Even if you do know about these record-taking fast and slow animals, there are 57 more you can find out about in Sami Bayly’s new book The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fast and Slow Animals.

Iconic animals known for speed, like the black marlin, cheetah and hare are included, as are well-known slow movers like the garden snail and the sloth. But Bayly also features animals that aren’t just the fastest and slowest walkers, runners and fliers – for instance the slow-ageing Greenland shark (also known as the sleeper shark), the high-speed spitting banded archerfish (its special eyes help aim its spit at prey) and the fast-clawed pistol shrimp (whose claws snap shut at 100 kilometres an hour).

As Bayly says in the encyclopaedia’s introduction, size to speed ratio is also important. Certain mites, for example, are among the fastest creatures on earth due to their ability to move a certain amount of body lengths over time in relation to their size. If a human ran 322 body lengths per second like a Californian mite does, she notes, they would cover 2317 kilometres per hour!

Two of my fast-favourite creatures Bayly includes are the Moroccan flic-flac spider (which performs gymnastic leaps down dunes at 2 metres per second to escape predators) and the peregrine falcon (the fastest animal on the planet, which can swoop at 83 metres per second).

Two of my slow-burn beauties are the Pacific banana slug (very slow and coloured like a banana) and the Olm (one Olm observed was so slow moving it didn’t move at all in seven years).

For each of the 60 creatures included there is a double page spread, one page for the illustration and scientific name and the other page for information about the animal’s fast or slow feats, conservation status, location/habitat and diet. There is also a box containing fun facts.

One intriguing illustration is of the ox heart ascidian, also known as the gold-mouth or ink-spot sea squirt, whose squishiness is well-rendered by Bayly in vivid purple and orange. I also liked her haunting depiction of the great barracuda, whose big eyes and teeth are accentuated through forced perspective and a brooding sea layered from indigo to tropical turquoise.

The Australian lungfish and the Australian tiger beetle were two Aussie animals I was happy to learn more about. The lungfish has been around for 380 million years, and the tiger beetle is the fastest-running insect on the planet; speed needed to propel it across the burning sands of our dry salt lakes and arid deserts.

I know an 8- and a 10-year-old boy who will love to receive this encyclopaedia for Christmas and I’m pretty sure their parents will find it fascinating too. I’ll get a gold star for choosing a beautiful and educational gift that will engross both fast and slow humans for hours.

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fast and Slow Animals

Sami Bayly
Hachette HB $32.99
Imprint: Lothian Children’s Books

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals by Sami Bayly can help us plug some of these knowledge gaps. More importantly, it reminds us we need to care for nature and its delicate ecosystems before it’s too late. Before they collapse.

‘Today, the rate at which species are becoming extinct is thought to be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate,’ Bayly writes in the encyclopaedia’s introduction. ‘Hunting, overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution, climate change and the introduction of invasive species are all modern causes of extinction. If we aren’t careful, the sixth mass extinction event could be a result of human choices and actions.’

It’s sobering stuff – and particularly for children.

Happily, though, while Bayly is candid about the realities of extinction she also makes learning about the 60 extinct or near-extinct creatures in the encyclopaedia both interesting and fun.

For each of these amazing creatures there is a double page spread, one page for the illustration and the other page for information about the animal’s extinction status, location/habitat and diet, as well as a box containing fun facts.

Did you know, for example, that the giant millipede (arthropleura) weighed 50 kilograms and grew to approximately the length of a car? Or that the giant ground sloth (megatherium americanum) was the largest bipedal mammal to have ever lived, and that they were even bigger than modern rhinos and elephants?

Were you aware that the Sunda pangolin (manis javanica), like all pangolins, is thought to have been able to feast on over 70 million ants or terminates in just one year, using their 25-centimetre-long sticky tongues to slurp them up. Or that western black rhinos (diceros bicornis longipes) probably communicated, like modern day rhinos do, through their urine, conveying important information through the scent of their pee? Amazingly, a single spray of rhino urine can reach distances of 4 metres! What!

Bayli’s marvellous illustration of the pugnacious wedge-seal (gomphotaria pubnax) shows a frightening set of tusks, and her portrait of the helicoprion shark (helicoprion) offers an eerie close-up of their spiral jaws (called ‘tooth whorls’). In fact, all the illustrations are really well done.

I was intrigued but also somewhat overwhelmed by the Australian-based species that have become or are nearly extinct. This includes the Kangaroo Island assassin spider (zephyrarchaea austini) thought to have been made extinct after a major bushfire on Kangaroo Island at the end of 2019 and start of 2020. Two spiders were discovered in some leaf litter in 2021, which means they’re not extinct but critically endangered.

Then there’s the southern corroboree frog (pseudophryne corroboree) of which there are only around 300 left in the wild in Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales. Also, there’s Hackett’s giant echidna (murrayglossus hacketti), which went extinct around 40,000 years ago, and may have been an occasional food source for early humans.

Fossil evidence places the Quinkana (Quinkana) – one of the last terrestrial crocodiles, and one of the largest Australian predators to have ever lived – in Bluff Downs, a fossil site approximately 1,150 kilometres northwest of Brisbane.

Along with the species I’ve mentioned so far, Bayli includes many more sea creatures, snakes, geckos, rats, orangutans and other animals from across the world for us and our young ones to study and consider. She also gives pronunciation guidance for the scientific names, which is helpful.

I love this encyclopaedia. It’s a rare bird in terms of how beautifully and carefully it’s been put together. A great gift for children aged 8+ … and, you know, Christmas is coming.

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The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals

Sami Bayly

Hachette HB $32.99

Imprint: Lothian Children’s Books

Hughes was in Sydney ahead of her appearance at the Byron Bay Writers Festival (August 9-11).

Her clear-eyed intelligence, gentle humour and great gift for storytelling shone through during an illuminating interview with Australian author Bri Lee (Eggshell Skull, Who Gets to Be Smart, The Work) on August 6 in a Roaring Stories bookshop event held at Balmain’s White Bay Brewery.

Set in Ireland, Hughes’ novel features four sisters who were orphaned young and are now in their thirties, each responding in her own way to the climate crisis.

Olwen, an earth scientist, is wracked with despair and walks away from her life and loved ones. Maeve, a chef and YouTube sensation, wants to chart a way forward through sustainable food and education.

Rhona, a political scientist and talking head, is trying to change the political system through fostering citizens’ assemblies. And Nell, a philosopher, is throwing herself into her lectures and into understanding her purpose, interconnections and agency in the world.

Nell was the youngest of the siblings when their parents died and Olwen, the oldest, became responsible for the girls’ upbringing. Of the effect of this shift on Nell, Hughes said, ‘Being brought up by Olwen leaves you very few skills to prepare you for the apocalypse’.

Hughes said she loved the idea that her book about sisters could also be a book about a geologist, a philosopher, a political scientist, and a chef – all who do meaningful work and whose family connection extends beyond the realm of the domestic.

As Rhona explains: ‘My child isn’t some hobby I attend to after clocking out intellectually. He’s not the nonwork part of my life. I don’t want to dedicate my day to something Leo isn’t part of. A baby is serious intellectual work, Maeve. Not the enemy of scholarship or promise.’

Hughes also spoke of how she ‘tried not to write this book for so long’ due to its challenging themes; wrote the novel in windswept and geologically significant Connemara on the West Coast of Ireland; gave some of her own pathologies to her characters; used the novel to explore deep time and the difficulty of loving a climate scientist; and wanted to show how little we know of our families and how a return to the family realm can mean much of our life lived outside the family ‘gets collapsed’ and rendered invisible.

The Flattery sisters come together on a stormy night in County Leitrim, after three of them take time out from their careers to search for Olwen, who has gone missing. When they eventually find her, she’s quite tetchy that they’ve pursued her.

We learn more from a discussion about eggs why Olwen is so prickly and what a burden an ‘ultra-awareness’ of the climate emergency can be.

‘Olwen shook her head. If I tell her [the woman who brings Olwen eggs] I don’t eat them, the innocent question why could follow; or maybe she looked me up, and saw Earth Science, and then it can be as little as one move to the question, Do you have hope? … And then you’ve to calibrate how long they have to listen, what they know, how much you’re willing to poison them.’

Ultra-awareness may be poisonous, but Hughes insists there’s also consolation to be found in facing up to the moment we’re living in.

The Alternatives is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’

The Alternatives is also a moving story about sisters who are charting their own paths during difficult times (i.e., right now in the Anthropocene). In reuniting, they’re reminded of the love they share, the importance of care and the value of community.

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The Alternatives
Caoilinn Hughes
Bloomsbury Publishing, $32.99

This anecdote from Brigitta Olubas’s biography of Shirley Hazzard reminded me of my own encounter with Transit in the early 1980s – how it floored me with its depth and elegance. The novel still stands a little apart from others in my mind and this could well be the reason I have not pursued the rest of Hazzard’s fictional oeuvre.

Having devoured Olubas’s impeccably researched and captivating evocation of Hazzard’s life I am now more inclined to seek out The Great Fire, which appeared in 2003 and earned its author The Miles Franklin Award. As Olubas points out, this was a long-awaited acknowledgement for Hazzard from her country of birth and where she spent the lion’s share of her youth.

Some Australian readers thought the award was misjudged because the characters seemed to them to be crudely drawn and the picture it gave of their nation was outmoded. By then Hazzard had lived her adult life shuttling between Manhattan and Europe a fact which may have – as David Malouf observed – obscured the changes that had taken place in Australia in the half century since she’d left its shores.

As The Great Fire was esteemed around the world, and since Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life has loosened the soil of my synapses, I am now ready to discover whether this novel has a similar power to Transit to thrill and disarm me.

With Olubas’s vivid picture of Hazzard’s life and literary connections fresh in my mind, I will no doubt try to recognise the real events and people sown into The Great Fire’s narrative, despite Hazzard’s own warning not to put too much stock in such comparisons: ‘The world likes to trace the author’s life in the novel but the obvious isn’t always true. Something that was very close to you and resembles your experience isn’t necessarily the deepest version of the story. … One feels for another person. One observes. One imagines.’

Olubas writes that ‘the genius of Hazzard’s fiction is that she is able to convey great love, monumental feelings, with supreme control’. The grist to this mill is revealed in the details of Hazzard’s unhappy family home life in Australia, her arrival in Hong Kong at 16 and falling in love with (though ultimately not pursuing marriage with) Alexis Vedeniapine a 32-year-old officer in the British Army, and in her mid 20s her ‘destined’ meeting with Francis Steegmuller in 1963, at a party in New York hosted by her friend Muriel Spark.

‘We sat down in a corner together and stayed there,’ Hazzard writes. ‘When we came out of that corner, you might say, we went and got married.’

Hazzard’s marriage to Steegmuller changed her life. ‘It was the final dramatic transformation confirming that she had left behind her obscure background,’ Olubus writes. ‘It gave her grounds and wherewithal to fashion her life and herself around the coordinates of literature, integrity, and love.’

It also gave her rich intellectual companionship, a world of connections and friendships, and a life of travel to, and making a home in, beloved places. Tuscany, Naples and Capri were close to her heart and provided inspiration for her work and a sense of belonging.

As a young, single woman, Hazzard took a UN job in Naples for a year and stayed at a villa outside Siena owned by an intellectual, anti-Fascist family that rented out rooms to writers and artists from all over the world.

She returned to villa Solaia each summer for the better part of a decade and said it moved her ‘to begin to write, and in this way delivered me into a happy life’.

She received her first acceptance letter from The New Yorker there in 1960 – and the magazine went on to publish 29 of her stories and one novel in its pages between 1961 and 1990.

Of Capri and Naples, she also waxed lyrical.

‘I am obsessed by Capri. I came here, miserable to the point of derangement … Capri saved me – dear lovely, loved place.

‘There were many times, of which this winter day was the first, that I walked in Naples in a kind of delight of observation and strangeness, the desire to observe and the happiness of having all this to lavish it on.’

Every spring and autumn, Hazzard and Steegmuller went to Capri to live, returning to New York through the summer. What she most appreciated about Capri, she said, was the very local nature of relations, ‘gently paced encounters during one’s necessary or unnecessary outings … the regular encounter with the whole community’.

Olubas writes eloquently about how place fuelled Hazzard’s creativity: ‘If the evocations of Middle Harbour at Sydney conjured a nascent sense of literature, the possibility of being a poet, and if the vistas of Hong Kong opened out the topography of the global world, then Naples was a site of self-discovery, ‘through the looking-glass,’ offering inward as well as outward prospect.’

At her last public appearance in September 2012, at an event held in the New York Society Library to honour her, Hazzard was frail and debilitated by dementia. However, her eloquence that night touched the audience.

‘I have felt increasingly in recent years,’ she began, ‘that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element now, that we’re waiting for something terrible to happen, and we do have an idea that it might be life, but maybe we’re pleasing ourselves with that because it might be much more terrifying.’

Hazzard died in 2016, but her words remain prescient and powerful.

Olubas has done us a great service in writing this meticulous and moving memoir, which means we can continue to discover Hazard’s ingenuity across four novels, two story collections and several works of nonfiction, as well as in her speeches and personal letters.

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Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life

Brigitta Olubas

Hachette, $24.99

This review of  Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life was first published in the South Sydney Herald in May 2023.

This question lies at the heart of Naturopolis – a new, creative non-fiction picture book for readers in years K to 6.

The book’s elegant, double page spreads both describe and explore the natural phenomena found in ‘the great grey city’ and children are drawn to ponder a creature in the garbage, a river in the gutter, a cave on the underpass, a meadow in the footpath, a glade in a laneway, a woodland in the wires and more.

As the children look and listen closely, lyrical phrases like ‘feathery fronds’, ‘seeds spun away with the wind’, silence ‘easily bruised’, a ‘quick, slick trickster’ and gems ‘as gentle as breath’ are used to evoke feelings and intricacies relating to the flora and fauna illustrated.

While Deborah Frenkel’s words are often poetic, Ingrid Bartkowiak illustrations leave no doubt that the creatures and plants described are in a city – on kerbsides, near drainpipes, peeping from cracks in the pavement, across rubble and in the eaves.

The patches of green and growing things are scattered, not dense, and yet, early in the book readers are entreated to look with care because they ‘may find a forest’.

It is on the final pages that we realise the ant (Iridomyrmex purpureus) depicted in each spread – and who has been leading us through these scraps of wilderness – has in fact led us to a ‘forest’ … of sorts. It’s an even more invisible world that lies beneath our skyscrapers and city streets – a world of intricate organisation and burgeoning population.

I saw this ending as a nod to the tenacity of nature and a pointer to the hubris of humans who think our world is pre-eminent and our infrastructure and organisational ways are more potent and deserving than those of other species.

It reminded me of how quickly a jungle will grow up in tropical places where buildings are abandoned; the foliage covering the bricks and steel – making it harder and harder to see that there was ever any human habitation there at all.

I really enjoyed Naturopolis – and think it’s been beautifully and thoughtfully put together. The story is evocative, the illustrations are harmonious and the bite-sized factual information about species (on the page) and the glossary of the fauna and flora (at the back) will help children understand more details of the natural world.

My hope is that the book is a stepping stone – a way to intrigue city children about the nature that is surviving and thriving around them but is often overlooked.

A further step would be to encourage (older?) readers to ask why they have to look so hard for the green shoots and traces of the insects and animals around them; why concrete, brick and bitumen have replaced forests and why habitats have been disrupted to create houses and workplaces for humans; what it would take to plant more trees and flowers in our urban environments, to cultivate forests and havens for animals in the heart of our cities, to create houses, offices and transport that are safe and conducive for humans and nature to better coexist?

I read a news story today that said more and more Australians have never planted a plant and don’t understand how pollination works.

If you want to make sure this isn’t your kids, grab Naturopolis – and use it to kickstart their journey of discovery of urban flora and fauna. Discuss with them early and often how humans depend on plants, insects and animals to survive. Encourage them to start a garden ‘between the cracks’.

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Naturopolis

Deborah Frenkel (author) and Ingrid Bartkowiak (illustrator)

Storytorch, $26.95 (HB)

This review of Naturopolis was first published in the South Sydney Herald in October 2023.

While there’s a lesson or two at its heart (one being to listen to your Dad because he might be able to teach you something you’d like to know) it’s also a fun story.

When Ruby gets a gift of roller skates from her Dad, he offers to show her how to master them. But she insists it’s ‘easy peasy’ and master it on her own until she ‘wibble wobbles’ a lot and comes a cropper a few times.

Finally, she accepts her Dad’s offer of instruction and they head off to the roller skating rink where Ruby’s skills improve rapidly and the joy of skating becomes real to her.

Ruby is a jewel of a character and Amy Calautti’s illustrations beautifully convey Ruby’s fear, frustration, stick-ability and enjoyment. Ruby’s roller skates and matching helmet are the stuff of dreams and I would have swapped them in a heartbeat for the dull, unadorned ones I had in my childhood.

The roller skating duck (while never mentioned in the text) is also a lovely touch, its presence gently reassuring.

Author Ky Garvey is a Brisbane-based mother of two children with autism and ADHD. She was initially inspired by her sons to write fun and engaging stories that turn challenges into successes in a way that is supportive, inclusive and empowering.

The idea for Easy Peasy was sparked by one of her children, who as a little boy loved his skateboard so much that he took it to bed with him every night like a teddy bear.

As she began to write, she was also prompted by fond memories of her father taking her to the roller skating rink each Saturday morning – and the warmth of this treasured time together comes through in her writing.

Garvey’s first picture book is for children aged 4 to 8, and I’m sure it will capture hearts and show children the power of persistence and further learning. This makes Easy Peasy a clever and cheerful addition to any child’s library.

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Easy Peasy

Ky Garvey (author), Amy Calautti (illustrator)

EK Books

AUD $24.99

This review of Easy Peasy was first published in the South Sydney Herald in March 2023.

But things are amiss in Peta’s life. He’s tired of plundering ships (just the thought of it ‘makes his peg-leg creak’ and shivers his timbers), the sea seems endless (‘salty and seetherling’) and his diet predictable (‘Tentacles again, and seaweed fricassee’).

Peta’s sad and begins to cry. Why?

‘It was a long, long time since Peta’d seen another mate, he was sick of all the shanties in his record crate.’

Years before, Peta’s mother Gertie had quit life on the high seas and ventured ashore without him. Lately, he’d been lonely and was missing her. He’d thought more and more about how she’d said it was mean to steal from other sailors – and it soon became clear to Peta that he needed a sea change.

Happily, Peta’s sighs of anguish (AAARRrgggh) soon become a simpler Argh – a sigh of happiness and relief.

The Homesick Pirate’s intriguing plot is just one of the reasons I think this witty, whimsical and wonderous picture book will be perfect to read to the little ones in your life. It’s so warm and inviting, I’m pretty sure they’ll want you to read it over and over to them – and that you won’t resist.

Repeated readings should help children relish the book’s clever use of language and puns, and the compelling illustrations, which seem to yield more bounty each time you look at them.

Some of my favourites were Gertie’s orange, sea-anemone-like hair; Shippy McShipface the boat; the bomb-laden cart that says ‘boom’; and the little mice that pop up on nearly every page – observing, offering comments and holding their jaunty little umbrellas aloft.

The drawings are colourful and lovingly rendered, supporting the soothing and amusing tone of the book, a tone which should help children feel safe to talk about missing their Mums and normalising the experience. (Surely, if Peta the pirate can miss his Mum, any of us can!)

The Homesick Pirate is a book about questioning paths, trusting your feelings, finding a home, and having adventures. Grab a copy for the children you care about, soon, and set sail.

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The Homesick Pirate

Clare Lewis (author), Catherine Skipper (illustrator)

Publisher: Catherine Skipper, Matavai, Waterloo

$20.25

The Homesick Pirate was published in May, 2023. This review was first published in The South Sydney Herald in August 2023.

Harriet’s slimy, hungry, relaxed, shiny and healthy compost worms crunch, scoff, feast and snack. They munch on muesli on Monday, wild weeds on Wednesday and Fred’s fruit on Friday.

But Harriet wants something more exciting to happen. She’s happy to keep feeding them – after all it’s her responsibility in the family to do so – but she wonders why the worms are so boring.

Eventually, she discovers that from all that munching and crunching they produce worm wee, which has the magical power (once diluted) to make her vegetables grow large and juicy. She’s overjoyed to find the worms have a purpose and that feeding them puts the family’s kitchen food scraps to good use.

Melbourne-based author Samantha Smith said, ‘I wanted to write an eco-book that wasn’t didactic – instead sparking children’s interest in worm farming in a fun way and showing them how simple it is for them to try at home.

‘I wrote the first draft with my three children – Tom, Ben and Evie – who are just as excited about bringing Harriet’s Hungry Worms to life and sharing it with their friends.

‘[I also loved] seeing the story come to life through Melissa’s beautiful illustrations using recycled materials. I particularly loved discovering the worm having a snooze on an old tea bag!’

Artist, illustrator and upcycler Melissa Johns produces artworks mainly made of recycled materials that lend her work a uniquely whimsical quality as demonstrated in this latest book and also in Growing Pains and Tabitha and the Raincloud.

‘Recycled papers are the predominant media used; recycled teabags are used in all my artworks and illustrations, added to these are the outside of coffee cups, wrapping paper, gift bags and serviettes,’ she said.

‘For Harriet, her family, and their dog I have added recycled wools and cottons for the first time. Once all of the recycled pieces have been collaged in place, I then add all of the finer details using paint and inks.’

Harriet provides some easy to absorb facts about composting worms and what to feed them at the end of the book – including the fact that worms have been on our planet for 500 million years!

The Teacher Notes also provide some great activities, along with this explanation of why composting is good for the planet: ‘When organic waste ends up in a landfill, it decomposes without oxygen and produces methane – a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Composting, on the other hand, allows organic waste to break down with oxygen and produces a nutrient-rich soil. Using an organic / green bin at school or at home is a way to help divert organic waste from landfill.’

Harriet’s Hungry Worms was released on May 3, just in time for International Compost Awareness Week Australia (ICAW) from May 7 to 13. ICAW Australia is an initiative of the Centre for Organic Research & Education (CORE), a not-for-profit organisation conducting year round organic research, education and awareness activities. Adults intrigued by Harriet but wanting to know more to know more detailed information about the benefits of composting could augment their understanding here.

Harriet’s Hungry Worms broaches composting, sustainability and recycling and would be an excellent addition to any library or classroom. It introduces children to composting and worm farms in an accessible, light-hearted and intriguing way that should inspire children to give it a go.

It is a smart book with a bright heart that encourages the best kinds of environmental responsibility and behavioural change in Aussie kids.

Harriet’s Hungry Worms

Samantha Smith (author) and Melissa Johns (illustrator)

EK Books $24.99

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This review of Harriet’s Hungry Worms was first published in the South Sydney Herald in May 2023.

As we turn each page, we continue to wonder who, or rather, what is Mim?

It feels like we’re getting nowhere – but we’re actually observing an interesting array of sea creatures including, the spotted flatfish, the spiked lionfish, the creeping hermit crab, the fine-armed feather star and more, all of whom might or might not be Mim.

Why is Mim so elusive? It’s only as the book draws to a close that we discover Mim is actually one of the natural world’s masters of disguise – the mimic octopus. Mim’s incredible skills in mimicry allow her to deter predators by morphing into creatures known to be poisonous (sea snakes for example), and she does this through changing colour, shape and skin texture.

Sandra Severgnini has captured this cephalopod mimicry beautifully by using contrasting washes for the double-page spreads and including the perfect selection of sea creatures and plants to showcase Mim’s superlative shapeshifting.

One of my favourite iterations of Mim is as a mantis shrimp “eyes bulging big and bright”. Another is when she’s being a seashell and there’s a crazed looking crab (at least I think it’s a crab) lurking just a couple of shell-hops away from her.

Through the depiction of the occasional bottle and plastic bag floating or resting on the sea floor, Severgnini also offers readers a gentle reminder that human refuse is littering pristine ocean environments.

From the 5 Fabulous Facts part of the book, we learn that the mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) lives in Indo-Pacific waters and has also been found near coral reef islands like those in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The Teacher Notes online are also comprehensive: drawing out Severgnini’s elegant use of language (swishing, swaying, weaving, waving); inviting readers to match a name – mantle, siphon, tentacle, sucker, head, eye – to the corresponding body part on an octopus diagram; and encouraging children to use their voice to mimic different sounds in nature or from audio tracks.

Severgnini owned an art gallery and retail store before she followed her lifetime passion to focus on children’s picture books. She is also fascinated with the natural world and explores it with sensitivity and imagination.

Mim’s tantalising tale of transformation set on the shallow sandy seabed is another fine picture book to add to her other captivating titles, which I’d encourage you to explore, and which include, Grub and Tree Beings by Raymond Huber which she illustrated.

While Meet Mim is designed for 5- to 8-year-olds, I think it will appeal to people of all ages.

Meet Mim

Sandra Severgnini

EK Books, $24.99

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This review was first published in the South Sydney Herald in September 2023.

It is also a nuanced examination of how faith grasped hungrily but imposed narrowly can segue into a slipperier sense of becoming, a wild tributary pulsing with possibility and sorrow.

We first meet Frances when she is newly divorced from her pastor husband, rejected by the Christian community she once worked in, and grappling with the prognosis of her terminally ill child.

She is also in the midst of a crisis of faith.

‘The day Lucas and I separated,’ she says, ‘was the day I decided not to read the Bible anymore, and decided to write my own.’

Thus, we receive The Gospel According to Frances, which tells her side of the story – and it’s a rollercoaster of events and self-analysis. We’re also offered The Book of Mary; the narrative of a 16-year-old pregnant girl Frances is forced to shelter and who claims she is bearing the Son of God conceived through immaculate conception.

Interspersed with these two perspectives are other ‘texts’ that prove pivotal. They include emails, Uber receipts, text messages, police transcripts and Bible passages. Through these fragments we encounter the malice of Frances’ ex-husband Lucas, the beliefs and practises of the church community, the heartbreaking advance of her daughter Neve’s disease, Frances’s homoerotic daydreams and encounters, and the trouble she gets into over the murder of a young woman.

We also learn along the way that while, initially, Frances couldn’t wait to see God perform the miracle of healing on her two-year old daughter, she had since had to ‘grow up’ in her faith and learn ‘how to hold someone in their suffering, without denying its existence.

‘I saw the pain in her, pain that no performative prayer could cure but which the loving arms of a mother could actually soothe,’ she says. ‘I felt repulsed by the idea of dishonouring her suffering by assuming God would remove it.’

It is during the murder investigation, and through Frances’s interactions with Mary, that we gain a clearer picture of how radically Frances’s sense of reality has shifted. Some pretty surreal events take place that I ended up attributing the derangement to the desperation of grief and which I was relieved to see ultimately augmented the narrative.

The characters in Immaculate are also refreshingly diverse and cleverly-crafted, and include a sex worker caring for her partner with early onset Alzheimer’s, a policeman whose grief has galvanised his vocation, a sympathetic dog called Dog (God backwards?), a young, homeless man caught up in a drug network, and a grandmother whose anxiety over her dying grandchild is distressingly palpable.

Anna McGahan’s deft storytelling and mastery over her material makes her a worthy winner of The Australian/Vogel’s Award for young writers for 2023, and I hope this means we will soon see more of her work on our bookshelves.

Her uncle, Andrew McGahan, was also a Vogel’s Award winner and celebrated Australian author, who died far too young at age 52 in 2019. While Anna may have drawn on his literary wisdom, she has also plumbed the well of her own life and creativity to create a memorable novel that mingles theatrical play with great gravitas.

A novel this deep is rarely written without a corresponding measure of personal loss, intense soul searching and a thirst to find freedom. As Immaculate gains a wider audience, I look forward to hearing more of how the catharsis of writing this unique book allowed Anna reflect on her own experiences of changing faith, sexuality, grief and single motherhood.

Immaculate

Anna McGahan

Allen&Unwin, $32.99

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The Australian / Vogel’s Award for Young Writers that has launched the careers of over a hundred Australian authors, including Anna’s uncle, beloved Australian novelist Andrew McGahan. The award is one of Australia’s richest and most prestigious awards for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35.

This review was first published in the South Sydney Herald in October 2023.