Oh man, this book was heavy. I suggested we read it for book club without realising the subject matter. Having said that, it is beautifully written and I loved the illustrations throughout. I just needed to be careful with how much I could cope with in one go - which is, I suppose, a credit to the writing! ( )

NB This book is scheduled for publication in May 2022.

Bedtime Story is not the kind of book one might 'review' in the usual sense of casting an evaluative eye over it, as Angela Bennie says, 'to judge well'. To read it is to be aware of the intensity of the author's emotional experience, which she shares with the reader in all its raw honesty. It's not a journey an empathetic reader can 'judge'; it's one that you feel...

The award-winning author was working on The Arsonist (see my review) when her partner and father of her two young children was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive blood cancer. Transcending all other consequences of this dreadful diagnosis, is her fear of telling the children. She does not know how to do it, and she researches indefatigably for the right kind of story in our death-denying culture, and she defers telling the boys the news for five months. The reader can sense the disbelief, desperation and her anguish: she knows that denial hampers preparing for the inevitable.

There is something very powerful and poignant about the way this memoir says so little about a mother's own terrors while on a quest to protect her children from them. We witness the unspoken all the same.

Both these parents are wordsmiths, so it is natural that she seeks the stories that will help her children negotiate the likely loss of their father. In her survey of books that fail to meet her needs and theirs, she ranges across contemporary picture books and classics, and discovers that many of the authors we know (the Brothers Grimm, Tolkien, Dahl, Saint-Exupéry, P.L. Travers, C.S. Lewis) were orphaned themselves. These writers, bereaved as children, wrote enchantments with happy endings, and often embedded in their work is a philosophical framework to deal with the dark.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/02/18/bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper/ ( )