Mantle

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Part of the human condition is having the need to identify and label something so as to be better prepared for the type of experience you're about to have. This is why we love genre. When you go into a cinema to see a rom-com or horror movie, you are armed with the security of an unspoken generic contract; you’re going to experience warm and fuzzy feelings during the rom-com, anticipation and anxiety during the horror, etc. While genre and its contracts are present in literature, the security is not quite as apparent and there are many authors who deliberately muddle and mix the building blocks of genre to create new experiences for the reader. The blurb of a book can only give so much forewarning and often, the book will turn out to be way different to what you expected from the summary on the back. Case in point, Romy Ash’s Mantle.

Ursula travels to the cold and scenic wilds of lutruwita/Tasmania to be with her ailing more who is suffering from a strange and mysterious illness. What began as a rash has turned into something dangerous. And now Ursula has it too. With the illness spreading across the island and beyond, Ursula finds herself stranded in her mother’s house, entangled in a relationship with a younger man she met at the pub, and finding solace in the unknowable, wildness of nature. But just like her, nature is changing, shifting, and turning into something else.

My initial thoughts upon reading the blurb were that this was going to be some sort of eco-horror, dystopian, contagion novel with heavy allusions and allegories to Covid, global warming, and the ways in which humans have destroyed the planet. And to an extent it is. The most intriguing thing about this book is the way in which Ash writes about horrific events but, rather than layer on the drama, doom-and-gloom, and scariness of the scenario in which the protagonist finds herself, the book reads as a tranquil journey of metamorphosis. Ash is an amazingly transportive writer: when you’re reading her descriptions of the pebbly beach or the windy, woody bushland, you can hear the wind, taste the salt, and feel the hard smoothness underfoot. The enrapture of Mantle is not in the story it’s telling or the scenes it describes, but in the sensory feelings it prompts as well as the many ideas and messages about the natural world and the nature of humankind that lines its pages.

Image credit: Melbourne Writers' Festival

Like a few of the books I have read in book club, this is not a story I would have picked for myself. And I certainly struggled with it in the beginning, as it did not read like the dystopian horror I had intoned from the blurb. The pace is slow and sauntering even though it's describing some truly disturbing things and the evolution of the narrative and acceptance of the reader is so gradual that it’s hard to pinpoint just where in the book I started to power through the pages. I guess this is reflective of the nature themes; ever-changing and sometimes going unnoticed.

Mantle is a truly provocative read. It’s one of the few books that I have been left feeling confused as to whether I liked it or not. Perhaps it warrants a second reading? Looks like I might need to keep it on the shelf next to Arborescence.

Author: Romy Ash, 2026

Published: Ultimo Press, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing, 2026

A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons

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While we often think about curling up and reading as the ultimate form of cosy, there are many factors to consider when measuring the cosiness of a designated blanket, couch, bed, or tea reading session. Of course, the biggest is the type of book one is choosing to cosy up with. Having powered through the mellow, romantic, and no-stakes comfort of A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic, it seems the thing I really needed this week was more cosy comfort reading and so it was onto the next Adenashire instalment: A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons.

After becoming best friends with Arleta Starstone at the Langheim Baking Battle, Doli Butterbuckle decides that moving to Adenashire is the next logical step for her. Peaceful, quiet living, being near her best friends, and spreading her infectious good humour through working in a bookstore seems like the ideal life. Plus, it’s away from the pressures of her overbearing family in Dundes Heights, where she’s never felt she could really be herself. But Doli’s quiet life gets shaken up when she inherits a dragon egg. Faced with a responsibility she’s not sure she’s ready for, Doli enlists the help of the newly-arrived gargoyle librarian, Sarson, to learn as much as she can before the egg hatches. Not only does her research uncover a myriad of potential challenges in dragon-rearing, but as she spends more time with him, Doli finds herself falling for Sarson.

Now that I have cottoned on to how these books are meant to be read, it was easier to simply fall into the enveloping warmth and cosiness of A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons. Reading like a PG erotic romance, whilst simultaneously making fun of the fact that it knows it’s doing that, the second book in the Adenashire series is every bit as sweet and warming as its predecessor. It’s an adorable little tale of how relationships can help to shape one’s identity, as well as inspire ambition, passion, and strength that one never knew they had.

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The romantic in me very much enjoyed the wholesome but still suggestive interactions between Doli and Sarson, and the dragon-lover in me was very satisfied with the cute and cheeky character of Evvy, a pink baby dragon with a penchant for mischief and an insatiable appetite. It also felt that there was more drama happening in this book than in the first one, taking it from no-stakes to low-stakes, which made the pages flip even faster.

Filled with romance, comedy, character growth, and just as many delicious-sounding recipes as the first book, A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons is another perfectly cosy read.

 Author: J. Penner, 2024

Published: Poison Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2025.

A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic

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After the rapid pace, thrilling tension, and macabre fantasy nightmares of Holy Terrors, I was definitely keen on the idea of a cosy read for my next book. Something cute and comforting with low stakes. A while ago, I came across a children’s trilogy by J. Penner that sounded right up my cosy fantasy alley, so this is what I’ve chosen to settle the nerves and adrenaline from last week’s read with. This week I travelled into the quaint magical world of Adenashire with A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic.

Arleta Starstone is a human with an incredible talent for baking. While she may need to work twice as hard as everyone else because of her lack of magic, her baked treats infused with herbs are her own unique form of magic. While Aleta does not believe she is anything special, her orc neighbours do and to prove it they enter her into the prestigious Langheim Baking Battle. Nervous that her being magicless and competing against the likes of elves, dwarves, and other magical beings will surely work against her, Aleta nevertheless travels to Langheim to compete. But the competition turns out to be a life-changing adventure as Arleta discovers her own self-worth and makes some unique friends along the way.

So admittedly I got a little bit of whiplash in the difference in prose, coming from the more mature writing of Owen and then diving into a book that is definitely aimed at a younger audience. The Adenashire trilogy feels like it’s a bedtime story for that age bracket between childhood and angsty adolescence. The writing is very simple and plain, comfortably building the world and its characters, but not quite doing it with as much flare as one would expect from a fantasy novel.

The events of the novel are then told in very quick and factual succession with a ‘no-muss no-fuss’ attitude. The story itself is very sweet and wholesome, a perfect cosy read when you’re wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea. One thing I would have liked though is a bit more drama and sense of stakes. Our heroine, despite being described as constantly nervous and keeping everyone at arm’s length, doesn’t really have a lot of dept to her. We aren’t given the story as to why she is standoffish and a loner, which I feel would then give her being in the competition – and indeed the competition itself- some stakes. It’s true I was after a low-stakes read, but not a no-stakes read. But in all honesty, this was the only area in which I felt that the book was lacking, and to give credit where it is due, once the supporting characters are established then the pace and the atmosphere of the novel picks up.

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Filled with romance, humour, and a cosy token fantasy world, A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic is a very sweet and cosy afternoon read.

Author: J. Penner, 2023

Published: Originally self-published by J. Penner, 2023. Pictured edition published by Sourcebooks, 2025

Holy Terrors

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After what seems like an age since I discovered that Little Thieves is a trilogy and ecstatically bought the remaining two books, I have now been able to hunker down and read the final instalment in the thrilling adventures of Vanja Ros: Holy Terrors.

After banishing the vengeful ghost of her mother who has haunted her for years, Vanja is slowly coming to terms with who she is as a person. Still unable to believe that she won’t be used against Emeric in his career, she has chosen to go it alone and has made a new name for herself as the Pfennigeist: helping those that the law cannot. After one particularly irksome job, Vanja discovers that there is a serial killer tearing through the country’s royalty. Normally this would not concern her, except that the killer is leaving her signature red penny on all the victims and the Pfennigeist is fast becoming a villain rather than folk hero. In order to save her name (and herself), Vanja has to team up once again with Emeric Conrad after breaking his heart a second time.

The final instalment in Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves trilogy is every bit as exciting and intriguing as its predecessors: a ghoulish fantasy-whodunnit with an underlying love story and journey of self-discovery. All our favourite characters return for a thrilling final adventure in which everyone is in mortal peril every single minute.

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Following the classic themes and formula of the whodunnit, Holy Terrors elevates the genre by being a noir thriller set against a delightfully macabre Scandinavian fantasy background. While a few modern musical throwbacks jerk you out of the world for a minute, Owen’s delightful banter between characters as well as her rapidly flowing prose guarantees total immersion and memorable scenes that cause you to exclaim out loud.

If the book falls down anywhere, it would probably be with the introduction of a comic-book narrative trope that is just everywhere at the moment (obviously I don’t want to spoil anything). There are also a number of places in which major plot twists or dramatic reveals don’t feel like they land the way there were intended to, either because they were nonchalantly dropped onto the table or were not sufficiently set up to achieve the desired response.

But having said that, Holy Terrors is still a wonderfully intriguing and action-packed end to a refreshingly different type of YA fantasy novel. Filled with suspense, gore, humour, romance, solid character development, and practically everything in between, it’s very easy to fly through its five hundred plus pages in no time at all!

Author: Margaret Owen, 2025

Published: Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette Uk Company, Great Britain, 2025.

A Rising of the Lights

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I wonder if there is a term for fictional works that chronicle a narrative but also a mental journey of its characters. Considering the existence of the omniscient narrator, the ideas that fictional characters are a means through which the author communicates/examines a multitude of thought processes, and then stories in which absolutely everything happens within the confines of a mind, ‘mental-fiction’ or ‘psych-fiction’ is probably too broad and flimsy to act as a binding label to a subgenre…

Sorry, my own thought process are running away with me; a side effect from just finishing Steve Toltz’s A Rising of the Lights.

Russell Wilson’s world has never been like that of other peoples’, but that hasn’t stopped him trying to secure love and normalcy. However, it’s incredibly hard to find security when everything that happens to you feels like having the ground disappear from beneath your feet. In quick succession, his wife confesses to an affair and leaves him, his elderly parents decide they no longer wish to see him, and he loses his job to an AI system. When his childhood friend Edwina sets him up with a job as a high school guidance counsellor, the dilemma of trying to inspire young humans to care about their future becomes the next mystery for Russell to grapple with. After all, is it worth crafting a future for yourself when the horizon is populated with robots and AI? Is the future even worth considering when it’s only the present that really affects the human condition? And then there’s the contradiction of the human condition: the cure for loneliness causes loneliness…

My immediate thought upon closing this book was that it reminded me of The Great Gatsby. Despite being written in a nonchalant and cynically humorous way, it’s a book that is really a lament for an age of uncertainty. With the rise of AI, generational attitudes are crashing upon each other, culminating in a person that has no static sense of self and is wholly influenced by external events and the behavioural messages that they have absorbed through media on how to deal with them. While the overarching cloud of gloom and doom (a la Great Gatsby) definitely left me feeling that something had been scooped out of my brain with a melon-baller, it was quickly smoothed over with the clever prose, intellectual dialogue, and leisurely rapid-fire pace in which disasters befall the protagonist (like the author forgot their finger was holding down the trigger).

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To say this book is ‘thought-provoking’ is putting it mildly. ‘Mind-exploding’ might be a better way of phrasing it. Imagine that it only blows up a portion of your brain and the shrapnel just continues to flutter about: thoughts chasing each other. Like when you kick up sand underwater. The brilliance of it really is how it makes you aware of the cloudy, chaotic, undefined swirling of your identity. Especially in this day and age where we're constantly absorbing so many messages through media and machinery. The dynamic, wavering, fragility of the sense of self - we see this reflected in the entire cast of characters; an ensemble that I still don’t know if I liked any one of them, but they all work together to tell a most interesting story.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Rising of the Lights and would absolutely recommend it. It's deep, funny, chaotic, and slightly unbelievable, still with a nice hopeful nugget at the end. 

Author: Steve Toltz, 2026

Published: Penguin Random House Australia, 2026

Helm

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While there is absolutely nothing fun about being in a ready slump, the inflating sense of accomplishment that comes from finally finishing the book that you were struggling through is nothing short of magnificent. It’s a different kind of reading experience that comes from encountering a book that provides challenges, takes you out of your comfort zone, makes literary/character/narrative decisions that you can’t really fathom... or a mélange of everything heretofore mentioned.

This month’s book for Bookclub was Helm by Sarah Hall, a book that is about everything and nothing, is enlightening and confusing, and took me over a month to read because once I had put it down, I struggled to aspire to pick it back up again.

Helm is a ferocious wind that presides over the southwestern slopes of the Cross Fell range in Cumbria England. Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born or when Helm will die, nor does Helm really care. But humans do: the Neolithic tribes that tried to placate it, the Dark Age zealot who attempted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who tried to capture it, the free-spirited little girl who loved it, Dr Selima Sutar who is trying to study it, and a whole bunch of other people all have stories connected to Helm.

The blurb advertises that this is a life story of Helm, though that term is about as unstable as the subject matter. The novel is a collection of individual stories, spanning throughout the ages of human history, that all have some tie-in with Helm. They are stories without closure, that raise questions about their narrators, and teach us little to nothing of Helm.

The sensual reading experience of this book was funnily enough like being caught in a multidirectional wind. With the exception of the 4-6 central stories, there is nothing that grounds the narrative or keeps you fixed and focused on a cemented path. The tone, the tales, the characters are discordant and higgledy-piggledy and it feels like there is no real space to breath and take in the sights before another blast from the narrative wind (either the ‘character’ of Helm or the narrative devices that Hall employs) scoop you up and deposit you somewhere else; like Dorothy and Toto.

Having so much happen (and seemingly nothing resolve) over the course of 300+ pages made this a very challenging book for me. So much so that I failed to really admire the scenic walk through the Ages or the Historic Tour of How Human’s Destroy the World that the author takes us on. The messages about climate change did not become present to me until they were literally voiced at the end.

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This book is a literary achievement. One that I think people smarter that me, able to see further than me, and more attuned to the subtle mechanics of narrative devices are able to appreciate more than I can. While I recognise the tricks and tropes that make this book different to other speculative fiction, and appreciate that the reading experience was reflective of the nature of the narrative subject, I just really struggled with it. I turned up to Bookclub having only made my way through half of it.

Author: Sarah Hall, 2025

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2025

Mother Mary Comes To Me

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Reading a memoir can be a daunting thing, especially if you know nothing about the author/subject. On the one hand, it could inspire you to find out more about the subject: read their books, listen to their music, watch their films, etc. On the other hand, it could also deter you from adventuring down this unknown avenue, depending on how well the memoir is written or if the subject’s story is one that is appealing or relatable.

And then sometimes you sit flat in the middle of the road between the two. This was my experience with this month’s book club read: Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy.

Mother Mary Comes To Me chronicles the emotional, environmental, and circumstantial events that shaped Arundhati Roy into the woman and writer that she is today, with many of her life’s most significant events either directly involving or drawing her mind to her mother whom she describes as both her “shelter and storm”. From a turbulent relationship stems an eye-opening and almost impossible mother-daughter love story between two strong, defiant, and inspiring Indian women.

I was not aware of any of Roy’s work before reading this book. And while I found Mother Mary Comes To Me to be an engaging and truly amazing book of love, admiration, and incredible narratives, I cannot honestly say that I am itching to get myself a copy of The God of Small Things or The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

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The book’s poignancy comes from the respect with which Roy writes about her mother, even when she is describing moments of abuse, drama, or neglect. Throughout its chapters, the book changes tone with the telling of different, incredible life narratives from Roy ranging from studying architecture, becoming an actress, and laughing off the ridiculous arguments that powerful men put forward for her arrest. While the tone changes from anecdotal, to mocking, to reminiscent, throughout the entire book there is this underlying current of love and respect for her mother that carries the book along and through it, the book also becomes a little bit of a memoir of Mary Roy as well. We learn about this strong-willed Indian woman who opened a school, took down/reshaped inheritance laws, and built a community around herself despite her loud and dramatic personality. What keeps you turning the pages is the way in which Roy writes about these seriously scary events that either she or her mother were at the centre of: there is a distinct lack of fear, almost nonchalance, in her descriptions of her court appearances, her traversing jungles with guerilla fighters, and way in which authorities tried to silence her or her mother. It’s awesome.

While it hasn’t completely inspired me to rush right out and acquire Roy’s fictional or non-fictional collection of works, Mother Mary Comes To Me has made me glad that I now know that these awesome women are real.

Author: Arundhati Roy, 2025

Published: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK, 2025