December was a big book month – Juz and I have been celebrating the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod (Yule book flood) since we met. I especially loved The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland, The Book Witch by Melanie Karsak and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. And I was happy that I did so well in my #bookaweek challenge, reading more than 90 books. It’s amazing what you can do when you vow to read more, and give up a bit of tv watching and social-media scrolling to get it done.

79 of 90 – The Little Teashop of Lost and Found by Trisha Ashley
After two stunning, powerful, heartbreaking, wonderful books – Shankari Chandran’s The Song of the Sun God and Yvonne Weldon’s Sixty-Seven Days – I wanted something light and sweet and fun to read, and Trisha Ashley’s The Little Teashop of Lost and Found was perfect. Tea, scones, faery tales and the wild English countryside – my bliss! Set between Cornwall, Scotland and Yorkshire, it was far more compelling than I expected, with secrets, betrayal, loss and yearning, and a baby abandoned on the moors around Haworth, who grows up to write twisted faery tales as she tries to vanquish the impact of her evil stepmother and abandoning birth mother, while trying to open her own little teashop in the place she was found all those years ago. Complete with lots of Bronte mentions, found family, new friends, pots of tea and the swirl of cinnamon and baking, it’s a sweet story, with a little extra magic as I’ve walked the same streets as Alice Rose.

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80 of 90 – Silver Leaves by Gladys Milroy
Silver Leaves by Gladys Milroy is a beautiful book, about the importance of trees and animals, conservation and caring for Country. Gladys’s simple but striking black and white illustrations perfectly reflect her text, introducing our precious flora and fauna, and hopefully inspiring us to protect them. A sweet fable that can be read to younger children, or gifted to those six and up to read themselves, it’s about a group of animals working together, despite their differences, to solve their problems and try to save their homes and habitat. If only humans could be so wise…
Gladys is a Palyku storyteller and educator from the Pilbara in WA, a member of the Stolen Generations, and mother of brilliant authors, artists and educators Helen Milroy, who this book is dedicated to, Sally Morgan, who wrote the ground-breaking 1987 autobiographical novel My Place, and Jill Milroy, and grandmother of writers, artists and academics Ambelin, Blaze and Ezekial Kwaymullina, who have all gifted us with moving and heartfelt stories in a number of genres, from kids books to scifi novels, and historical, academic and non-fiction titles, all of them so important for the truth-telling process we are slowly beginning to embrace.

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81 of 90 – A Conscious Home by Rebecca Sullivan
One of the recent books I read, many times, for work, is A Conscious Home by Rebecca Sullivan, published by Australian Geographic.
In our ever changing world, climate resilience is more important than ever. Small actions in our own homes can make a massive difference, and can be quick, simple and inexpensive. Join sustainable living advocate Rebecca Sullivan on a room-to-room journey to create a natural, healthy lifestyle for your whole family, using easy recipes and projects with stunning photographs, tips and tricks for all eco-minded Aussies, whether just starting out or already in action.

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82 of 90 – With Love from Wish & Co by Minnie Darke
I loved Aussie author Minnie Darke’s first two books, Star-Crossed and The Lost Love Song, and her new one is lovely too. With Love From Wish & Co is sweet and moving and funny, with flawed but (mostly!) loveable characters, and multiple perspectives that draw you in to everyone’s lives. There are secrets, betrayals and misunderstandings, and a long-held dream that’s challenged physically and emotionally. Light hearted and charming, it’s also really compelling, and the audiobook is great too. [ETA: she has also written a couple of Audible Originals since this one, including Wild Apples and The Yellow Wood, which I enjoyed too.]

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83 of 90 – The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
I loved The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, a magical story about the family you choose, the friendships you treasure, and the rules you decide are worth breaking in order to protect them both. Set in Norfolk, England, with nods to Yorkshire, Brighton and the Outer Hebrides, it’s a sweet story, where modern-day witch Mika abides by the very strict rule that her powers, and very existence, must be kept secret, and that she must stay away from other witches to prevent power surges that could expose them… Until she receives a desperate plea to her instagram account – where she “pretends” to be a witch – to help three orphaned witches learn to control their powers. She should refuse, but her loneliness makes her go to Nowhere House to meet the young girls and their quirky caretakers, and she can’t resist all seven of them. There’s a little romance, and a lot of friendship, along with a mystery and a devastating secret, and I love that a big part of the story is about the difference between being nice and being kind – and there’s a big difference. It’s a heart-warming, sweet and charming story of found family, self-acceptance and belonging, which Sangu describes as “like Practical Magic meets a grown-up Kiki’s Delivery Service: a warm, cosy fantasy with a diverse and quirky cast of characters…”

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84 of 90 – Bird’s Eye View and Wayfarer by Sophie Masson and Lorena Carrington
One of my favourite things about being part of the Australian Fairy Tale Society is the wonderful, talented members and their gorgeous co-creations – which is one of the aims of the Society, to spark magical new projects and collaborations inspired by the stories we investigate. Author Sophie Masson and illustrator and artist Lorena Carrington created the gorgeous book French Fairy Tales, and this year they started Pardalote Press, a tiny press making small surprising things. It was a pleasure to help crowdfund their first two releases, the book Bird’s Eye View and the sweet Wayfarer card deck, which can inspire your own creations.
Bird’s Eye View is a little chapbook of words – poetry and prose – and black and white images, which together form glimpses into the world of birds, and the world as seen by birds.
Wayfarer is a unique set of sixteen beautiful full colour cards which in words and pictures take you on a journey of mystery, magic and meaning. The cards can be used to build a thousand stories; or consult the faery tale oracle; or play games of words and pictures: the choice is yours!

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85 of 90 – Blueback by Tim Winton
Tim Winton’s Blueback is a sweet fable of a young boy, Abel, and his environmentalist mother who live a simple, close-to-nature life on the beautiful Western Australian coast. When Abel meets playful old blue groper Blueback while diving, they become great friends, so when developers and greedy fishermen threaten the groper and his pristine ocean home, he takes matters into his own hands. It’s a beautiful story about family, belonging, living in harmony with the environment, and the power of one person to make a difference. It’s a book close to environmental warrior Tim’s heart, about the ocean he loves and the things that are important to him. And I’m looking forward to the movie of the book that comes out January 1st…
Weirdly this is the first Tim Winton book I’ve read, but I guess I should read more. Anyone have a favourite to recommend? (Although there’s also this…)
Tim Winton has published twenty-nine books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music), and in 1997, he was named a Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia.

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86 of 90 – Hauntings and Humbug by Melanie Karsak
It’s no surprise that my favourite festive tradition is Jolabokaflod, the Christmas Book Flood, the beautiful Icelandic practice of gifting people books on Christmas Eve, then staying up all night drinking tea, eating chocolate and reading – #soundslikeheaven! Could explain why the country has more writers, more books published, and more books read, per head, than anywhere else in the world! I’m so grateful to my sweet hubby, who has been sharing this ritual with me since we met, long before I came across this lovely tradition…
Tonight we did give each other book gifts, but I read Melanie Karsak’s sweet Hauntings and Humbug – A Steampunk Christmas Carol, a stand-alone gender-swapped short story loosely based on the Charles Dickens classic. Her Ebony Scrooge is grumpy, stubborn, devoid of hope and oblivious to the suffering of everyone around her – and desperately in need of a little scare/Christmas miracle to bring her back to the world and rediscover her heart and her conscience.
And I can’t wait to read Melanie’s new faery tale, The Book Witch, very soon! xx

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87 of 90 – The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland
My favourite book this month was The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland (which is coincidentally the Aboriginal Book Club book of the month too!). Set between Lutruwita/Tasmania, Copenhagen and the Faroe Islands, it’s a beautiful story of love and loss, grief and anger, sisters and ancestors, regret, remorse and (the possibility of) redemption, and what a family must endure before they can reach for forgiveness. Some of the characters took a while to like, but the mystery at the heart of the book – an older sister who returned from her dream life overseas as a broken shell, then disappeared into the sea – compelled me to continue, the beautiful writing drew me in, and the selkies and swan maidens woven throughout had my heart from the first moment.
A year after Aura’s death, her sister Esther is still a mess, barely holding it together, when her parents beg her to travel to Copenhagen to find out what happened to her there. Aura’s diary holds seven clues – each one a painting or sculpture that links to a faery tale she was exploring, with a phrase she wrote to accompany each one, phrases she’d secretly had tattooed on her body. I loved this element of tattoos as healing and reclamation, of telling your story, taking ownership of it and embracing your true self. There was also a beautiful weaving of the bonds of women, both friends and family members, of tea-drinking rituals and the Tasmanian Aboriginal practice of kanalaritja, or shell stringing, and of astronomy and the natural world, which plays such an important role in the book, from the ocean of Lutruwita to the mountains of the Faroes.
I also loved the Danish folklore and faery tales threaded through the book, and discovering Danish faerytale-writer Helena Nyblom, a contemporary of Hans Christian Andersen’s, who I went off on an adventure to learn more about, tracking down and ordering a couple of her out-of-print books – before realising Holly had thoughtfully added the three faery tales of Helena’s that she references in her book on her website, lol. But I loved the search, as well as learning about artist Hilma af Klint, a favourite of Esther’s Danish aunt Abelone (I thought of you Lorena Carrington when one of her paintings was being described, the two swans meeting on the horizon, like your beautiful AFTS conference artwork women do)…
When I finished the book I wanted to travel to Tasmania, Denmark and the Faroe Islands – and get some more tattoos – but for now I’m focusing on the joy and courage that Esther finds on her journey, the healing and growth that doesn’t alleviate the pain of loss, but does help her discover a way to move forward, and move towards her family and all those who love her, and the magic and transformation that is at the heart of every word of this moving novel.

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88 of 90 – SCAD: Straight From the Heart, compiled by Pamela McKenzie
It’s three months today since my scad heart attack, so I’ve been reading WA survivor Pamela McKenzie’s anthology SCAD: Straight From the Heart, which shares the stories of many many women who had their own unexpected cardiac event…

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89 of 90 – Galatea by Madeline Miller
“The thing is, I don’t think my husband expected me to be able to talk. I don’t blame him for this exactly, since he had known me only as a statue, pure and beautiful and yielding to his art.”
– Galatea, wife of Pygmalion, given a voice at last to explain that her story is NOT a romance.

Madeline Miller’s Circe was one of my favourite reads of 2019, and her first novel Song of Achilles was brilliant too, so I was excited about a new book. This time she’s reimagined the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who despises real women, so carves the “perfect” one from stone, then begs the goddess Aphrodite to bring her to life. He immediately falls in love with this beautiful and obedient wife – until she becomes too real, with too much agency, and too little desire to be used and abused at his whim.
Introduced in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the myth of Pygmalion inspired many other writers too – although it’s always told from his point of view, with him as the hero.
“Galatea is a story that is very dear to me, inspired by a myth that always infuriated, fascinated, and frankly repulsed me. I had A LOT of fun writing it,” Madeline says. Galatea is a (very) short story, a maybe 20-minute read, and has been available in the xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths anthology for 12 years. But it’s a gorgeous little hardback, and a wonderful reimagining, confronting and powerful.
As Madeline says in the afterword: “The term incel wasn’t in wide circulation when I wrote this, but Pygmalion is certainly a prototype. For millennia there have been men who react with horror and disgust to women’s independence, men who desire women yet hate them, and who take refuge in fantasies of purity and control. What would it be like to live with such a man as your husband? There are too many today who could answer that. But that is the mark of a good source myth; it is water so wide it can reach across centuries.”
I just wish it was much longer, and can’t wait for Madeline’s upcoming Persephone novel.

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90 of 90 – The Book Witch by Melanie Karsak
Journey to the quaint small town of Chancellor, where fairy tales live, dreams come true, and happily-ever-after always reigns supreme. From mermaids to witches to faeries, the residents of Chancellor are far from ordinary…
Six years ago I fell in love with three beautiful, magical novellas – The Glass Mermaid, The Cupcake Witch and The Bee Charmer – from The Chancellor Fairy Tales series by Poppy Lawless. Then the author started writing other awesome and popular books, including the Celtic Blood Series, the Road to Valhalla Series and several in the Steampunk Fairy Tales Series, under her real name. But I was very excited to see that this year Melanie was returning to the small town of Chancellor, with The Vintage Medium out a few months ago, and book five, The Book Witch, out now! (She’s also still writing very prolifically in her other book worlds, and next I’m looking forward to Queen of Oak, the first in her Celtic Rebel Series, about Boudica…)
The Book Witch is a sweet new story of enchantment and wonder, focusing on would-be writer Paige, owner of a book store I desperately want to visit, which she runs with her adorable black cat familiar Miss Bean. After a recent break-up, her magic is not behaving as it should, and discovering the father of her favourite young customer has broken his promise and booked a very loud band for the night of her most important folkloric author event is not helping! Can a touch of magic and the power of books help the book witch and the pub owner resolve their differences, and even fall for each other? Each of the Chancellor stories are shortish stand-alone reads, but are set in the same small and magical town, and it’s so lovely to return there and spend some time with characters I still adore, and new ones too. And now I want to re-read the first three again!