Isobel BlackthornRezensionen

I’ve been warned from the very beginning that The Cabin Sessions was a slow book. Other reviewers seemed to confirm it, so I wasn’t expecting anything fast-paced or ripe with action when I dived in.

Thing is, there’s a fine line between ‘slow’ and ‘static’, and uh, the narration sometimes pushes it. It’s a shame because there are engaging parts too, where the rhythm and the flow, albeit still slow, are flawless. The same flawlessness shown by Eva and Delilah as characters—I really liked them!

[Keep reading @ Bookshelves & Teacups]

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: Sing Like a Canary

Thank you to Blackthorn Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book! I voluntarily leave this review!

When readers are introduced to Marjorie she's grieving the loss of her partner and trying to find her way through life once more. Cast adrift, she searches for closure from her once informant Billy McKenzie. Bad information from him ended her career, and she wants to uncover the truth behind it. But Marjorie isn’t the only one searching for Billy. At one point his information put away a few of his old associates. Ones that are now recently free and out for revenge. But who will find Billy first? And if these associates catch wind of Marjorie, she’ll be next on their hit list.

Readers will slowly reveal how Marjorie ended her career as a detective as the tension builds within the plot. The closer Marjorie comes to finding Billy’s whereabouts, the closer readers come to revealing the full history between the two characters. The pacing for this reveal was so well done and accented the overall story. The anticipation of what will happen if the two characters eventually meet once more will build and readers will be left needing the meeting to occur.

Isobel Blackthorn also tackles the challenges women faced in a predominately male workforce of the 70s. Majorie is met with doubt and sometimes outright aggression when she has information her coworkers are unable to produce. When she’s successful, it makes the situation all the direr for her. While there are a few people that seem to be on her side, they still have an underlying sense of jealousy against Majorie. And there are instances where they try to take advantage of her, causing Majorie to become both ashamed and confused. In some aspects this is a tough read due to the treatment of women. The writing does not shy away from the hardships Majorie faces, but I enjoyed the honesty of it. It takes finesse to incorporate these elements into a story, and Isobel Blackthorn has done a fine job.

If you enjoy detective stories, give Sing Like a Canary a try. While this isn't book one of the series, it can easily be read as a standalone. The characters and settings are brought to life by Isobel Blackthorn’s wonderful writing. Readers will not be disappointed as they join Majorie in her search for Billy and the truth only he knows.

I won't go into what the book is about, you can read the blurb for that. What I loved about the book is that it is based on the author's family. I did not know this until I read the epilogue. It made the story so much more believable. I can't imagine what it was like to be whisked along to Singapore and other places that Ernest had Emma going to. To be expected to live under the circumstances she did, because of her origin of birth, being a Mennonite Germans during WWI she was not accepted into the societies that she ended up in.

The hatred and bigotry that the German people endured, a people that abhorred war and were conscientious objectors to war but were shunned because of this. Plus living in Singapore, not knowing the language or customs plus having two children and a husband who only cared about his career. Emma spent years living like that, she did make some friends but she still felt adrift in her marriage. Then the ultimate betrayal by her husband, having her leave Singapore for the American West. Emma's journeys take her from Japan, China, England, the US, and Canada. She dearly missed her family in Canada, her parents had been unhappy with the fact she married outside the Mennonite faith.

She still has to endure the hatred of people who hated the Germans, even though Emma was not a practicing Mennonite she still felt bad when she would see the signs, 'Germans must speak English' in the shops in Colorado. An incident in the boarding house she has been living in has Emma and the girls reunited with Ernest. Life goes on for a while until Ernest just disappears. Never to be seen by Emma and her girls again. What happened to him? What I learned in the epilogue floored me.

The story goes back and forth to WWI and just prior to WWII, where Emma is a caregiver to an elderly lady, Adela, who was a good friend of Oscar Wilde. In the stories from Adela she reminiscences about her friendship and what happened to Oscar, he was a homosexual and was imprisoned for a time because of this.

I loved how the author wrote of Emma's life, and how she coped with insurmountable odds to be a very strong woman. Like I said, I liked the epilogue, it just tied everything together. The words just flowed across the pages. I am not really a fan of stories about WWI or WWII, there are just too many of them. That said, I really enjoyed this book, I almost didn't want it to end, but all good things must come to an end. I will definitely be reading more by Isobel Blackthorn. Gets 5 stars in my book!

I don't know much about the world of strippers and lap dancers…but my concept of it has certainly been endorsed. It's a bit seedy, unsophisticated, unglamorous and a bit pathetic. Attended by either men who need company, to forget their unhappy lives or merely just to objectify women. The strippers are women trying to survive financially by earning a quick and lucrative buck: let's face it, their shelf life is pretty short in this industry.

But the thriller set in this backdrop was quite accomplished. Lana is trying to finance herself through law school by working as a lap dancer in the club and finds herself turning into a bit of a sleuth when a rather undesirable regular to the club, Billy, collapses and dies. Amber is Lana's best friend and falls in lust with the paramedic who comes to attend to the dead man. But Lana is concerned. She's not so sure Billy's death is quite so cut and dried. And Amber isn't picking up her calls. And Lana seems to be getting trolled on social media. And her ex-boyfriend is sending her death threats…or is he?

This moves along at a very decent pace and keeps you fully engaged right to the (perhaps a little over-dramatic) end. I could have done without the constant mention of every detail of every song played by the club's DJ, and the present-tense narrative didn't work for me at all, but that aside, this was packed with suspense, darkness, sizzle and drama.

Not for late-night reading, though…and be prepared to be quite a little bit shocked…

I enjoyed this story. Although I'm not typically a reader of erotic thrillers, I think TWERK fits into that category. The characters are fully developed (at times a little too much so and the pace of the tale suffers a bit from that).

There's a particular balance between plot and story that most genre authors try to achieve in order to hold the reader's interest. During the AMBER segments, this pace is well done. Some of the others feel like we're drifting off into the character's stream of consciousness, which makes it difficult to discern what's actually important to the story and what might just be more character development.

That said, Blackthorn's TWERK is a worthy and interesting read even when Amber is not in the spotlight. The background of the "Gentlemen's Club" creates the opportunity for some behind-the-scenes vignettes that allows the dancers their humanity amid what could have been scenes played merely for more prurient interests.

Blackthorn's villain in this tale is very much a sadistic bastard. If you're not Amber--who finds that she at first is attracted to him as much as she is repulsed by him--you'll hate him. And you should.

If you're a fan of the genre, I think TWERK is worth your time. The characters are interesting, the setting is unique, and the plot is compelling. My rating for it would definitely go up if it were shortened and tightened a bit so that all the character development segments blended with the action segments a bit better.

renovation, ghosts, paranormal, mystery *****

The perfect read for a lazy summer afternoon. The pace of the novel and the narration is slow with an even flow. No startling melodrama despite the renovation being unpopular with the local residents and the past residents of the building. Beautiful descriptions of the island, detailed and expressive imagery for everything and everyone. I really enjoyed it!
This was my chance to visit the islands where the Norwegian cousins spent many a holiday.
Virginia Ferguson is very well suited as narrator with her pleasant voice and clear delivery.
I won this audiobook in a giveaway! I really win!

Harriet, living amid forests in Victoria, paints abstracts of the downs of south England. Judith, living in another place, the south of England, and indeed, in another time line, paints landscapes of a country she has never seen, the Wimmera of her imagination. To the dismay of each, their respective daughters abruptly return home, escaping awful men, 'The Degenerate', 'The Troll'.

'Happenstance would lodge in (Harriet's) imagination, resonant with significances'. Ch. 1

A feast for the reader, this multi-layered novel is itself resonant with significances, increasingly disturbing, such as the recurring appearance of the triptych in black, white and grey by 'an unknown artist'. This was purchased by Harriet's agent Phoebe. But no buyer wants it. We learn it was commissioned by Judith's own business friend, Bethany, from Judith herself, who disliked painting it. Progressing from one deceased estate sale to another, this thing trails ominously across the novel. More shadows disturb the gardens, friendships, music and art filling so much of the book: Ginny's nightmares, the conspiracy theories to which Judith feels morbidly drawn, Harriet's memory of 'a darkness' around Ginny's father, Wilhelm, the hints that Wilhelm,' The Lemurian', was immersed in something worse than merely criminal.

' Grey eyes that looked to the back of you with innocence and suspicion'. About pianist Ginny, Ch. 1.

Tensions between Harriet, who feels artistically stuck, and Ginny, determined to know why her mother abandoned her father, play out in the creative field. Harriet's art is rooted in the Bauhaus movement and Kandinsky's artistic theories of line, point and colour, most particularly of the possibility of synaesthesia. Even while we readers wonder at the connections between two women, two daughters, on far sides of the world, we are also treated to a skillful portrayal of the need for art, the drive to create. Harriet and Ginnys' creative battle itself shows the constant tension between the method and the artifice of it all on one hand and the desire to evoke something greater and nameless from it, on the other. Chromatic scales, in colour as well as in music, number theory, layers, curves, lines, correspondences, all tell their own story, combining into a new level as something the art 'evokes in the beholder or listener' (Kandinsky, Harriet). Or, could it be, as Ginny writes in her PHD on transformative experience, resulting in what the expression is 'for the person expressing it.' p.75.

'Too many composers view composition as something that happens to the individual, not something the individual steps inside. She thought otherwise'. Ginny. P 120.

Here for you to absorb for more than one viewing is a painting, or perhaps a novel, of intricate characters and their inner worlds, the whole ridden through with an increasing sense of dread that something is going to go horribly amiss.

Step inside.

Paula Cray was an English tourist agent who went on vacation herself, to Lanzarote, an island in the Canary Islands. There she met Celestino Diaz, an artist and an anti-corruption activist, and fell in love. Now they are married, and have a daughter about to turn three years old. Paula's parents have moved to Lanzarote, too, to be near their only child and only grandchild. Gloria's birthday party is being held at the home of Paula's parents, Bill and Angela.

But there's a major storm bearing down on the island, and Celestino has a commission to deliver, first. Paula is annoyed that he'll be late, but is well aware that they do need the money he'll be paid.

The storm hits, even worse than anticipated, and Celestino never arrives.

We see, in alternating chapters, we see Celestino's struggle to survive after a truck intentionally t-bones his car--to survive while hiding the fact that he has survived, and to get to safety--and Paula's growing worry, and search for her missing husband.

Celestino is struggling with a broken arm, a dog bite from a hungry and desperate stray dog, and clear evidence that someone is still hunting him in case he survived.

Paula is struggling with her conflicted feelings about Celestino's anti-corruption activism, her still-limited command of Spanish, the fact that Celestino's friends seem evasive, and an often helpful neighbor whom Celestino doesn't trust, Shirley, is suddenly determined to drag her everywhere on the island in pursuit of her her own errands. She knows Celestino wouldn't want her calling the police, and anyway, what does she have to tell them, especially in the first few days? He's a grown man.

Her outings with Shirley lead her to discover some strange seeming pranks--art clearly her husband's work, with pointed political messages, substituted for more innocuous artwork in places where the message won't be appreciated. When she visits his studio, looking for evidence of where he might be, or might have been headed, she's sure someone has been there, someone other than Celestino, but on the first visit there's nothing specific she can point to. He's apparently not in any hospital. Shirley says she saw him leaving the house at 1:30 on the day of the party and the storm--far too late to have gotten to Gloria's birthday party, an infuriating detail. She also claims to have seen him headed out of the village in an unlikely direction.

Yet as Paula continues to dig, she begins to get a sense of why Celestino is so passionate about his anti-corruption campaign, and to share his passion. Meanwhile, Celestino is, along with surviving and trying to get home, doing some hard thinking about how much he may have put Paula and Gloria in danger, without keeping Paula fully informed, if someone is indeed trying to kill him over it.

This is a thoughtful and emotional work, that kept me absorbed from beginning to end. Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

Claire Bennett wins a lottery jackpot, and buys a decaying ruin on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, where she has been spending her vacations for years. It's her dream, but her Aunt Clarissa,a psychic, warns that her chart projects difficulties, loneliness and isolation, and possible dangers, if she does move to Fuerteventura. Claire is not a believer in the spirit world, and now that she is wealthy, rather than a Colchester bank teller, she's determined to live her dream. Off she goes to Fuerteventura, where she rents an apartment, hires a builder, and sets to work restoring her new home.

The former owner had intended to demolish it. The builder suggests that they use the stones to build a new, modern house. Locals believe the house, called Casa Basaro, is haunted. She meets a local photographer, Paco, who loves the building too, and tells her the story of another Englishwoman, 19th century travel writer Olivia Stone. But Paco, too, interested as he is in the project, also says it's haunted, and urges her to be careful.

The stories don't alarm her. She doesn't take her Aunt Clarissa's warning seriously. When the builder, Mario, has to hire non-local men to do the work, that's just local superstition. When small rock she took from one of the damaged walls back to her apartment moves around in her apartment, she is sure she, somehow, has an intruder.

Even though, really, that doesn't make sense.

Claire is a determinedly rational woman, dealing with a situation that isn't responding to her rational approach. Strange accidents happen at the site, and when she starts sleeping there, the doors to her finished rooms, bolted from inside, nevertheless open, and furniture gets moved around. When power is connected, she experiences moments of extreme cold, and the power going on and off. Outside, strange, floating lights follow her.

Paco and the owner of the nearby cafe, Gloria, have very different stories about the history of the house.

And while Claire stays there, long-buried memories of seeing her mother die in a bus crash, when Claire was just seven, come back to her.

It's an intriguing and emotional story, and drew me in after some initial resistance. Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

Read for judging in the Australian Shadows Awards

This powerful collection of stories hit me hard, and I think will do the same for anyone, men and women, leaving you thoughtful about certain relationships in your own life, and about people you may have known in these sorts of troubles, perhaps even have tried to help.

Most of the tales are narrated in the first person and by women. They seek escape from abuse and manipulation, and not always from husbands and ‘lovers’. One tormentor turns out to be a therapist, another a female ‘friend’. We meet survivors bonding in the soul-destroying shelters. We watch on as mothers, themselves survivors of dire relationships, struggle and fail to save their daughters from also being undervalued and misused.

The belief by so many victims that the blows dealt to them are somehow their own fault permeates these stories. Their tenuous grasp of self esteem, even when they’ve perhaps had years to feel safe again, is vividly portrayed in ‘Bad Good Friday’ in which a woman tries to cudgel up a sense of grief for her dead father, who we gather was cold and cruel, while all the long night someone’s locked up dog howls with its own misery.

The last three tales have a lighter touch which leads you out from the others with a sense of relief, even a smile. Two are narrated by males, and one in the third person. While this change in form might seem at first discordant, I found it fitting. A wounded person often needs a wholly different perspective - usually that of someone who at last cares, to find the sense of hope the sub-title of these stories refers to.

After the slow motion collapse of her marriage Anne seeks refuge on the jagged island of Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off Africa.

Wounded, prickly - like the Drago tree of the title - Anne broods about her past, trying in her notebook to exorcize the ghosts of her husband and troubled sister.

She meets the novelist Richard who lives on the island seasonally, perched in his house as though at an outpost of progress, surrounded by artefacts made by the local potter Domingo. His plan to pluck bits of the islanders' story from Domingo to use in his next book becomes, in Isobel Blackthorn’s hands, a parallel for the robber cultures that plunder from others .

With Domingo and Richard, Anne explores Lanzarote, learning the unhappy story of its fragile population, the target of conquerors and pirates, and now of tourists. Anne both welcomes and distrusts Richard’s interest. He advances but exasperatingly retreats. Domingo just as infuriatingly holds his counsel. Unexpressed emotional forces heave beneath the surface, like the volcanic forces that shape the island. When they erupt it is in the form of their argument over tourism, whether it is the ruin of the island or its salvation.

Underlying the story of these three people is a meditation on the art of writing. Richard, seeing Anne’s notebook, thrusts upon her his views as a professional writer. As Anne tests his critiques, expanding her notes, trying for her own voice, Blackthorn weaves them also into her novel, playing with them, taking us alongside the writing process at the same time as we are reading its results - this book. It’s a risk to skim along just inside the “fourth wall’ like that but Blackthorn beautifully pulls it off. And when Anne confronts her ambiguous feelings about Richard, Blackthorn unexpectedly turns us further down the theme of exploitation, this time about where personal lives meet literature.

For readers who love layered levels of feeling and thought expressed in fine language, this is your novel.

Isobel Blackthorn writes well and in the end I really enjoyed this book. I want you to read that first, because I’m about to tell you that I really didn’t like the main character.

I struggled initially with this novel, mainly because I felt no empathy with the main character, Yvette. Let there be no misunderstanding, Yvette is a well written character – so believable that I developed a dislike for her.

Yvette has experienced tragedy in childhood - a broken home and a violent father who ultimately leaves. She comes to Australia, on a tourist visa, to escape a relationship with a charismatic criminal she met in Malta. Once here she decides she wants to remain in the country.

Apart from her childhood, Yvette’s disasters in life are largely self-inflicted. When the reader first meets her she is self-centred, wallowing in self-pity, unable to define herself without a man in her life and looks on the lives of others with derision. Yvette’s characterisation is excellent and I disliked her so much I wanted to stop reading.

It is a testament to Blackthorn’s writing that I continued. Slowly, I could see the character evolving and I really wanted to find out how she would grow. Blackthorn takes a character with no personal insight and transforms her into a woman who begins to recognise her own folly and view those around her with more compassion. Yvette is a far more likeable character at the end of the novel than at the beginning. This transformation is done in an entirely believable way and, in the end, it was this that I really enjoyed about the book – the characters.

Blackthorn weaves a lovely bunch of supporting characters into Yvette’s life – each with their own tangled little histories and tragedies. They are part of the catalyst for Yvette’s transformation and serve to show the myriad of ways people cope with their past in contrast to how Yvette deals hers.

The only negative for me was that I found some sections of the narrative jarring. Commentary on the woeful predicament and fate of the asylum seekers in Australia came across as being the author’s voice rather than the character’s. I felt this could have been better integrated into the story. In fact, I felt there was unexplored potential in this regard.

This is a novel that many will love. It is a tale of young woman learning to deal with her past, discovering her own worth and finding the strength to carve out a new place in the world.

I ended up not being able to put it down until I had finished.

Four Stars.

The Drago Tree, the name and the cover appealed from the start, and then from the first page, I was in love with the beautiful prose, the elegantly constructed sentences, which promised an intelligent and insightful story, sensitively told.

I was not disappointed.

The novel is set on the island of Lanzarote, brought to life by an author who knows it intimately. With confidence, she lavishes poetic descriptions of its unique landscape, placing you there; making you feel, see and fall in love with the place.

For example, the character Ann sees from her car window: “Several calderas pimpled the land to the south-west. The lava plain, to the south of her now, rose to meet its mother, La Corona, a monolith of black in the fading light.”

The author applies her talent for intricate detail to her characters as well. The trio we focus upon are complex, flawed, vulnerable…

It is Ann’s journey we follow, and I really enjoyed the snippets of her past that were revealed to us, providing intriguing, and at times, disturbing encounters with her sister.

The island’s past and history is also heavily featured; and I could not help but champion and understand Ann’s sympathy for an island ravished by tourists, its past and culture presented in superficial and sensational ways to serve as a diversion to the damage being done to natural habitats.

Through Ann we are able to connect with what is natural, meaningful and raw – she is despite her troubled and haunting past, an idealist, an artist – a cloud catcher!

I found it a delightful and enjoyable read… the believable relationships explored in the novel developed, expanded and evolved swiftly, adding sprinkles of romance and mystery to an inner journey taking place in an exotic location.

I recommend this novel if you like superb writing and reading a novel that has something meaningful to say about people, places and life.

A Perfect Square is an absorbing literary thriller by author Isobel Blackthorn, which delivers a well-executed and thought-provoking ride towards a diabolically chilling climax.

Exquisitely written, the novel weaves its way around two, hauntingly similar stories, both based upon mother-daughter relationships, within which the daughters are troubled by absent fathers and wanting more attention or empathy from their artistic mothers.

The author, like an artist slowly dabbing paint upon a canvas, methodically yet tauntingly brings to life complex, damaged characters, their pasts, their struggles to relate to each other and the paths they are set upon.

By the time truths are revealed, the reader is fully involved and caring about the fate of the characters, fates that are disturbingly interchangeable, if not for the timing…

Timing, by the way of moon cycles, as well as art, music, creativity, synchronicity and mysticism are themes that litter this unique and intellectually engaging story. There is much to savour in the symbolism offered and in the beautifully crafted prose. But driving the reader forward is the sinister plot that slowly unfolds…

The novel begins with Ginny moving back home with her mother, Harriet, after breaking up with her boyfriend of three years.

Harriet, wanting to snap her daughter out of her depression, suggests to her that they could hold a joint exhibition. They decide after some contention that Harriet would create nine paintings; and Ginny would compose nine songs… inspiration for their works to be sourced from the moon’s movements in relation to the planets. Not every mother’s cheer-up remedy, but for Harriet, who Ginny perceives as “a mother so lacking in depth, so pretentious and arty”; it is the best she can devise.

Ginny agrees to the exhibition but as far as she is concerned she is: “in her mother’s house because she had nowhere else to go, here to reassess her life, here to make sense of her recent past, a past that catapulted her back on the search for answers, for revelations, for anything that would help her understand why she didn’t have a father.”

As Ginny pushes her mother to open up about her father, Harriet remains “too tight-lipped”, turning Ginny’s quest to understand the past into “a real present tense endeavour”.

Harriet, while wanting to protect her daughter, is not thrilled to have her back home, miserable and pushing for answers about her father. At the crux of it, Harriet fears that her daughter’s mood will “thwart her creativity”.

As mother and daughter are locked in each other’s orbit, like the moon and the planets that they are seeking inspiration from, their relationship waxes and wanes, and there are ups and downs, light and shade.

They approach their art as differently as they approach life, but in their own way they unlock their creativity. As the exhibition is finally pulled together, much more is unlocked and released.

Interspersed between mother and daughter tensions, is the unravelling of the story of Judith and her wayward daughter Madeleine.

Madeleine is also eager to seek out a relationship with her estranged father… but unlike the protective Harriet, Judith encourages contact.

What finally is produced, through the author’s cleverly paced revelations, is a dark, unsettling picture – the last dabs of paint are applied and the reader is left to watch in horror as the intertwined stories resolve.

The reader is no longer looking at crescents but a full moon, bright and harsh in its full circle. But light brings a new start too, after the dark.

There is so much to this layered novel. It is every bit a thriller – holding the reader, serving up pages of simmering suspense and startling secrets.

The author’s writing style is poetic, complex, fresh. Descriptions are purposeful and suggest much about the characters. For instance, Ginny’s obsession with paisley clothes, is her clutching to her childhood.

There is a strong sense of the feminine throughout – beyond the female characters and their strong female friendships, the reader can’t help but feel the over-riding feminine power of creativity, caves and cycles.

If looking for an intriguing, well-crafted story that at the end will have you biting your nails… then pick up A Perfect Square and immerse yourself in it. I strongly recommend it.

This sensitive, introspective story, recounted with exquisite prose, takes place on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Author Isobel Blackthorn, who lived on Lanzarote for several years, has captured well the intense, raw beauty of this small volcanic idyll. The ravages the island has endured, leaving it exposed and raw in places, mirror the protagonist's inner journey throughout the novel.

“Ahead, the bare-sided calderas loomed. They’d reached the lava plain of Timanfaya, an underworld on the overworld, the earth’s subcutaneous layer smeared upon its skin…”

Ann, a hydrologist, has come to Lanzarote to escape for a few weeks, but even here, finds that there’s no escaping the trauma bubbling up inside. She begins to write, partly as a means to come to terms with the end of a difficult marriage and a troubled relationship with her sister. Together with author friend Richard and local potter, Domingo, she wanders the island’s small villages, beaches, and cliffs. Cuts into the past are frequent, painful reminisces which often feel like sheer drops from the cliffs of the island itself, jarring and dislodging the detritus carried within, as Ann tries to reconcile her past and chart a path for the future.

“Crusting over the top with cool thoughts and detached emotions was all very well, but underneath, rattling about in that hollowed chamber, lived memories of past torments, moiling vestiges like brooding bats, poised to scream in fits of frenzy in response to any slight.”

Sometimes prickly, like the drago tree itself, Ann is nevertheless unfailingly astute, using her scientist’s acumen to seek clarity where she can. The honesty of her shrewd observations on herself, on the people around her, and on life itself, set the Drago Tree apart from other stories of its ilk and left me with much to ponder.

The Drago Tree by Isobel Blackthorn is an environmental romance. The love object is Lanzarote, the stunningly beautiful island that is the easternmost of the Canary Islands, its geography making it the target of conquest and invasion by pirates, Spanish conquistadors, and tourists. Yes, there are people involved, but the land dominates everyone and everything.

“She felt herself expand in the face of what she saw. Ever since her first geology field trip in the Lake District she had known there exists something profound and ineffable in the relationship between nature and the human beholder, a capacity to feel exhilarated by nature’s beauty, as if she could transcend her little life in the face of the earth’s grandeur.”

Ann is drawn to the land, to Lanzarote’s wild and stark volcanic landscape. It is land formed by volcanoes, by violent eruptions. She seeks refuge there after the explosive collapse of her marriage. In fact, she describes her life in geologic terms, it’s failure beginning as soon as they married. “Within weeks their interactions were tectonic, always grinding and crashing into each other, until their relationship had become a grotesque deformation.”

She meets Richard, a successful genre writer, not that she is terribly impressed by that since she is a bit of a literary snob. Sparks fly between Ann and Richard, a mix of attraction and antagonism. She’s feeling prickly and he’s far too shallow for her.

There is a third wheel on several of their excursions, a local potter named Diego. Richard picked him out to be his friend on the island and Diego goes along with him to a degree. Many of the conversations among the three of them concern the history of Lanzarote and the role of tourism in the present. Ann and Diego are decidedly anti-tourism while Richard sees it as a necessary element to the economic development and enrichment of the island.

Ann is quite disdainful of tourists and tourism. She’s irritated when they crowd the sites she goes to see. She loathes the flashes of their cameras in the caves and the hubbub of their conversation, their amusement at the tour guide’s humor and their very existence. Heritage should just be lived, not collected and examined. Of course, she’s a tourist, too. And when Richard points it out, she is livid. “His comment cut her like shrapnel. She despised him then, intensely.”

And if all tourists picked up a special stone at every site they visited, they would denude the beaches and cliffs and caves of small stones. For someone who examines so much of her life, there is a moral obtuseness here. She reminds me of those who think they stand apart, that they are travelers, not tourists.

It is not that she never interrogates herself. She sees herself as somewhat like the land of Lanzarote. “Crusting over the top with cool thoughts and detached emotions was all very well, but underneath, rattling about in that hollowed chamber, lived memories of past torments, moiling vestiges like brooding bats poised to scream in fits of frenzy in response to any slight.”

She recognizes that there is a similar avidity in scientists as in tourists in an interesting extended metaphor. This highlights one of the delights and exasperations of The Drago Tree. Isobel Blackthorn is in love with language and with crafting outstanding sentences, finding new and unique metaphors. There’s a precision and beauty to her prose that is undeniable. Sometimes, though, this is at the expense of the narrative. Blackthorn is more in love with writing than with telling a story.

“What about her? A scientist—didn’t she have the same wanderlust, the same yearning to discover? The scientist’s quest is indefatigable, a million wandering minstrels popping up everywhere, chanting hypotheses, strumming out experiments, singing gleefully their proofs and verifications, consummate lab-coat entertainers satisfying their inquisitive minds. Tell me more, I need, I must, I have to know the answer, the solution, the prevention, the cure. The whole earth is unearthed in this insatiable desire to know.

I enjoyed The Drago Tree. I liked the prose far more than the story. I think the writing mattered more than the story and that was her choice. It’s a bit of a confusing novel because Blackthorn is trying to accomplish too much. She’s writing a story of a woman finding herself, a story of family tragedy and struggle, a romance and an environmental manifesto. She is most successful with the last, because after all, this story really is a love affair with the land and history of Lanzarote. The rest is decoration.

Is humanity doomed by its own inquisitive and acquisitive drives? Is that what the myth of Atlantis is really about? Not a story of a fallen civilization long ago, but a warning, a foretelling of what is to come? Surely that is a doomsday mentality, yet maybe we are bound ”

Although this quote is pessimistic, the story does find hope, not just for Ann, but for Lanzarote as well.

I received an electronic copy of The Drago Tree from the publisher through NetGalley.

http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/the-drago-tree-by-isobel-b...

All Because of You is a collection of short stories by Isobel Blackthorn. The organizing theme for the stories is seeking refuge, whether women seeking refuge in a shelter, a daughter seeking it with her mother or an immigrant seeking refuge in another country.

Some of the stories were moving. I particularly liked the generational short story Mother’s Day that opened the collection. A woman and her daughter flee her abusive husband who is threatening to take the daughter away and her mother goes into shelter with her. Their closeness was deeply affecting.

The stories are organized into four thematic collections, Refugees, The Wayward Daughter, Abusers, and Hope. I find it odd that two of the stories that showed there is hope were narrated by men and the third, the person who found hope is not the person the story is about. That is sad. Most of these stories are sad.

The Wayward Daughter was particularly disturbing because it is the story of the headlong pursuit of the wrong man. The collection of stories of Abusers had one particularly powerful story where a woman who desperately needs therapy goes to an abusive therapist. I guess if my anxieties came from several disastrous relationships with men, I would not go to a male therapist.

While there are some affecting and emotionally moving stories in this collection, particularly the first two stories, Mother’s Day and The Moon Circle, some of the stories were not particularly interesting. A few did not really fit into the collection. Strangely, the title story “All Because of You” was the most discordant.

The prose is fine. It’s the actual story that fails for me. Blackthorn is best with dialogue, including the alternately amusing and heartbreaking run-on dialogue of the hairdressing gossip. What is missing for me, though, is an understanding of why some of the stories need telling. There feels like there is no “there” there and I was bored. In truth, I kept going to finish mainly because there was not that much left to read. I am glad I did because the last story is another one of the better ones.

I was provided a review copy by the publisher through NetGalley.