About the Book:
I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.
Charlotte (‘Lot’) and Ellen (‘Nelly’) are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother’s death, years before. Clever, beautiful, gentle Lot has been unfailingly dutiful – basically a disaster of an older sister for much younger Nelly, still haunted by their mother in her early thirties.
When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed.
Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse. It’s an account of love and ghosts so sharp it will leave you with paper cuts.
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia
Released 28 May 2024
My Thoughts:
Rating: 4 stars
Why I chose it: The cover initially caught my eye – it’s absolutely stunning and flowers on a cover will always get me.
Themes: Grief, family, sisters, love, organ donation, the mother load (ie. mothers who do more harm than good to their offspring).
For fans of: Literary fiction with a touch of the paranormal to it.
The good: The writing is beautiful, passages of deeply felt, well written emotion and introspection. Josh and Lot were a highlight in terms of characters, particularly as they bonded through their grief. And the ghosts. I thought that aspect of the story was really well done.
The not so good: It took about a quarter of the book to really be able to follow the narrative structure.
In brief: There is a dark humour to this novel that gently balances the raw emotion. There was a possibility that this novel would have become weighted down by its own sadness and multiple layers of grief, but the author infused enough rays of hope, humour, and love into the narrative to lighten it all up. It’s an emotional read, for sure, but not a depressing one.
Thanks for the review copy goes to: Pan Macmillan Australia.
Theresa Smith Writes 
I was quite impressed by this author’s historical novel A Treacherous Country (which won the Vogel). But I’m not so sure about genre-bending with the paranormal … there was a bit of a fad for that a while ago but even Jane Rawson (who wrote the best of them IMO — Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists; and From the Wreck) had a bit of trouble making it work in her last novel. (A History of Dreams).
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It can be hit and miss for me too. I felt like the author was almost demonstrating how much the younger sister was haunted by her mother by literally having her mother haunt her. It kind of worked (for me), as it wasn’t ghoulish or an actual ghost story.
I think I was sent A Treacherous Country but never ended up reading it.
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Perhaps it’s because, when we read genre fiction, it’s because we’re in the mood for the predictable elements of that genre. So when they get mixed up together, the book is not what we were expecting. That’s ok if it really works, but it’s just annoying if it seems gimmicky.
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Absolutely. I’ve had that happen more than once.
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