Event Recap: High Tea With Melina Marchetta

Every so often Better Read Than Dead in Sydney hosts high tea events with Australian authors, and yesterday they had their biggest ever with Melina Marchetta. There was so much interest they had to  move the event out of their bookshop and in to a hall around the corner. They do a great job with creating a lovely high tea atmosphere, the food is awesome, and you get to hear an amazing author discuss their work - it's basically my idea of heaven. Also tickets are only $10, which is crazy good value. Seriously, I am obsessed with how brilliant these events are. And of course yesterday's event with one of my absolute favourite authors was extra brilliant.

If you're wondering what those non-Melina Marchetta books are - I won the lucky door prize, woo!

Melina discussed everything from writing Looking for Alibrandi to the On the Jellicoe Road film script and the novel she's just finished. Some of the highlights:

• Melina left school in Year 10 and at her mother's urging did a course to learn to type. Instead of typing random things she began writing what would go on to become Looking for Alibrandi. She would write little snippets of story and pass it to the girl next to her, who kept asking for more, which encouraged her. So her very first reader was a 16-year-old girl. But she said Alibrandi went through many, many rewrites, and even after she got an agent and later a publisher it needed work. She didn't keep a record of the process, but she believes she got rejected between five and eight times before Alibrandi was rescued from the slush pile. From the time she first started writing it through to when it was published, it took about five years. Her other novels have taken about 18 months from writing the first draft through to being published.
• Her love of reading was what got her in to writing. She had never seen a character like herself or her world portrayed, and that's what really drove her to create Alibrandi. But although she created a story within her world and tied to her experiences growing up in Australia with Italian heritage, she said it's not her life story and Josie Alibrandi is not her: "Josie is much smarter than me and I am much nicer than her." 
• She said "write what you know" is great advice, but that doesn't mean it has to be exactly your story - you can use your experiences or emotions to create a fictional journey: "My own life is very boring - the highlight of my day can be getting an email or going up the road to get a coffee." Melina used Saving Francesca as an example of this - working at an all boys school, she knew what it was to be a minority in that environment, and she used that in Francesca. 
• She was very proud of On the Jellicoe Road but when it was first published, nobody was really interested in it. She even had a bookseller tell her to her face that she didn't like it. People wanted her to keep writing Alibrandi and Francesca again and again, and didn't know what to make of this completely different story. But then it was published in America, and it was really what cracked the American market for her, and suddenly people in Australia were interested in it too. Now it is one of her most beloved books.
• Despite the themes of her first two books, she was never interested in writing about multi-culturalism forever - what interests her most, and what ties all her books together, is identity.
• Melina sees Finnikin of the Rock as a companion novel to Alibrandi. It has the same theme of identity, and searching for who you are, and of people displaced from their homeland. She was inspired to write Finnikin when she was living in New York for a couple of months, and she was sitting on the subway and saw an advertisement about refugees. And as she was sitting there she realised everyone around her was talking in different accents and languages, and everyone, included herself, was disconnected from their homeland. Those two observations led to Finnikin. She wanted to write a story about refugees but she didn't want to set it in the here and now because it would be too political, so she created the fantasy world. 
• Finnikin is almost as much Evanjalin's story, but Evanjalin didn't get a POV because she's got too much to hide.
• The descriptive language was something she worked hard to get right when writing fantasy. While most of her novels undergo at least five rewrites, she rewrote scenes in the Lumatere Chronicles up to 20 times. She would write a scene, and then sit there with a thesauraus to find just the right word for each thing she wanted to convey, to create a rhythm within the prose. She said the important thing with fantasy is that there is a song that is sung through the writing.
• Finnikin and Francesca were both written as standalones, but they each had characters that wouldn't leave her alone (that'd be Froi and Tom!).
• Tom Mackee was originally supposed to be the villain in Francesca. But one comment he made in the novel - about being the first Mackee male to get to a certain age with his liver intact - stuck with her over the years. One night Melina was watching an Australian Story about Vietnam vets who were going back to Vietnam because the bodies of five soldiers had never been recovered, and she had a "mystical moment" where she felt Tom Mackee sitting next to her saying "that's my grandfather." He also said "and Georgie Finch is my aunt" - she had been thinking of Georgie as a character for another story at the time. She said she doesn't really buy into what a lot of writers say about things just coming to them, or that writing is some mystical process - "it's mostly really hard work" - but that was one of the few moments she's had like that. And that led to The Piper's Son.
• Jimmy Hailer's story is very much in Melina's head right now. He and Siobhan did not appear in The Piper's Son because she could only include who Tom brought with him, and he didn't bring those two characters, but she was aware their absence was a presence that was felt, and they were still there even if they weren't an active part of the story. She has been thinking of Jimmy in the past two days in particular, and she knows what will happen in his story, but she needs to get the chance to write it. She said she firmly believes stories are written at the right time - and she feels that now is Jimmy's time. She wanted to stress that it won't be YA - Jimmy is about 25 or 26. He is still drifting, as Jimmy does. He will get stuck in a house for three days due to a flood, with another character who was in a short story Melina wrote last year (I have yet to read that one - I need to).  There will be two other main characters, in their 40s - another woman who was in that short story, and her love interest. It will be about these four characters, but the old gang will definitely show up in some way. 
• The novel Melina just finished is unlike anything she's written before. Her agent describes it as a "literary thriller" and it is an adult novel set in London. It's about an explosion on a bus that is tied to an explosion on the London underground 14 years earlier. She said while in the past her novels have been about young people where older people play an important part, this one is about older people, where younger people play an important part. It was partly inspired by Melina's feelings over anti-terror laws. 
• Melina is currently tinkering with the Jellicoe film script. She said it has to be absolutely perfect because they're hoping to get the right backing in the new year to finally get it made. They've auditioned actors and she said if it was made tomorrow, she knows they definitely have a Jonah Griggs, Ben Cassidy and Jude Scanlon - and they are all "amazing, and hot too". But she can't say who they are because by the time the film gets made they might not be able to do it for whatever reason (Hollywood might snatch them up - "and Hollywood will definitely snatch them up" - or they might get too old, for instance).
• Melina said film scripts are incredibly difficult and complicated because there is a lot more to consider than when writing a novel. And the people who are funding it are not necessarily interested in what's in the novel. It sounds like the Jellicoe script might be quite different from the book, but she said the "six most important things" that are in the novel are also in the script. She also said that everyone who has read the script has loved it.
• Her advise for writers: just write! Melina said she meets a lot of people who say they want to be writers but aren't actually writing anything, and she understands the difficulty of putting things on the page and the fear that it will never live up to what's in your head. She said her latest novel was in her head for a year before she put anything to paper - and it ended up being even better than what was in her head. She said you need to write something every day - it doesn't have to be much, and you might end up throwing out three quarters, but that one quarter might be the hook you need to hang the next thing on. Even if one sentence out of hundreds is gold, it's worth it and that's what you need to do. 
• You should also rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Melina said people ask her how she, for example, plants something early in a book that doesn't have meaning until much later on, and she said that's the sort of thing that comes through rewriting. It's only when you rewrite that you really know the characters and can really flesh them out and add those little, meaningful details. But you need to get that first draft done as the foundation to then go back and rewrite and make it better.
• Melina is the queen of YA and it seems she will soon be the queen of adult fiction too - of course she didn't say this, but I am. If you haven't read her books you should go buy them all right now.

Audiobook Reviews: Revisiting Melina Marchetta

I've been wanting to reread some of my favourite Melina Marchetta books for a little while, and decided to give the audiobooks a try, because I don't feel so guilty about rereading if I'm at least experiencing the books in a different way. These are some notes on the audiobooks themselves, as I've already addressed the overall books in my original reviews.

On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Narrated by: Rebecca Macauley

Available at: Audible

See my original review here.

I really loved this audiobook. Macauley's narration was great and felt authentic to the characters and the story. I didn't love a couple of the male voices, like Griggs, but they weren't bad - just not totally how I thought they should sound. Overall it was a solid performance from Macauley though, and it was a wonderful way to experience the story again. It made me ugly cry on the train, which looked even weirder than it usually does when reading, because I wasn't actually reading - I had headphones in and it probably just looked like I was listening to a really sad song or something. But it was worth it. 

Rating: 5/5 story, 4/5 audio.

Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta (Book 1 in The Lumatere Chronicles)

Narrated by: Tom Wren

Available at: Audible

See my original review for the whole series here.

I have really mixed feelings about this one. The audiobook was so, so good in some ways and really not good in others. Wren's narration was well done for the most part and some of his voices - like those of the older men in particular - were brilliant. But other voices were awful - Froi's was one that was very grating. And certain words and names were so badly mispronounced it drove me batty every time I heard them. I could also hear him swallowing at times which wasn't very pleasant. But I found myself loving the book perhaps even more than I did the first time, nonetheless. Still, I probably wouldn't recommend this as a way to experience Finnikin - certainly not for the first time.

Rating: 5/5 story, 2.5/5 audio.

Froi of the Exiles and Quintana of Charyn by Melina Marchetta (Books 2 and 3 in The Lumatere Chronicles)

Narrated by: Grant Cartwright

Available at: Audible 

See my original GIF review of Froi here.

The final two books in this series are narrated by a new voice actor from the first one, and although he doesn't have any really standout character voices like Wren did, he is also much better overall. He gets the pronunciation of everything right, the pacing is good and the emotions he infuses the dialogue with are incredibly moving. There was one section in particular that I relistened to about five times before I moved on because it was so powerful - part of that was the amazing writing, but the narration really enhanced it. I still don't know if I'd recommend listening to the audiobooks if you haven't actually read the series first, but maybe that's because I adored the experience of actually reading them so much. Basically, no matter how you get them, they're going to be good.

Rating: 5/5 story, 4/5 audio.

Talking Point: Book Hangovers

Symptoms

• You feel like crying when you finish a book, not because it was particularly sad, but because you don't want it to end.
• You find yourself unable and/or unwilling to start a new book, because you're not ready to let go of the last one.
• You go back and reread your favourite passages - or, in extreme cases, the whole thing.
• You imagine what the characters are doing now or how they'd react in certain circumstances. Serious afflictions may even lead to fanfiction.
• Everyone you know starts to look panicked whenever you come their way. You're not sure why - you only want to remind them again that they MUST read this fabulous book.
• You squee when you come across others who have a similar love for the book and instantly become their friend.
• You start to lose your ability to form coherent sentences and instead begin to express yourself in gif form (which is not particularly practical in real life).
• You can't concentrate on anything and wander around in a daze for days.
• When you finally do start a new book, it inevitably disappoints you, because it just can't live up to the last one.
• You want to take the book to bed at night and cuddle it.

Hi, my name is Belle, and I'm suffering from a book hangover. You see, ever since I finished Melina Marchetta's The Lumatere Chronicles, no book has been able to satisfy me. Granted, I've only tried three, and they could just be bad books - but I get the feeling that even if there were outstanding, I still wouldn't enjoy them as much as I normally would. My heart is still in Lumatere.

I was trying to think of previous book hangovers I've had, and the one that immediately sprang to mind was when I read Stephenie Meyer's The Twilight Saga - which of course is light-years away from The Lumatere Chronicles (and not in a flattering way). Still, despite all its faults, The Twilight Saga got under my skin. First I tried to cure my hangover with more vampire books. Then I ended up just rereading the whole saga.

Another time I remember is when I finished David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It's quite a hefty book and took me a little while to read, but when it was done I was left wanting more. Not because the ending wasn't satisfying, because it was - rather, I had enjoyed the world of the book so much I wanted to stay there awhile longer. I read some other Dickens books to remedy the situation, and I enjoyed them, but none grabbed my heart quite so much as David Copperfield.

So now, I have this book hangover I need to cure. Do I just bite the bullet and reread the trilogy (though I would feel guilty about all the completely unread books staring at me from my shelves)? Try and find another fantasy series that I may love as well (even though I'm not a massive fantasy reader and wouldn't really know where to start)? Or just plough away through mediocre reads until the hangover lifts? Tell me, dear readers, have you ever had a book hangover? If so, what was the book, and how did you get over it?

Ten Reasons You Need To Read The Lumatere Chronicles by Melina Marchetta

-The wonderful, intricate plot. Finnikin of the Rock tells the story of the the curse on Lumatere, which has caused half of its population to be trapped within the walls of the kingdom, with the other half caught outside. Finnikin is a young exile who believes his people's best chance of survival is to create a second Lumatere – until he meets the novice Evanjalin, who walks in the dreams of those trapped in the city and whispers of the survival of a royal heir, believed to be dead, who could break the curse. Because it was originally intended to be a standalone, the plot of Finnikin is largely wrapped up in the first novel, and Froi of the Exiles and Quintana of Charyn both focus on a different curse – the one on Charyn that means no child has been born there for 18 years.

I adored Finnikin and when I started reading Froi I was a bit skepitcal about there being another curse, but the way it eventually unravelled made a lot of sense – and was brilliant to read, of course. Marchetta skillfully laid the foundations of each mystery, revealing clues at key points before masterfully bringing everything together at the end of each book (although Froi and Quintana go hand in hand, there are still some great revelations in the end of the former).

-The fantastic world-building. I don't read a lot of fantasy, but I really enjoyed the world of Lumatere and thought it was well fleshed-out and believable. The history, cultures, landscape and languages of the various kingdoms were all rich and strongly developed.

-Marchetta's beautiful writing. It's so easy to read but so incredibly lovely, creating a number of powerful moments and images that give you goosebumps and stick in your mind long after you've finished reading. (SPOILERS: Two of my faves involved Froi and a baby – the moment at the end of Finnikin, when he holds the baby high and the “future of Lumatere” is in his hands, and the scene at the end of Froi, when he sees Quintana with his baby and falls to his knees embracing them. Siiigh).

-The awesome heroes. There's one to warm your heart: Finnikin, a smart, skilled and sexy ginger (no, that is not an oxymoron), who is haunted by the past but plans for a brighter future. There's one who'll tug at your heart: Lucian, Finnikin's childhood friend, who is stubborn and somewhat cocky; his charm and sensitivity buried under a deep grief and sense of failure. Then there's one who'll obliterate your heart: Froi, who comes from nothing and becomes everything. I have to admit, after reading Finnikin I was a bit concerned about Froi as the main character in the rest of the series. He's only secondary in the first book and actually does something quite reprehensible. I knew Marchetta would redeem him, but I think that's what my problem was – I was afraid to like him after what he'd done. But Marchetta addresses it almost immediately in Froi, and makes it very clear that Froi is deeply repentant. As his past is slowly revealed, it becomes clearer why he did what he did. Not that that excuses it, of course – but Froi himself nor any part of the narrative ever does try to do that, which is important. He knows what he did was wrong, he hates himself for it, and he does everything he can to make up for it. The reader, like the characters, never fully forgets what he did – it is consistently brought up throughout the novels – but Froi's many other heroic actions make you begin to love him all the same. In the end, Froi was the character who most got under my skin. He's deeply flawed – like all of the characters – but therein lies his brilliance.

-The amazing heroines. If you think the heroes sound good, just wait till you meet the heroines. They're each strong and compelling in their own way. Evanjalin is strong-willed, intelligent, independent, and manipulative, doing whatever needs to be done for her people to heal – even if it means people hate her for it (and there are times I kinda did, even though I loved her overall). Phaedra, oh Phaedra – at first she seems quite weak, but she's quick-thinking, caring and much, much stronger than she, and the other characters, think she is. But as with the boys, it was the most messed up character who really got under my skin when it came to the heroines: Quintana. She's got dirty hair, odd facial expressions, multiple personalities and a savageness bordering on crazy. But underneath all the apparent madness is a deeply hurting girl who has been through so much, but still cares about others more than she cares about herself. She's resilient and cunning and just a little bit charming. She's a survivor.

-The sensational secondary characters. Although I use the term “secondary” very loosely – they are anything but. There's a large cast of characters across the series, and each one is richly developed, with a story to tell and a connection to be made. It's hard not to fall for them all (or love to hate them, as the case may be).

-The strong narrative voice. While Finnikin is told primarily from the title character's perspective, the subsequent novels switch viewpoints regularly. But no matter who is the focus of the story at a particular time, the voice is always relevant to each character. The most distinct were Froi in the first novel (before his language skills are more developed, as they are in the later books) and Quintana in the third. Her anxiety and confusion shine through in her first person, present tense narrative voice that contrasts sharply with the third person, past tense narrative given to the other characters. It's fantastic to read.

-The authentic and powerful relationships. Whether it's lovers, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, siblings or friends, the relationships in this series are all amazingly written and realistic. Between them all there's love, hate, hurt, healing, joy, sorrow, yearning, desire, fear, jealousy, acceptance and incredibly deep connections. As you can probably tell, they will make you feel ALL THE FEELS.

-They're page-turners. The Lumatere Chronicles are completely addictive; despite their massive size I read them in a matter of days. They're the kind of books that you need to clear your schedule for, because once you start reading you literally won't be able to stop. I had more than one late night and unproductive day thanks to these books. I regret nothing.

-It's Melina Freaking Marchetta. 'Nuff said.

 

Rating: 5/5