Kathryn's Inbox

Literary Journalist Jane Sullivan (who you may know from the Turning Pages column in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald ,) spent much her childhood immersed in books. Now, many years later, she has decided to revisit those years and the many books that she read in Storytime, and take a look at how they shaped her to become the adult--and reader--that she is today. One part memoir and one part literary criticism, this one was an enjoyable read. Full of nostalgia, the volume includes short essays from prominent Australian writers on their favourite books. The author holds nothing back as she admits to the many misconceptions that she made about the books that she read during her formative years. On a more personal level, I was very keen to see how many of the same books I had read as the author. The answer to that question, as it turned out, was not many, though much could be owed to the fact that I grew up in a different era, in an entirely different country.  Althoug...

Quentin Jacobson, or Q to his friends, is about to graduate from high school. The path of his life looks pretty set--he'll go to college--but his life derails slightly when Margo Roth Spiegelman the cute and charismatic girl from next door breaks into his bedroom window and takes him on an adventure that is fun and unpredictable. And then Margo disappears. Over the next few weeks, Q, with the help of his friends, begins to put together the clues as to what may have happened to Margo. And there are certainly plenty of them. (This isn't the first time that Margo has disappeared, nor is it the first time that she has left clues behind.) Along the way, Q makes some important discoveries and soon begins to ask the question--how well can you really know another person, and what does your perception of them say about you? This one starts out fun, gets a little slow in the middle and then moves toward an unconventional but ultimately satisfying ending. (I didn't find th...

It is the early 1970s in Melbourne, a time of great change in attitudes and freedoms, in a city that is both progressive and renowned for the arts, yet still very conservative and clinging to the old ways. Nora is a single mum, living a bohemian lifestyle in a shared house where there is a strong sense of friendship, sexual freedoms and an underlying hint of selfishness that no one ever acknowledges or talks about. And though she is with a different man, she soon finds herself hopping into a relationship of sorts with Javo, a drug addict. Javo loves her, but he loves his freedom more and he's caught in the trap of addiction. Meanwhile Nora has and struggles with an addiction of her own--love. Reading Monkey Grip felt very much like reading someone's diary. It's episodic and often there isn't a sense of closure. And often we see Nora make the same mistakes when she clearly knows better. So it's a bit like real life, really. Just set in a very different time-...

Romy Hall is just about to begin serving two consecutive life sentences for killing a man. What the jury, and her lawyer, who is funded by the state don't know is that the man she killed was her stalker. And that the crime happened in a fit of rage. She may not be perfect, but she's not the calculating monster that she was made out to be in court. What follows is the experience of being treated as nothing more than a number, who must do as she is told, as she navigates a cruel and unforgiving system that would appear to care nothing about rehabilitating her or anyone else, and that has punishments that lack both logic and humanity. When Romy learns that her mother has died and she cannot get word from the outside world about her son, she realises that she must find a way to escape. Brutal and confronting, this book offers a very real glimpse into why people make the decisions that they do, and how the American prison system can often be flawed--offering no hope of rehab...

View this post on Instagram Stopped by @ciboespressocolonnades today & left a signed copy of About a Girl on their bookshelf. I hope that someone finds it & enjoys reading it. Looking forward to the official launch date of About a Girl later this week. Did you know that you can pre-order the eBook from Amazon, iTunes and other online retailers? #bookstagram #bibliophile #books #amreading #bookshelf #proudauthormoment #cibo #colonnades #noarlunga #noarlungacentre #fleurieupeninsula #adelaide #southaustralia A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathryns_inbox) on May 25, 2019 at 12:36am PDT

Louisa May Alcott's classic novel  Little Women gets modern day makeover in Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy a beautifully illustrated graphic novel, intended for middle grade readers. In this version, the March sisters are living in the big city. Dad's away serving in the military overseas, while their mother is juggling full time work and looking after their four daughters. In a contemporary twist, the Marches are a blended family--Meg is their father's daughter from his first marriage, while Jo is their mother's daughter from an earlier relationship. The pair married when both girls were little, their father adopted Jo and then younger sisters Beth and Amy came along. Oh, and did I mention that this family also happens to be bi-racial? The story weaves events from the original and gives them an contemporary twist--for example Beth is struck down with Leukaemia rather than Scarlett Fever, while Amy's experiences of bullying at school take a slightly different turn....

View this post on Instagram Spotted on the upper level of Noarlunga Interchange, an old milk ad from the 1980s. When the Interchange first opened, there was a kiosk on the upper level, which later relocated downstairs. #liveonmilk #hauntedadelaide #noarlungainterchange #noarlunga #adelaide #southaustralia A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathryns_inbox) on Jun 21, 2019 at 11:25pm PDT

Alice Dyson has a big year ahead. She is in her final year of high school and the plan is to study, hard. But after an unexpected and slightly strange encounter with Teddy Taualai, the school's biggest troublemaker, which is caught on video and goes viral, Alice finds herself the unwilling centre of attention and with a number of unwanted complications. This was a pleasing story about the realities of high school, extreme shyness, first relationships and a young woman trying to find a sense of self. I loved that the story was set in the western suburbs of Adelaide, and the depictions of the Adelaide coastline and rail network. Although this is marketed as YA and features characters in their final year of high school, I found that Alice and her friends came across as quite young in places and her narrative voice seemed quite young for her age in the early stages of the book. (Then again, Alice was very shy and this no doubt influenced her outlook on life.) The highly readab...

Sammy Lou needs somewhere to live. Let down by all of the people who were supposed to love and care for him, he ends up homeless and surviving the only way he knows how--by breaking into empty houses, sleeping there and leaving the next morning before he can be caught. Then, one fateful day, he breaks into the house that belongs to the De Lainey's, a big family, full of people who have even bigger hearts. When he is found, each of the De Lainey kids just assume that Sam is a friend of one of the other kids, and he ends up sticking around for a while. However, Sam has some dark secrets from his past, and a brother with a disability who may be in serious trouble, and he knows that this friendship cannot last forever. The De Lainey's will never accept him once they know what he has done ... will they? This novel was a pleasing read that addresses some serious issues in a way that is relevant to the target audience. In particular, I was impressed with the way that the autho...

A strange confession. I have never dreaded writing a book review nearly as much as I have dreaded writing this one. And do not, for one second, think that it is because I hated the book. On the contrary, I loved it. There was something utterly compelling about every one of the autobiographical essays contained with the book. The difficulty with writing this review means saying a good-bye of sorts to a book that has been a solid companion over several days as I slowly devoured the stories within. And I am not sure how I feel about that. Written by a number of different Australian authors and edited by Lee Kofman, Split is a collection of personal essays of significant endings and their aftermath. Opening with an essay by Graeme Simsion that talks about how he discarded his past self and the possible label that went with it, many of the essays veer into territory that is both heartbreaking and familiar. Virginia Peters talks about her daughter's charismatic but ultimately sel...

View this post on Instagram Do I spy a Ferris wheel & ice rink in Victoria Square? It must be almost time for ice skating & lots of rides and fun in the square again 😍❄️ #victoriasquare #adelaide #southaustralia A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathryns_inbox) on Jun 26, 2019 at 3:38am PDT

On July 27 Heaven , the latest V.C. Andrews novel to be adapted for the screen will premiere on Lifetime in the USA. Less famous than Flowers in the Attic , though no less loved by fans of the author, Heaven tells the story of Heaven Leigh Casteel, a young woman who was born in abject poverty and is raised by her loving grandmother, a stepmother who tolerates her and her father, a womaniser and an alcoholic who cannot stand her and blames her for her mother's death. It is notable that Heaven resembles her mother in every possible way, but for her hair. While Heaven's hair is black, and according to her, cursed, her mother was a blonde, and consequently, more attractive.  Heaven does her best to rise above her situation, trying hard to look out for her younger half-siblings and by working hard at school. She forms a relationship with a middle-class boy from the town. Then the family situation takes a turn for the worse and her old man decides that the only solution is to...

For all the VC Andrews fans out there

Australian journalist and now author Trent Dalton takes pieces of his life story and shapes them into a tall tale that is as entertaining as it is over-hyped. (Though that last bit isn't really the authors fault.) Set in Brisbane in the mid 1980s, it tells the story of Eli Bell, a kid on the cusp of puberty who has a heroine junkie for a stepdad and his favourite babysitter is a notorious criminal. Add to that a brother who refuses to speak and his interactions with a Brisbane drug dealer that eventually cause him to lose his lucky finger and for his mother to wind up in jail, and the whole thing is one heck of a ride. Unfortunately, this one didn't hit all the right notes for me, though I very much enjoyed some parts of it. For me it was a book with entertaining bits in it that probably would have been a whole lot more entertaining if I hadn't been told just how much I should enjoy it by practically everyone on the planet and if I hadn't seen it displayed pro...

Inspired by Johannes Vermeer's beautiful painting, author Tracy Chevalier creates a beautiful work of fiction centred around who the mysterious girl in the painting may have been. Through a combination of research and imagination, Chevalier creates Griet, a young lady who is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household after her father is injured in a workplace accident. Sensing that Griet has an aptitude for art, Vermeer develops a friendship with the young woman and she soon becomes his student and muse. But darker forces are at play, first through the less than honourable intentions of one of Vermeer's friends, and then through Vermeer's insistence that Griet pose for him, and wear his wife's beloved pearl earrings. Can she rise above the scandal, or will it ruin her future forever? Well researched and beautifully told, this story is a pleasurable read. It comes as no surprise that this one has been in print for the last twenty years and has been made in...

What do you do when music is the biggest thing in your life, but a ministroke leaves you unable to hear? That is the challenge faced by Simon Rain, the eighteen-year-old protagonist of Impossible Music, a brilliant new novel by Adelaide author Sean Williams. The novel opens with Simon hurting and angry, and resisting all opportunities to adjust to his new circumstances. And then he meets G (or George, or George who likes coffee,) a smart, tough girl who is learning to cope with her own newfound hearing loss, and who challenges Simon on a number of occasions. But what ultimately leads Simon on a path toward self-acceptance is an idea. He wants to create a new form of music. Something that the Deaf community can experience, along with the hearing world. The novel starts off on a dark note, but that is understandable, given the subject matter. Though Simon's circumstances are unusual (he's the thirteenth recorded case in the world of having this type of hearing loss,) the...

View this post on Instagram Spotted outside the hairdresser near the Central Market. #funnyquotes #inspirationalquotes #centralmarket #victoriasquare #adelaide #southaustralia A post shared by Kathryn White (@kathryns_inbox) on Jun 21, 2019 at 1:08am PDT