much understanding of the competition as Celia herself. Despite the fact that he knows they are opponents, the two of them fall headlong into love. Their love is powerful, consuming and magical. But it is this love that forces the hand of the ringmasters – and the game finally becomes known to both of them in a terrifying reveal.

I’ve been wanting to read The Night Circus since I first heard about it some time ago. I even borrowed it from my local library but didn’t get around to it in the time I was allowed to have it and had to send it back as there were requests on it. I found it cheap in an online store and purchased it but it wasn’t until it was the May selection for my new face-to-face bookclub that I actually got around to reading it. I read it on the day of the meeting because I sort of lost track of the dates and thought I had another week. I’m so glad I finally read it! This book is magical.

There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s rich with the wildest of imaginations – Erin Morgenstern has developed a world within a world here with the circus of Les Cirque des Rêves. Celia begins the novel as a shy, frightened girl of 6, who doesn’t know her father and perhaps doesn’t know what to think of him. Marco likewise starts out as an orphan with little in the way of prospects. The two of them end up as opponents on a glittering stage – the circus, although rarely do they come into contact. As the illusionist, Celia travels with the circus and Marco stays in London, controlling things from his end in his way. With every turn of the page, I was further drawn into this wonderful circus and the mysteries that surround it, such as how does it reach its destinations so swiftly, in such an era? Why is no one aging? All of those things hovered at the edge of my mind, which was much more occupied with the beautiful descriptions of the circus and the tents and the love story that began to develop between Celia and Marco.

Because The Night Circus is a love story. Celia and Marco fall hopelessly in love and want nothing more than to be together. Unfortunately they learn that their love could be nothing short of hopeless, because as they are voicing their wants and desires, they are finding out the true extent of this competition they are bound in and just precisely how it can end. That lends a touch of the tragedy to it – star crossed lovers in a very unusual way. Their instructors are not sympathetic to their predicament, nor are they inclined to be generous in terms of deciding a winner by changing the way the game must play out. And while I loved absolutely everything about this book, I have to admit, the end did let me down a little. I’d have liked a little more explanation devoted to exactly what happened and how it was decided rather than just being written in the stars. That might’ve been part of the charm of the book but it seemed that everything else happened for a reason, right down to the smallest things, even the way in which the twin characters were born – one looking back, one looking forward. In comparison, the end did feel a bit fuzzy (and this was a general consensus at bookclub as well). It wasn’t disappointing, it didn’t change the way in which I felt about the book, it just seemed to be lacking that something that the rest of the book had contained. I love that there was an ending which richly and deeply satisfied a part of me, although there was another small part of me that said ‘hmm, I’d have liked to know more about this’. But this is still a beautifully written, wonderfully constructed book, a world so incredibly intricate and delicate – balanced on a knife edge in a game of push-pull as two opponents strive towards an end they don’t really have any idea of. For a first novel, this is a truly remarkable effort.

8/10

Book #121 of 2013

I’m counting The Night Circus towards my participation in the Literary Exploration challenge and using it to tick off the Magical Realism category. It’s the 7th novel completed.

 

Out Of The Silence – Wendy James

Out Of The Silence
Wendy James
Momentum Books
2013 (originally2005), eBook
Copy courtesy of the publisher

Maggie Heffernan is a country girl, raised by a strict and never satisfied mother on a farm in country Victoria at the turn of the last century. She’s a hard worker and has often escaped the farm to go and work for family members, looking after them while they’re in the last stages of pregnancy or doing housework. She meets a young man named Jack and is immediately drawn in by his handsome features and easy going manner. With her sister as her accomplice, it isn’t long before Maggie is sneaking out to meet Jack every weekend. He promises her love, undying devotion and the eventuality of marriage. When Jack moves on for work, Maggie finds herself a position where she can be near him. Although she attempts to remain strong until they are married, Maggie does eventually succumb to Jack’s charms (and sulks) and it isn’t long before she finds herself pregnant with his child. And instead of announcing a wedding like she thought, Jack seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Elizabeth Hamilton lost the love of her life some time ago. She has left her brother on the other side of the world and traveled to Australia in order to become a governess. However, her first position doesn’t work out exactly as she planned – it’s in a very remote location and although the three children are well behaved, Elizabeth soon finds herself heading back to Melbourne where she lodges with her cousin and attempts to secure teaching work at one of the nearby schools. Through her new life she meets Vida Goldstein, a suffragist who is campaigning heavily for equality and rights for women. Vida is passionate and full of life and Elizabeth dallies on the fringe of this group, listening to their talk.

When Maggie’s hard life becomes unbearably harder and the most terrible of things happens, her world collides with that of Elizabeth and Vida, both of whom show her kindness, sympathy and are interested in helping her to negotiate the perils of a judicial system. Elizabeth and in particular Vida prove that in a society still prejudiced against women, that the most powerful show of persistence and persuasion can help unleash all manner of possibilities.

I was first introduced to Wendy James last year, when I read her most recent novel, The Mistake. It had a huge affect on me and the last line still sticks in my mind to this day so I was always intending to go back and read some of her earlier work. Momentum Books are republishing two of these titles, Out Of The Silence and The Steele Diaries in eBook form and I was keen to read both of them. I chose this one first because in a recent interview I did with Wendy’s sister Rebecca, also an author, she chose this as one of her favourite books.

It’s set around the turn of the 20th century and revolves around three women, although the narrative heavily focuses on only two – Maggie and Elizabeth. Maggie is a simple country girl who just wants to marry the boy she loves, Jack and escape the rather tyrannical presence of her perennially unsatisfied mother. Elizabeth is still mourning the love she lost and through letters to her brother, on the other side of the world, she details her new life in Melbourne and how she comes to cross paths with Maggie.

Maggie’s plight is probably not an uncommon one to begin with – she falls in love with a boy that she thinks loves her back. She tries to hold out against giving up something precious but eventually is talked into it and then not long after that, she is promptly abandoned as Jack moves on to greener, richer pastures. Alone, searching for Jack who she doesn’t think capable of leaving her, Maggie doesn’t discover that she is pregnant until she is quite significantly far along. She mostly manages to conceal her pregnancy from her employers until baby Jacky is about to be born. After his birth, accommodations are secured for her but once again believing that Jack is nearby and coming for her, she leaves these in order to pursue him. And it’s after that where Maggie’s situation really becomes dire. It is hard to articulate my feelings for Maggie – she was so blinded by her love for Jack that she couldn’t allow herself to choose anything else but to be with him. These unfortunate choices that she made led to her downfall. A young girl, alone, too frightened of going home for the reception she’d receive, no money, no where to go, heartbroken by rejection and a baby that wouldn’t settle. It’s a disastrous equation and the result is horrific and yet strangely unsurprising. It was almost like Maggie’s whole life moved her down a path to this one moment where she did a desperate thing.

Out Of The Silence is a fascinating blend of history and human nature resulting in a terrible crime. It’s done without censure, without judgement, with a gentleness that doesn’t justify Maggie’s actions but seeks to explain how she may have been so far pushed to end up at this point. How as a young, single woman, her options were so few and that for her, what she did was the only solution to her problem. Her story is written with such sensitivity. Although Elizabeth and Vida respond to her story in different ways and for different reasons, they champion Maggie for the fact that she was pushed to such a limit by the ways in which society constrained her. It’s the struggle to have a voice and a choice.

Wendy James continues to deliver thoughtful reads that make me want to examine every line and I’m looking forward to getting to The Steele Diaries soon.

8/10

Book #118 of 2013

Yay, milestone reached! Out Of The Silence is the 50th book read and reviewed for the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2013.

 

Wedding Night – Sophie Kinsella

Wedding Night
Sophie Kinsella
Transworld Books
2013, 394p
Read from my TBR pile

Lottie is 33 and just wants to get married. All of her relationships have gone along in the same pattern – meeting, having sex, falling in love and then fizzling out. However this time she’s sure that things are going to be different. She’s sure that her boyfriend Richard is going to propose. After all he’s booked a special lunch and he has a “big” question to ask her. What else could it be?

Unfortunately for Lottie, things don’t go the way she expects. Single once again and devastated, she suddenly finds an old boyfriend has reappeared in her life. Lottie decides to do things differently this time because she’s obviously been doing things wrong. This time she’s going to do marriage first. No waiting, no anticipating the engagement, just a quiet wedding with no fuss. And no sex until after the wedding. That way it’s not just a shag.

Fliss, Lottie’s sister is in the middle of a horrible divorce. She has always been protective of Lottie, almost a mother to her rather than just an older sister. She desperately wants her sister to avoid making the mistakes that she herself has made and to not have to experience the devastation of a marriage ending. When Lottie tells her that she’s marrying someone she hasn’t even see in fifteen years, Fliss is horrified. She knows she has to stop it before something horrible happens. This has disaster written all over it and it’s the way in which Lottie acts when she’s heartbroken. She immediately does something spontaneous, like getting a tattoo….but this one definitely takes the cake.

Unable to stop the wedding in time, Fliss follows the couple to their honeymoon on the Greek island of Ikonos. She has to stop this farce – no matter what the cost.

I love Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series but her stand alones have been hit and miss for me. However her last book, I’ve Got Your Number was one of my favourites so when I heard about this one I was really excited and hoped I would love it as much as that one. I bought it as soon as I heard it was out and settled in to read it that afternoon, knowing it would be perfect after the classic that I had just read.

Lottie has reached that age where she wants to get married and perhaps begin a family and she really thinks that Richard, her boyfriend of three years is the man for the job. She’s devastated when he doesn’t propose, choosing instead to break it off with him because she can’t just keep wasting time with men who don’t want to move forward, even though this is heartbreaking for her too. Lottie reacts to heartbreak by pretending it doesn’t exist, doing something crazy and then breaking down about it later. Fliss, her older sister has seen her go through this many times but Fliss is off on a holiday with son Noah, two weeks break from the stress of her divorce and she returns to the news that Lottie is getting married. To a guy she hasn’t seen since she was 18. Tomorrow.

Lottie is a typical Kinsella heroine in that she’s a bit ditzy and flighty but she manages to take it one step further with her blind faith that marrying someone you haven’t seen in fifteen years that you don’t know, will work out because conventional relationships have failed. She has a single-mindedness about the marriage to Ben, ignoring some pretty crazy red flags that pop up because she’s so determined that this is the only way that she can be happy. She hasn’t had a chance to even grieve her break up with Richard, who she does love but she allows herself to be swept away by memories of a long ago summer in Ikonos and her first love.

Sometimes it’s a little hard to put yourself in a protagonist’s shoes and I had this problem with Lottie because I could never see myself doing that. I think I related more to Fliss, the worrier, the one who frantically tried to stop Lottie from doing things that might hurt her. Fliss had to understand that Lottie’s life was Lottie’s life and that if she made choices that hurt her, then she would have to deal with them. You can’t wrap other people up in cotton wool and not let them experience life and all the mistakes that are a part of it. However Fliss’s story with Lorcan, Ben’s childhood best friend and coworker was a really nice touch to this novel, grounding it in a bit of reality. Both of them had lessons to learn from each other about the way in which they “mothered” other people. Sometimes there’s a beautiful freedom in just letting go.

Wedding Night was a fun novel, much of what I expect from Kinsella although I must say that it took a little while to hit its straps for me. Around the 150p mark is where it really started to come together and I found the giggle-out-loud moments that I expect when reading one of her books. I like the way in which the honeymoon played out – some of it was so ridiculous that you couldn’t not laugh even as you were cringing a little bit inside both for Lotte and Ben and the poor people working at the resort. From that point on there were so many funny moments and it just really stepped up the notch that it needed to.

8/10

Book #117 of 2013

I’m counting Wedding Night towards my participation in the Literary Exploration challenge and ticking off the “Chick Lit” category.

It also counts towards the What’s In A Name?6 challenge, fitting into the 3rd category, Read a book with a party or celebration in the title.

Boomer & Me – Jo Case

Boomer & Me
Jo Case
Hardie Grant
2013, 334p
Copy courtesy of the publisher/The Reading Room.com

Jo is a single mother of Leo, in his second year of primary school. She shares custody with Leo’s dad in an amicable arrangement that seems to work well for all involved and works, often from home, as a freelance writer and editor of a newsletter for a bookshop. Leo didn’t seem to have many problems in kindergarten but now that he’s moved up a year, there seems to be some issues with fitting in.

Although intelligent, Leo’s social skills often seem lacking and although his antics often win him friends in the schoolyard, sometimes things go awry. Perhaps due to his upbringing, Leo has always been treated more like an adult than a child and he seems to have an easier time relating to and conversing with them. He’s also happy to be alone, playing with toys that he becomes incredibly interested in.

When a teacher suggests getting him tested, a fleeting thought crosses Jo’s mind but it is some time before the steps are taken to assess Leo and see if there is an underlying issue. Leo is officially diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and Jo has some trouble with the label because of what she fears it will mean both for Leo and also even for herself. As an Asperger’s child, she fears that is all Leo might ever be – he won’t be judged or assessed on his intelligence, his cheeky sense of humour or any of his other attributes. He will be the child with Asperger’s Syndrome. Leo’s diagnosis also results in Jo analysing her own traits and behaviour and that of several of her family members.

I’m not the mother of an Asperger’s child, nor do I know anyone officially diagnosed. I don’t know what it’s like to be given the news about your child and what it might mean. This book does give something of an insight – the worry for Leo’s lack of ability to sometimes relate to other children, what the diagnosis might mean for him in school and in life outside of it, dealing with other parents who may not understand Leo’s little quirks. Leo in particular has trouble with team sports, often becoming very angry or distressed during his Auskick game (an adaptation of AFL, an Australian football very popular in the state of Victoria where both Jo Case and I live).  Likewise in school, he often has issues when kicking a ball around with other kids.

At times I sympathised heavily with Jo, especially when she was bewildered about how best to help Leo, or how best to advocate for him, particularly with a teacher who didn’t seem to grasp the situation. She and Leo obviously have an incredibly strong bond and her relationship with her former partner, Leo’s father, is utterly admirable. It can be extremely difficult to keep a civil relationship after a breakdown, especially when there is a child involved. Jo and Mark seem to both do their absolute best to maintain a friendship in their devotion to Leo and Mark shares the parenting duties. He’s often more passive than Case is.

To be honest, some of the scenes where Case confronts other parents, or teachers, or rants about them behind their back were a touch alarming. We all lose our tempers, all might swear in front of our kids sometimes. I like the fact that this was explored and that Case obviously took great pains to present things as honestly as she could – there was no attempt to hide any part of her. However it did make some of the scenes particularly unenjoyable to read – there’s advocating for your child and then there’s just losing it that little bit. However the answers did come for her about why she may have experienced these losses of temper and about her own social awkwardness and the fact that she often had to screw up huge amounts of courage in social or professional situations.

This is a no holds barred parenting memoir, about more than just a diagnosis of Asperger’s. I live quite close to where most of this book takes place and there was an easy familiarity in the surroundings, the local “culture” so to speak. However it’s not really a book that I can assign a rating to – I think that it would be very helpful, very enlightening for anyone in the same position as Case found herself and I’d recommend it to anyone if I ever knew someone in that position. It really does embrace all the myriad of emotions that she feels and that Leo feels as well, and other relatives as well – Leo’s father, his stepfather, his grandparents etc. It’s an interesting story.

Book #119 of 2013

Boomer & Me is the 51st novel read and reviewed for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013

The Future Of Us – Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler

The Future Of Us
Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler
Simon & Schuster
2012 (originally 2011), 356p
Read from my TBR pile

It is 1996 and Emma’s father has shipped her a brand new computer, partially to help soothe the possible wound of a new baby sister with his new wife and the fact that he lives far away. Josh, Emma’s neighbour brings over an AOL CD that he had so that Emma can get online and start exploring this relatively new thing called the internet.

So Emma gives it a go and installs the CD. Once connected, she opens a page and finds herself confronted with something called Facebook with what is clearly a picture of herself, but 15 or 16 years into the future. At first she thinks it’s some sort of bizarre prank and so does Josh although they can’t figure out how anyone could possibly have managed to do something like this. But the Facebook page remains there everytime Emma connects and then all of a sudden, she begins to notice something.

The page changes. Emma-from-the-future can be changed – by Emma in the present. Emma’s actions on a day to day basis can have an effect on what is happening to her in the future. Not only can Emma and Josh see Emma’s destiny but they can also see Josh’s – and Josh is more than pleased by what his future looks like. He begins to berate Emma for trying to change hers, lest it change his.

Emma and Josh used to be best friends – but things have been undeniably weird for a little while now since one of them got their wires crossed. Logging on each day to check how their futures have altered has given them a chance to regain their closeness although Emma is quickly becoming obsessed with her future and how to get the perfect outcome. Perhaps she needs to let go and see what is right in front of her in the present.

I remember hearing about this book when it was first published and I knew it was something that I wanted to read. My parents got the internet in 1998 when I was in year 11, about the same age as Emma is in this book. I remember the painful dialling in every single time you wanted to do something and what it was like to get continually bumped off the internet every time someone attempted to call the house. I also had a free AOL CD or two in my past and used my free 50 hours or whatever it was that they came with. This book brought back so many memories, which was rather sweet. I have to admit that if, like Emma, I’d logged on and faced a glimpse of future-Bree, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from taking a peek at the page. And at the page of everyone I knew. And like Emma, I might’ve attempted to change things that seemed less than ideal. It’s hard seeing yourself fifteen years into the future and knowing that you’re miserable. If you think there’s something that you can do to change that, so that you don’t marry that deadbeat, or move to that city or lose that job, it’d be mighty tempting to try and make that change happen.

So on one hand, I thought this book was rather fun. It’s a great idea, blending the not-so-distant past (that may as well be a millennium ago, technology wise) with the now. I loved that portion of it. I loved Josh’s incredulity at people making mundane status updates about what they had for dinner or “vaguebooking” about how they were feeling. He couldn’t believe that anyone would actually bother to put stuff like that out there, or that people would want to read it. And most people would’ve probably felt the same way in 1996. This book doesn’t even touch on other social media – Twitter, Instagram, etc. There are many ways now in which she can share the most intimate yet mundane details of our daily lives. And yet not that long ago, this sort of thing would’ve been almost unbelievable.

However, this book lacks something – a certain punch. Emma is okay as a character, she’s a little self-absorbed and this shows in her obsession to change her future and make her life as perfect as possible. There seemed better ways to change it than the ways in which she goes about it in the novel – every time she changes something, in the future she ends up married to someone else. There would be easier ways to avoid this than totally changing your college preferences, for example. I appreciated that she was concerned for her best friend in the future and did what she could in order to change her future, which would probably make years of her life very difficult, although perhaps rewarding in the end. Occasionally her attitude got on my nerves, particularly towards her parents but then I remembered how obnoxious I was at fifteen years old and concluded that she was probably relatively realistic!

However what I didn’t love was her friendship with Josh. Quite often I’m a huge fan of the childhood-besties-turn-more story lines in YA but this one just felt so lacklustre! There was no feeling there, no chemistry. And the fact that Josh was a year younger was a bit strange to me – Emma was 15 or 16 (perhaps 16 as she was old enough to drive) and Josh was 14 or 15. I remember boys that age and the last thing I wanted to do was date them. They just seemed so different and even though their conflict arose from one of them being interested and the other not, the way in which this changed was so abrupt and clumsy. I never got the impression of the tide turning, of feelings changing… It just felt left field and awkward and out of no where. It wasn’t something that I read and felt comfortable with, it just seemed like it was thrown in there to tie up the ending neatly but it just didn’t ring authentic for me at all, which was a shame. The rest of the book was quite interesting.

6/10

Book #120 of 2013