Title: Siren
Author: Rachel Matthews
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Published: 1st August 2017
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Price: $29.95
Synopsis: A brave new novel that sensitively explores one woman’s experience of sexual violence and the silencing of those who feel compelled to speak out.
What happens when a young woman enters a city apartment early morning, with two footballers? Jordi Spence is sixteen years old and lives in outer Melbourne. By daybreak, her world has shifted. Max Carlisle, a troubled AFL star, can’t stop what comes next. And Ruby, a single woman from the apartment block, is left with questions when she sees Jordi leave.
In this remarkable novel, Rachel Matthews captures the characters of Jordi and her family, the players, and the often loveable inhabitants of a big city with a deceptive lightness of touch that seduces the reader. Siren reveals the often unnoticed life of a city while simultaneously drawing us deep into a dark and troubling world. What happens has an unexpected effect on all those who are both directly and indirectly involved.
The result is a powerful and haunting novel about cultural stereotypes and expectations, love, loneliness, family and our struggle to connect. In so many ways, Matthews subtly sounds the siren on sexual violence and its prevalence in our culture.
~*~
It is rare to come across a novel that tackles concepts and issues that are rarely brought into the light, unless it becomes a major story that hits the news. In Siren, Rachel Matthews tells the story of Jordi, a teenager victimised by an AFL star, who would have all the power of a club and community behind him, and the privilege of money and standing in society that can and is, in some instances, used to silence victims and those without power and influence. Where the AFL player in question would have had the best defence he could afford, Jordi is silenced, alone, and feeling like she can’t turn to anyone, not even her mother. The witnesses are silenced too: the roommate of the AFL player, Max Carlisle, who knows what happened, and is consumed by fear, and torn between the desire to do the right thing, and the idea that he needs to protect the brand of the AFL, and ensure that nothing tarnishes it, even when a crime has been committed. And Ruby, the single woman in the same apartment building, who will encourage Max to speak out, or to try to, is caught up in this web of silence as well.
It is a web of silence that affects everyone, except the perpetrator, and it is this culture of silence and exploitation that forms the basis of the novel, complementing Jordi’s struggle, which is front and centre. It examines the culture of blaming the victim and questioning their role in the violence, whether it is sexual or domestic. By placing the story of Jordi front and centre, and showing how powerless even those who are in positions where they might be listened to are as well, Siren eloquently relates the gritty reality of sexual violence against young women. It has a sense of discomfort throughout the novel, because as a reader, you know Jordi is the victim and isn’t to blame, the doctor at the clinic urging her to report knows, and the witnesses know, and yet, everyone who can help, is unable to without Jordi saying so, or because they feel silenced by the community they are a part of.
Told in third person and moving between the perspective of Jordi and those who were unwitting witnesses, including the homeless woman Max befriended, whose concern for Jordi and finding out what had happened to her over her own health and living situation. Jordi’s home life isn’t perfect, with her father off all the time, and her mother’s current boyfriend isn’t great, and even her mother isn’t always there for her, but begins to change her tune, casting the boyfriend aside when she realises Jordi is struggling and does everything she can to get her daughter to open up, but is also afraid to speak out, to say what she fears has happened out loud. Jordi is ashamed, and doesn’t want anyone to know, but she feels like she is drowning, and the witnesses who feel compelled to speak out are equally silenced by their own fears and doubts, or by those of those around them, and the threats they might face – whether from those they know or the community at large, and the desire to bury the issues of domestic and sexual assault and violence behind closed doors, because there are those who would rather not acknowledge it.
The culture of silence is depicted cleverly through the actions of each character, and the way they think and respond. It is shown through the decisions Jordi makes and about who she tells and doesn’t tell, about what she does and doesn’t do and about the assumptions made towards the end of the novel, and the sense that I got whilst reading it that things could go wrong and might not be resolved.
Dealing with uncomfortable issues in literature is a good way to get attention on these issues, and out into the broader community. Sometimes media stories don’t give the full impact and only tell part of the story, or tell a narrative they want to. In a book, many facets can combine to show various sides of the story, but at the same time, illustrate that the privileged notion of victim blaming and being able to get away with something due to power and money – I felt this was what Rachel Matthews was suggesting in the story – can be shattered and broken down, and therefore discussed and ideas surrounding sexual and domestic violence that appear to put the responsibility on the victim can begin to be broken down.
It is not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination and I don’t think it is meant to be easy and light. It is meant to be dark, and gritty and confrontational. Not only is the reader confronted by sexual assault and domestic violence, but by homelessness, and class divide, and the assumptions people make based on these characteristics and others, without getting the full story. It does not sanitise any of these experiences either, and combined, these make it an important book to read, even if you only read it once, it is a story that will stay with you, niggling at the back of your mind whenever these stories come up in the media. Rachel Matthews acknowledges these issues and writes about them in an in-your-face style that ensures the reader is unlikely to forget too quickly.
A powerful story that needs to be told, and is told without any sugar coating of the issues.
Title: Leaving Ocean Road
Title: Tell It To The Dog: A Memoir of Sorts
Title: Sky
It is very rare that I get to meet my favourite authors, or in fact, any authors, even though we interact over social media, so when I heard that 
At age 25, Kate’s boyfriend, and now husband, gave her five years to get published – five years, where she could polish her work and query it, and learn her craft through study and writing and rewriting. As Kate tells it, the story came, as several of her stories have, from a dream. Using this as a launchpad, she set out to write what would become her first book, with the contract signed two days before she turned thirty, and that book is turning twenty years old this year. I still have my original copy of this book that Kate signed for me after the talk on last night. This book was the beginning of a six-book saga that introduced me to the world of fantasy, and led me into reading Kate’s books for life. This book was 
Dragonclaw’s publication then led to Kate’s career as a full time writer, resulting in that series, and the trilogy that followed, her children’s books which include 
Australia: A Mother’s Offering to Her Children by A Lady Long Resident in New South Wales in 1841, the mother of four children, fighting to keep them safe, and loved in a harsh world that tried to separate them, and this book is a testament not only to the literary blood in Kate’s family but to the love, sacrifices, triumphs and moments of grief that Charlotte went through to keep her family safe.
Hearing about Kate’s writing process and literary family was fascinating and she had the audience captured with her words, and very interested to hear about her writing journey, and the moments in her life that affected her and her writing, and introduced her to a love of fairy tales, a love that I share with her, just as we both enjoy reading and watching different fairy tale retellings to see how someone else interprets a fairy tale. The fascination of fairy tales has as much to do with their history and where they came from as what we know them as today – from the oral traditions to the many interpretations that have come about since they were first recorded the early 1800s by Jacob and Wihelm Grimm, whose stories mostly came from Dortchen Wild, their neighbour. During the talk, Kate recounted the childhood incident and subsequent hospital stays that had sparked her interest in fairy tales and desire to write, specifically the fairy tale of Rapunzel. 
of individual names such as William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and had read some poetry by Dante’s sister, Christina – my favourite of hers was Goblin Market and re-reading it, I wondered if the characters of Lizzie and Laura in her poem had been inspired by Sleeping Beauty as well, and those in the Pre-Raphaelite circles, though perhaps not as obsessively as the series of paintings of her done by Dante Gabriel had been – an obsession that led him to running back to her after affairs, and burying his only copy of his poetry with her, and seven years later, digging her up to retrieve his poetry. Beauty in Thorns tells the stories of Lizzie Siddal, Georgie MacDonald, who married Edward Burne-Jones and Janey Burden, and the various affairs and love triangles that happened with each other and the models that the men longed to paint. But the main story became the story of Margot Burne-Jones, daughter of Georgie and Edward, whose father longed to keep her from growing up and falling in love an experiencing the pain of adult life, and the contrast in her longing to be awakened like Sleeping Beauty, an obsession that Edward had had for many years, since childhood. Together with Georgie’s story of being the faithful wife, Margot’s story shows how obsessions ate away at these artists, and what their passions did to their families and their great loves, how their obsessions became what finally consumed them in the end. Kate said she structured this story along the lines of Sleeping Beauty, with Margot representing Sleeping Beauty, and Georgie as the Queen, and the paintings were Edward’s way of awakening the world, as the Pre-Raphaelites were trying to do through their involvement in the suffrage movement, for example. I was lucky enough to be an early reader and reviewer for Beauty in Thorns, and it was full of hope, love, tragedy and despair, and everything else that makes Kate’s novels so good. Like her written word, Kate’s spoken word is powerful and weaves a spell on her audience, capturing their attention wholly and completely across the room, not even a gasp at times flying forth from the crowd. And like her books, the talk was over all too soon. It was a lovely evening for all, and Kate was so generous with her time afterwards as well.
