Wow, another fortnight, and another book bingo – my 23rd of the year. As this is my second round, Theresa, and Amanda and I have allowed some flexibility and I have used previously read books to fit into categories I may not make by the end of the year but making sure they did not double up with my previous bingo card. Of the remaining categories, I am yet to read a book that fits in with a forgotten classic, and that will, together with a book written more than ten years ago, make up my final book bingo post that will appear just before Christmas – it’s a busy time of year – the asterix next to We Three Heroes in this post indicates I have not marked that square off yet, and it will appear in my next book bingo in early December.
This time around, I have scored three bingo rows – row two across, and rows two and three down – with some books not having appeared in my bingo previously but read this year, they fitted in perfectly to the categories, and some will as I previously said, be discussed in later posts.
The first book off the shelf is the one that we have all spent a year waiting for. Ever since Nevermoor was released in 2017, the anticipation for Wundersmith, my book with a one-word title (I’m not counting its subtitle for the sake of this category), has been bubbling over in the book blogging world, the publishing world and the bookseller and reader worlds. Wundersmith continues the adventures of Morrigan Crow, rescued from Jackalfax on her birthday by the enigmatic and utterly delightful Jupiter North, whose air of mystery and magic show Morrigan a world beyond what she has known for her entire life. She is taken to Nevermoor, and after her successes in her trials, she is accepted into the Wunder Society, or WunSoc, to study and cultivate her talents and knack. She meets her friends, Hawthorne, the Wundercat, Fenestra, and Jupiter’s nephew, Jack, and lives at the Hotel Deucalion – where the rooms change depending on what you need, where vampires throw parties and where doors that lead to secret places appear. Who wouldn’t want to live here? In Wundersmith, Morrigan is due to start her lessons at the academy, with her classmates, including Hawthorne, but when her knack is revealed, she finds that there are many who will want to work against her, and those, such as Ezra Squall, who wants to use her to get back into Nevermoor. What follows is Morrigan’s fight to stay in classes and resist Squall – and it is through these trials that she finds out who she can really trust, and who is just in it to help Squall, by using her. A great series and I am eager for the third one, to see where Jessica and Morrigan take us, and would love to find out where I can get a cat like Fen.
The second book on this list and post is a book that became a movie. For this, I chose Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant by Shrabani Busi. I saw the movie first, and then found the book, which was originally published in 2010, seven years before the movie came out. True to the core elements of the story, including the racism and discrimination Abdul faced by the Queen’s family and staff, the movie covers only the year of the Diamond Jubilee, whereas the book covers the preceding ten years and the Golden Jubilee, and also tells us of Abdul’s fate after Queen Victoria’s death in January, 1901. The story was discovered years after, through diaries that had remained secret after the death of Victoria and Abdul – it was these diaries that Shrabani used to piece the story together, as Bertie, who became Edward the VII, had all personal correspondence between the two destroyed after he sacked Abdul and sent him home. What their story highlights is that prejudice is deeply entrenched in society – whether it is class, gender, age, or in this case, race and religion, and whilst Queen Victoria saw beyond these and respected Abdul as her friend and munshi, those around her did not like it. The diaries had been Karim’s – kept secret by his family after he died in 1909 – and without them and their dedication to keeping the diaries safe, and Shrabani’s fabulous detective work, we might not know the depths of this relationship, and the Queen’s family and her advisors would have succeeded in scrubbing a remarkable, and intriguing tale from the annals of our history.
Finally, a book that everyone is talking about – Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee. This is one that has generated a lot of press from the publisher, Allen and Unwin, who won a seven-way bidding war for the right to publish this book. It tells the story of Lenny, whose brother, Davey, is sick and has a condition that makes him keep growing. Lenny dreams that her father will return one day, and as she and her brother collect a build it yourself encyclopaedia, Lenny begins to search for her father’s family, determined to find him. Yet as her brother gets sicker and has to go to hospital for tests, Lenny finds herself caught between a reality she has to deal with and the fantasy she is looking for. This book is special because it shows the strength of a community and family when things get bad, and a child narrator whose voice grows with her, and who has strong beliefs. Lenny and Davey dream of a life of freedom and adventure, heading up to Canada to find their father with Davey’s invisible Golden Eagle, Timothy, and away from the confines of their life with their mother. It is a love story, but not the kind of love story that everyone associates with those words. Instead of romantic love, it is familial love – mother and children, mother and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister – relationships that are perhaps more powerful than a romantic love because they are forever, and do not flit in and out of life in the same way romance does. There is a fragility about this book, but also a strength, and Lenny’s story is driven by her love for her family and insatiable thirst for knowledge. Lenny’s Book of Everything is one of those books that stays with you, and that haunts you. It gave me a book hangover that I’m clawing my way out of and trying to get on top of all my other reading. It is so powerful that my mind keeps circling back to it and I may need to read it again at some stage.
Row #4
A forgotten classic:
A book with a one-word title: Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend – AWW2018
A book with non-human characters: A Home for Molly by Holly Webb, Beast World by George Ivanoff
A funny book: Archibald, the Naughtiest Elf in the World Goes to the Zoo by Skye Davidson, Illustrated by Ágnes Rokiczky -AWW2018
A book with a number in the title: We Three Heroes by Lynette Noni – AWW2018*
Row #5 -BINGO
A book that became a movie: Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant by Shrabani Busi
A book based on a true story: The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris – AWW2018*
A book everyone is talking about: Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee – AWW2018*
A book written by someone under thirty: The Yellow House by Emily O’Grady – AWW2018
A book written by someone over sixty: Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies by Jackie French – AWW2018
Down
Row #1 – –
A book set more than 100 years ago: The Gypsy Crown by Kate Forsyth (Chain of Charms #1) – AWW2018
A book with a yellow cover: Australia Day by Melanie Cheng – AWW2018
A book written by an Australian woman: Disappearing Act by Jacqueline Harvey (Kensy and Max #2) – AWW2018
A forgotten classic:
A book that became a movie: Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant by Shrabani Busi
Row #2 – BINGO
A book written more than ten years ago: The Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas*
A book by an author you’ve never read before: If Kisses Cured Cancer by T.S. Hawken
A book written by an Australian man: Captain Cook’s Apprentice by Anthony Hill
A book with a one-word title:Wundersmith by Jessica Townsend – AWW2018
A book based on a true story: The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris – AWW2018*
Row #3: – BINGO
A memoir: No Country Woman by Zoya Patel – AWW2018
A non-fiction book:Amazing Australian Women: Twelve Women Who Shaped History by Pamela Freeman and Sophie Beer – AWW2018*
A prize-winning book: Chain of Charms series by Kate Forsyth – 2007 Aurealis Award for Best Children’s Fiction – aWW2018
A book with non-human characters: A Home for Molly by Holly Webb, Beast World by George Ivanoff
A book everyone is talking about: Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee – AWW2018
This is my third last book bingo of 2018!! The next one shall be my penultimate post, on the 1st of December, and the entire challenge will wrap up ten days before Christmas on the 15th, so look out for my final posts and I hope, a book bingo wrap up post.
First square being marked off this week is a memoir –
Title: Amazing Australian Women: Twelve Women Who Shaped History
Title: No Country Woman
No Country Woman by Zoya Patel is a story of identity – the intersection of three cultures and nations across generations – Fiji, India and Australia, and how these contributed to the identity of Zoya, and how the clash of her Fijian-Indian identity, to her, felt like it was at odds with the Australian identity that she grew up with. Zoya grew up in flux and flitting between her Fijian-Indian identity and culture at home with her family, and her Australian identity at school, with friends, that saw her feeling like she had to choose between her identities, and where it took her many years to realise she could embrace both of them equally and find solace in each – that being Fijian-Indian-Australian was who she was and each culture, country and heritage was who she was. Grappling with how to navigate the traditions of her family, parents and the culture they grew up in with her new life in Australia, where she found herself faced with the conflict of trying to embrace an identity as a Fijian-Indian, a migrant and an Australian – all of which were, to Zoya, felt as though they were competing against each other and she could only choose one.
