Book Club: The Not So Chosen One, The Registrar, Shortest History of the World and Thistledown Seed

THE NOT SO CHOSEN ONE

Kate Emery (Text, $19.99)

“Living a double life is hard, and it’s doubly hard when you’re seventeen and sharing a house with your mother.” So says Lucy Sparks, protagonist of The Not So Chosen One, the Perth-set young-adult novel by debut author and senior reporter for The West Australian Kate Emery.

As we meet Lucy, her biggest problem is how to tell her mum about her unplanned and unwanted teenage pregnancy. It is, admittedly, a very significant thing to be dealing with, but one that begins to look almost run-of-the-mill after Lucy’s life is turned upside down by the revelation that she’s been accepted to Drake’s, a prestigious school for students with magical abilities — and that, crucially, she’ll need to hide its existence from her loved ones.

The situation only becomes more complex after a fellow student is found badly injured on the Drake’s campus. As Lucy’s own magical talents prove elusive, she begins to suspect someone is keeping dangerous secrets and struggles to work out who, in this new world of spell casting and enchanted portals, she can trust.

To say too much more would be to spoil the enjoyable twists of the novel’s initially slow-burning plot, which combines fantasy and mystery with a sweet serving of romance. Emery has written of her conviction that YA fiction should be embraced not only by the younger readers who are its ostensible target audience, and I suspect many millennial adults, in particular, will be charmed — excuse the pun — by the novel’s playful references to the Harry Potter series, among other books.

Emery writes with a sharply ironic sense of humour and a knack for creating characters that combine comedic exaggeration with emotional authenticity. The determined, wry Lucy is an endearing, engaging protagonist whose double life works to not only explore The Not So Chosen One’s interest in dishonesty and truth, but also to dramatise the many pressures that teenagers — magical or otherwise — so often face.

THE REGISTRAR

Neela Janakiramanan (Allen & Unwin, $32.99)

Melbourne reconstructive plastic surgeon Neela Janakiramanan draws on her past experiences as a surgical registrar in her first novel, which highlights the challenges faced by trainee doctors in Australia. It’s a work of fiction centred on Emma, a young woman following in the footsteps of her father and older brother after being accepted into an orthopaedic surgery training program at an esteemed training hospital, but who quickly finds herself contending with a broken system and battling misogyny, bullying, overwork and exhaustion. “The unique thing about my book is that it is, as far as I know, the only novel about health care that centres the female experience of both patient and clinician,” Janakiramanan says.

THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF THE WORLD

David Baker (Black Inc, $26.99)

Drawing on an approach known as Big History, David Baker’s new book seeks to follow “the continuum of historical change . . . from the Big Bang to the evolution of life to human history” — all in fewer than 250 pages. Having written a YouTube series on Big History hosted by vlogging pioneers John and Hank Green, Baker has form when it comes to making complex subject matter accessible — he promises “foreign cosmic phenomena will be boiled down to plain speech” — while also advocating for their significance. “History allows us to live many lives instead of just one,” he writes, “and this particular story instils in us the combined experience of billions of years.”

THISTLEDOWN SEED

Louise Helfgott (Brandl & Schlesinger, $32.99)

Louise Helfgott’s family was depicted in the Oscar-winning movie, Shine, based on the life of her brother, concert pianist David Helfgott. In her new book, the Mandurah-based poet, playwright and author explores another aspect of her family’s history: their Polish-Jewish heritage and tragic connection to the Holocaust. Vivid and deeply felt, it interweaves three narrative strands: Helfgott’s travels to Poland to learn about the events that led her forebears to migrate to WA; reflections on her childhood and journey to becoming a writer; and a fictionalised depiction of her aunts, Childa and Gutka. “I am on a mission to discover family who have slipped between the pages of history,” she writes.