Divergent (Veronica Roth)

Note: This is an audiobook, narrated by Emma Galvin (www.audible.com)

Holy moly. Veronica Roth is only 22. Divergent’s her first book. Wow.

I’ll admit that the timing is superb. Just as 2010/2011 were the years of vampire fiction, 2011/2012 were dedicated largely to dystopian fiction – where people live in a totalitarian or environmentally degraded environment.

Against the backdrop of global hysteria about Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy, young adult author Veronica Roth wrote Divergent: a story about a young girl living in a society saved from the brink of apocalypse.

In short, humanity has organised itself into five factions, each of which lives by a single core value: Abnegation (the Selfless); Erudite (the Intelligent); Candor (the Honest); Amity (the Peaceful); and Dauntless (the Brave).

Born into a staunchly Abnegation family, Beatrice Prior has tried to uphold the ideals of her parents – which go against her natural inclinations. Then, on her 16th birthday, she takes an aptitude test to determine which faction she is most suited for. And it is revealed to her, in secret, that she is one of a very rare and dangerous subset of the population – Divergent – because she possesses the traits of not one but three factions. (You’ll see which ones.)

For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is, so she makes a choice that surprises everyone. During the highly competitive initiation that follows, she struggles to determine who her friends really are and discovers a conflict that threatens to unravel her society.

This magnificently written book is also superbly narrated by Emma Galvin, who is able to sound youthful, old, female, male, happy and sad – depending on the relevant point of view. I am loving every minute of listening to it.

Disclaimer: I'm known for my default skepticism when it comes to fantasy/sci-fi. But... This book is that good. Promise.

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Two books about unusual women

Five days of holiday. Three separate car trips of four hours each. Four provinces. Four cities. Insufficient reading time. And two books. One: among the top five pieces of trashy, self-serving, barely literate piles of drivel I've read in my lifetime. The other: so brilliant I can't stop thinking about it.

The first is Loui Fish's Walking in my Choos. It's hogwash. Fascinating, sensationalist, poorly translated hogwash. It is peppered with typos, missing a few critical editorial items (like attribution for the foreword) and profoundly lacking in class... but I read it twice. And loved every minute of it.

I knew little or nothing about Loui Fish a week ago, other than that she's the ex-wife of local footballer and (supposed) hunk Mark Fish. I've spotted her in Heat, draped over this or that young buck and showing lots of booby, and I thought she was pretty. If you like that sort of thing. But I had no real idea of the shenanigans - the drugs, affairs, criminals, drama, mutually assured destruction and other chaos - that accompany celeb living.

And if I had the inside track, as Loui does, I'd be too skaam to tell anyone.

Her ex must want to murder her. He, fellow sportsman James Small, and a cast of other local bigwigs come off looking like a bunch of coke-addled miscreants, and the laughingly recited tale of how little Luke Fish tried to loosen his dad's girlfriend's tires is terrifying in the least. Oy. Those poor kids.

So if, like me, you love reading trash and you get off on knowing who's done what to whom and for what bizarre reasons, and you particularly enjoy stories about people you may spot in Tasha's, this book is divine holiday reading. But wrap the cover in brown paper, for God's sake, because I'd be more embarrassed to be caught reading this than I would 50 Shades of Grey, or even Twilight. Yeesh.

Number 2 Holiday Book is Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and it's possible I am the last bookworm on earth to have discovered it. Those in the know have been raving for ages, and I've been ignoring them. The blurb simply doesn't do this novel justice. That's my defense.

Anyway, here's my take on it:

The story is genius. The writing is magnificent. The characters are utterly believable. The twists and turns are many. The dialogue and internal dialogue are insightful.

In short, it's a winner - reminding me a lot of a book I adored about ten years back: The Drowning People, by (I think) Richard Mason. There's also a lot of Wally Lamb, Lionel Shriver and Joanne Harris in Flynn's style, and I really like all three.

Here's what some others have said:

Gone Girl is one of the best—and most frightening—portraits of psychopathy I've ever read. Nick and Amy manipulate each other—with savage, merciless and often darkly witty dexterity. This is a wonderful and terrifying book about how the happy surface normality and the underlying darkness can become too closely interwoven to separate. - Tana French, New York Times bestselling author of Faithful Place and Into the Woods 

Gone Girl builds on the extraordinary achievements of Gillian Flynn's first two books and delivers the reader into the claustrophobic world of a failing marriage. We all know the story, right? Beautiful wife disappears; husband doesn't seem as distraught as he should be under the circumstances. But Flynn takes this sturdy trope of the 24-hour news cycle and turns it inside out, providing a devastating portrait of a marriage and a timely, cautionary tale about an age in which everyone's dreams seem to be imploding - Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing and I’d Know You Anywhere

Gillian Flynn's first two books, Sharp Edges and Dark Places, are already on my Kindle. Yay!

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A Year in the Wild (James Hendry)

The best place to read a book set in the bush is in the bush. So you can imagine my glee when it arrived before I left for a week in Madikwe Game Reserve. And A Year in the Wild: A Riotous Novel by James Hendry continued to delight me from there.

It’s both delicious and deliciously funny. It draws easy-to-imagine pictures of madness and mayhem; hilarity and horror. And it gives the most fascinating insights into what goes on behind the posh scenes of larney lodges, in a very similar manner to Imogen Edwards-Jones’s Babylon novels, all of which I have greedily devoured.

But I don’t think the back cover blurb does this book sufficient justice, because there’s so much more to it than the rivalry between brothers – and newly appointed Sasekile Private Game Lodge staff members – Angus and Hugh MacNaughton.

It’s about strong and strange personalities, ridiculous holidaymakers, broken rules and ignored regulations. It’s about animals and birds and the human beings who live and work alongside them. And it’s about the author’s own real-life experience of the bush and the game lodge world, translated into comic (and sometimes tragic) fiction.

I typically disparage novels written in correspondence form. I don’t like them as a rule; I find them cheesy. But the device works well in A Year in the Wild, because the plot is mostly light and undemanding. The writer has also taken great care to give his two main narrators, Angus and Hugh, completely different voices, styles and tones.

Not an easy thing to achieve for an author who’s new to fiction. I’m impressed.

My only criticism, then? The novel gets more enjoyable the deeper you delve, with a strong middle and a great end. It’s neither as flawless nor as compelling in the start as it could be, and is, elsewhere. Buy it for bush or beach reading, though. It’s fun.


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