Eliza Henry-JonesCritiques

"In the Quiet" was a gentle novel narrated by Cate Carlson, a young wife and mother who has recently died. Now she watches as her family mourns her loss.

While I could feel the pain her children and husband were grappling with and could sympathise with Cate as she watched them suffer her loss, I didn't enjoy this novel as much as I thought I would. It was slow and not a lot happened in terms of the plot. There were far too many characters and the number of times they smelled something was ridiculous. The author obviously enjoys describing scents! Unfortunately, this novel never resonated with me.

Salt and Skin is a contemporary literary fiction by Australian author Eliza Henry-Jones and is longlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Award.

Widowed Luda Managan and her two teenage children, Darcy and Min, move to Seannay island in the Orkneys in Scotland. Luda works as a photographer, raising awareness about environmental issues. Publishing a photo of a child taken in the moments before her death in a landslide turns the locals against Luda and repercusses through the story. The children soon befriend Theo, the mysterious, luminous foundling who washed up on the island years before with webbing between his fingers. The islanders believe he is a selkie.

The story began very well and I was intrigued by the mystery surrounding Theo and also the mystery of why some of the islanders have a kind of sight that reveals the hidden scars on the skin of anyone on Seannay. There is also a storyline involving the historical witch trials on the Orkneys. The women who were killed were accused of communicating with the whales. Then there are the mysterious witch marks on the walls of the ghost house, protective engravings on the walls. There were so many fascinating facets to the story but sadly all of these tantalizing titbits are thrown out to lure the unsuspecting reader in, only to leave you frustrated and annoyed when halfway through it degenerates into a slow, ponderous, indulgent treatise on the awkward relationships between the family, and also Theo. None of the mysteries are concluded, none of the storylines actually go anywhere, and the ambivalent ending was an anticlimax to say the least. Even the gay romance that was presumably meant to be slow burn eventually just became frustrating. My favourite character was aunt Casandra, but even her story was not fleshed out and explained. The priest was a dangerous misogynist, and somehow a story that sets out to be empowering to women isn’t really.

The audiobook accents were brilliant. The first half of the book was a four to five star read, the second half probably two stars at best, so overall I’m going with three stars, but almost reluctantly, as the writer clearly has the skill to set out a great story, so why did she leave us high and dry?

An initially promising narrative was drowned in a sea of overblown “aching” prose. The author is so enthralled with her characters—so preoccupied with documenting their every melodramatic move and mood, romanticized look and sigh—that she loses sight of her job to maintain readers’ interest in them. Belaboured. Repetitive. Tedious. Just dreadful.

I received this book free from the publisher via netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

Please see my full reviews available at www.coffeeandtrainspotting.com.

For requesting arcs and books to review, please visit www.netgalley.com.

This story of Stella and her very broken family grew on me through I found myself wishing for some good news towards the end of the book; as there was so much depressing stuff happening. So lets see...Stella is 17 and has just found out that she is adopted and her birth mother has been writing to her for years. Her father is a gambling addict and has lost his job and subsequently the family home so they are having to move into a caravan park which has a terrible reputation as a den of meth labs and drug dealers. Her sister Taylor has been expelled from Stella's school for setting fire to the Library and is basically a wild child who climbs on the roof when she can't get her own way. And finally, there is her mother who still loves Stella's father despite having to work two jobs and keep him from the pokies and the track. Not very cheery stuff.
Stella survives through the friendship from Clem, Zin and Lara but is clueless as to Clem's developing feelings for her....thus more complications in her very complicated life.
After she moves into the caravan park, Stella keeps it a secret from her friends at school but soon comes to love all the residents of the park with all their quirks and faults, as they have a real community vibe happening. On top of all this, she and her sister try to keep their dad away from gambling AND Stella must decide whether or not she wants to contact her birth mother.
This is a lot to put into one book, but the author has done it very well and you can see all the characters as true people with their flaws and selfishness. Things come to a head when Stella decides to stay with her very broken birth mother and there is a flood that threatens to swamp the caravan park. Engrossing story .

Ache by Eliza Henry-Jones is an Australian novel that accurately depicts the dialogue and country lifestyle in a small town in a way that often reminded me of a Tim Winton novel. Set one year after a bushfire devastated the small mountain community, Ache is about family, community, grief and recovery. The regeneration and recovery of the environment and wildlife is just as important as that of individual community members. Readers will also enjoy the way in which main character Annie's vocation as a vet is incorporated in the story.

I loved the setting of the novel, the juxtaposition of country and city and the individual growth and development of the main characters, however, being a primarily character-driven novel it did leave me wanting a little more from the plot.

Eliza Henry-Jones is a talented and accomplished writer living in the Yarra Valley in Victoria and with a new YA novel out this year called P is For Pearl, has certainly made her mark.

I recommend Ache for any reader wanting to discover an uplifting and uniquely Australian novel and explore life in a rural community recovering from a trauma.

* Copy courtesy of HarperCollins Australia *

Ache is commercial fiction exploring the aftermath of bushfire on individuals and communities. It’s quite draining to read, made more so by the knowledge that the author has qualifications in psychology and grief counselling, and wrote her Honours thesis about the representation of bushfire trauma in fiction.

The story centres around thirty-something Annie, who shot to tabloid fame by escaping with a small child from the burning mountain on a horse. (Need I say, this is a classic example of highly risky panic? So many people die trying to escape at the last moment. If you live in, or visit, anywhere at risk of bushfire, including the urban fringe, have a bushfire plan and rehearse it.)

Annie’s grandmother dies, as do other people in the small community. Her mother’s home is ruined, and her daughter is traumatised. And Annie, who lives and works in the city with her husband Tom, feels the urge to return to the mountain to help her mother and her uncle. She also needs to sort out her marriage and deal with her own grief.

The characterisation of the child, Pip, is painful. Quite honestly, if it were not for the author’s qualifications which show that she knows much more about this than I do, I would find it hard to believe that any parent could survive the bratty behaviour of this child and still love it.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/06/22/ache-by-eliza-henry-jones/

The second book in as many months that I have read narrated by a woman, a mother, a wife, that has passed on to the great beyond. Would probably have passed on this if my good friend, Angela hadn't given this five stars. Which would have been a shame because this was simply a beautiful story.

Cate, not yet forty, has died, she doesn't remember how and hopes to find out as she watches her family try to come to terms with her death. She is able to see certain things, she has no control over what, or when. Time skips and jumps and in between we learn her back story and that of her family. Jesse, Rafferty, and Cameron, her children, her sister Bea, her friend Laura and her husband, all grieve in different ways, one has a big secret that is eating at him, and one feels responsible for her death.

Although there are moments of sadness this is a life affirming book, how they learn to go on wonderfully portrayed. Such great characters, I cared about each of them immensely. A quiet, meditative story, I appreciated the gentle way this story was rendered, with compassion and love. A sentimental story for sure but not written in a maudlin or dramatic way. The different ways they grieve but come together as a family, not without difficulties, but a new way to see their family as a whole. As I said, simply beautiful and touching.

ARC from publisher.

Beautiful and heartbreaking.

A nicely constructed novel, about grief, recovery and family. I wasn't that into the overarching conceit of the book, in which Cate, who has died, watches over her family and friends, and I could have done with a lot less of the horses, but this is otherwise a pretty impressive debut.

I am not any sort of expert in these matters, and this may be a rather patronizing thing to say, but it seems to me that this is a remarkably good piece of work from a very young author. The way Ms Henry-Jones has chosen to tell this story, with multiple perspectives and continual jumps backwards and forwards in time, runs a grave risk of confusing the reader or at least hiding the story beneath the complexity of the story-telling. But Henry-Jones maters the technique beautifully. That said, I need to mention that any story which is told in the voice of a dead person, "looking down from heaven" as it were, can never get five stars from me. But that's my limitation, not hers.½