Exciting contemporary Australian fiction, an unusual story that picks up some common themes but placed in a multi-diverse environment. Loved it. ( )

The Healing Party comes with impressive credentials. It’s been nominated for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the blurb is by Helen Garner who calls it a wild family drama, shot through with a furious, pure and grieving love. But it’s a difficult book for unbelievers because it’s about a family of ‘charismatic’ Christians and their daughter who doesn’t share their belief that a miracle is going to heal her mother’s cancer. Of necessity there’s a lot in it about faith, and although at the beginning I was mildly interested to see how this manifested itself in family life, the intensity of it wore rather thin for me. It took me three days to read it and that was not because it was a long book… it was reluctance to continue reading it. I doubt that I would have if not for the VPLA nomination.

However, as Garner says, it’s a family drama, and differences in religious belief are just another one of many differences that can tear families apart. Likewise the dogmatic attitudes shared by the Chan family are just another kind of psychological barrier that can cause estrangement within families. In this novel Natasha has escaped her father’s domineering behaviour by making a new life in Darwin, but she can’t run away from the love she feels for her mother and she leaves her job to come home when she learns the bad news.

But the tensions between the four sisters are still unresolved, her father is as domineering as ever, and her mother is wholly compliant, just as before. What complicates things still further is that Dad has convinced himself that if everyone has faith, then Jesus will confer a miracle, and the family is to hold a massive party to celebrate her cure. So the pressure is on Natasha, and the situation is complicated by her own faith, which is strong but not of the ‘charismatic’ kind.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/14/the-healing-party-by-micheline-lee/ ( )