It’s the start of spring down under and, as some of you know, I am on a holiday in outback Queensland. It’s a bit of a sentimental journey for me, but it’s a region that is worth visiting regardless of personal connections. Anyhow, my holiday is not what you are here for, so I’ll get onto the meme. As always, if you don’t know how this #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book, and this month she selected another book I have read! That makes two in a row! Unheard of – or, at least, very rare for me. The book is Larissa Behrendt’s After story (my review). As its subject matter is a mother-daughter holiday – this one to England – and as I am currently also on holiday, I plan to use some sort of holiday theme for all the links this month.
Given my plan to stick with the holiday idea, my first link is obvious to me, Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Not only is it about a holiday – this one to Japan – it’s also about a mother and daughter with some issues to resolve, from the daughter’s point of view anyhow.
For my next link, we are staying with the parental theme, but in this case the protagonist, an adult son, is running away from his oppressive elderly mother, to an old holiday haunt from his childhood, a place called Jimenbuen in the Monaro region of New South Wales. The book is Nigel Featherstone’s My heart is a little wild thing (my review), and our character falls passionately in love. It’s a wonderful experience, even though it doesn’t quite end the way he’d like.
The Monaro is a beautiful place, and it just so happens that I have another novel set there that fits the bill. Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize long-listed novel Stone Yard devotional (my review) is about a woman who goes to a place on the Monaro for specific type of holiday, a retreat to heal her troubled spirit. Gradually, we come to understand her troubles, and many stem from unresolved grief over the loss of her parents, decades earlier.
Now, because I can’t have all Australian authors, I’m taking us back to England, but staying with a parental link. It’s a daughter again, but in this case the novel opens with her father having just died at the place they had taken for late summer. Utterly bereft, she stands at the front gate when a man goes by. Vulnerable in her grief, she falls in love, but as it turns out he’s not what she thought at all. Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera (my review) is an early, chilling study of coercive control.
My next link is a little tenuous in more ways than one. It is about a camping holiday taken by two women, and we are back in Australia, so no connections there. However, I can find one link, besides the holiday one, and that’s the idea that holidays don’t always go to plan. For Lucy, it’s the death of her father that puts paid to the happy times, while for our two camping women it’s a flood, one serious enough for them to have to consider how best to survive it. The book is Susan Hawthorne’s verse novel, Limen (my review).
And finally, I am concluding with a sort of everylink! That is, a link that should work with any book featuring a holiday because, what do you do when you go on holidays? Hmm, perhaps that should be, what did we used to do when we went on holidays? Send postcards of course. So, my final link is American poet and blogger Jeanne Griggs’ Postcard poems (my review), which enables us to end on a positive note! Thankyou Jeanne!
So, we started with Kate’s book taking us to England, then I took us to Japan, Australia and England, before ending with Jeanne who takes us all over the USA and a few other places besides. I’m sorry-not-sorry to say, however, that all but one of my authors this month are women. (Sorry, because I do enjoy many male authors, but not sorry because I also love supporting the women!)
Now, the usual: have you read After story and, regardless, what would you link to?
Whispering Gums 
I enjoyed travelling around and there’s a couple I might check out.
Thanks Claire.
Hi Sue, I have read the After Story. All my links include novels about travel and parental love. My first thought was the same as yours – Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. Followed by The Road by Cormac McCarthy; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong; The Memory Keepers Daughter; Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng; and The Light between Oceans by M L Stedman. Enjoy your travels.
Thanks Meg … I started off not doing Cold enough for snow because it felt a bit too obvious but I was running out of time so wanted to schedule this before I left. And I think it’s a good link. I love that you went from there to The road … great choice.
And yes, we are enjoying our travels.
A very enjoyab
Love that you carried the theme right through. Of all the starter books I’ve picked recently, I think this had the most scope for going in all sorts of directions, particularly because of the number of other writers mentioned in After Story, and all the places they visit.
Enjoy your holiday!
Thanks Kate … and yes you are right, I think she did. I could have done a Jane Austen novel holiday. And thanks, yes, we are enjoying our holiday.
Loves your holiday themed links!
I haven’t read the first book (again!) but here’s my chain: https://portobellobookblog.com/2024/09/07/6degrees-of-separation-for-september-2024-from-after-story-by-larissa-behrendt-to-when-i-first-held-you-by-anstey-harris/
Thanks Joanne … I’ll come see if I’ve read any of yours!
Great chain! I am reading Stone Yard Devotional at the moment and really loving it.
That’s great Cathy … I love to hear people enjoying this book.
Thnx, WG. To help with your ‘not-sorry’, may I say that I took my daughter to India for 2 months and wrote a memoir about it. If interested, you may see it here, thanks:
https://www.seandoyleauthor.com
Thanks Sean … I’ll have a look when I’m back in consistent communication country!
A lovely collection of vacation books with mothers and daughters here. As for postcards… I really miss them, to be honest. We really should bring back that tradition of sending postcards to people when we’re on vacation. Now it’s all Instagram and checking in on FB… how boring!
Thanks Davida, I’ve been looking for postcards to send to the grandkids but not finding many.
Even in the tourist shops or hotels?
Even there … they are few and far between.
Von Arnim is Australian too! I do need to read more of her work–have enjoyed her garden books. Cold Enough for Snow was the first name that came to mind when I read the description of After Story, but I couldn’t use it since I haven’t read it yet. Enjoyed your chain and the parental theme that runs through it!
Thanks Mallika … yes, she is technically, and I used to claim her s one of ours but it started to feel cheeky given she left here when young and did all her writing in Europe. I love that you also thought of Jessica Au.
Much like trying to classify Henry James; my British lit book group would often argue about him.
A bit though he did to-and-fro between England and the USA in a way Von Arnim didn’t, which makes him a little more complicated. I’d love to claim Von Arnim but really feel I can’t.
In reviewing one David Lodge’s novels, about a family vacation, Hugh Kenner related it to the Odyssey. The novel is one that I have not read–at the moment I can’t find the essay, so I won’t include it.
But degree one will be the Odyssey itself which tells of a ten year trip with a good deal of enforced idleness.
Degree two will be Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides [etc], which is as early an example as I can recall of a work of travels not undertaken for purposes such as business or war. (Penguin has an excellent edition of the Journal in one volume with Johnson’s Voyage to the Western Isles of Scotland.)
Degree three will be Stendhal’s A Roman Journal, a worthy early example of a travel narrative including eyewitness accounts of events not seen–Stendhal wrote it up in Paris, largely from a cousin’s notes.
Degree four will be Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800: the reader who trusts Chateaubriand’s account of his travels in North America is very trusting indeed, or has access to evidence not available at publication time to his editors and translators. (NYRB has published two volumes of the memoirs.)
Degree five will be open fiction, Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs: two of the main characters are American academics on sabbatical in London, one is a retired American on a vacation.
Degree six, just to complete a circle, will be Hugh Kenner’s The Elsewhere Community, a collection of essays about writers who had or felt a need to be someplace other than home.
Wonderful travel related links George. Love Stendhal’s chutzpah!
PS The elsewhere community sounds interesting, given the number of Australian writers who left these shores to write, including a lot of women.
That was fun! I hope you enjoy your holiday!
Thanks Stefanie … enjoying it well enough except we’ve both got COVID. We’ve stayed clear of COVID through multiple trips to Melbourne over the last 2 and a quarter years, and then get it a couple of days into this trip. Such is life.
Oh no! I hope it’s mild and you feel better soon!
Mild-ish Stefanie – certainly not debilitating and a bit better every day.
I have such vague recollections of Vera that it’s obviously time to take another peek. (Technically EvonA is one of my MustReadEverything authors, but I’ve not and clearly need to start rereading before I do anyhow. lol)
Hope this round of Covid isn’t too rough on you. I’ve lost track, now, of the number of people I “know”, from so many different places, who have it now or have caught it since the middle of August. And, round here, there’s no more tracking (conservative provincial government despite liberal government at the national level), so no way to inform people officially of rising rates so that we could choose to take more precautions. Rest up! Take care!
I’ve read some of yours, Sue, but not (yet) all. Here are mine: #6 Degrees of Separation from After Story by Larissa Behrendt to The Stranger by Kathryn Hore – Tasmanian Bibliophile @Large (wordpress.com)
Thanks Jennifer. I’ll check yours out. We actually have reception tonight.
Aw! So happy to see Postcard Poems on your list!
I still buy and send postcards, and receive them from a devoted group of people who love them. You’re right, though–some of the places I used to find postcards don’t carry them any more (like motel room desks!). But they’re still my favorite souvenir, and I found lots of them in Iceland this summer
Glad to end with you Jeanne … I must say I don’t much anymore except for the grandkids. On our outback trip, until today, I’ve only seen a few 3D ones, but today, in a town 6,600 people – but one with a couple of big tourist sites – I saw a full postcard stand outside a shop in the main street. You could have knocked me over …
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