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Book Review
Hot Flush, by Rosy Fenwicke (Wheelers, paper; e-book via Amazon)
Reviewed by Wendy Montrose
In Hot Flush, ordinary Euphemia Sage, 53-year-old wife, mother and business consultant acquires special physical powers, super powers if you like, as she goes through menopause. “I can see better, hear better and smell better than any human – better than any dog, which is saying something…”
It should be ridiculous but it’s such fun and it’s written well enough to keep the pages turning. In fact Hot Flush was hard to put down, and the suspense and unexpected twists make up for any failings.
We follow Euphemia’s adventures as she comes to grips with ‘Rachel’s Switch’, a genetic phenomenon triggered by the menopause and passed down from eldest daughter to eldest daughter through the generations in her family. Euphemia had heard the stories but, like any right minded 21st-century woman, was sceptical until that first hot flush triggered not only the ‘Switch’ but also a series of increasingly bizarre events.
Overnight, she is thrust into the world of loan sharks, thick-necked heavies in cheap suits and gratuitous violence. Faced with uninvited callers, kidnap at gun point and a knife-wielding plumber bent on murder, Euphemia is forced to put her powers to the test.
Hot Flush is good light entertainment, and Rosy Fenwicke writes with skill. Euphemia is an entirely believable and likeable character, flawed as we all are but essentially a good, honest, down to earth super woman (“two words, lower case”). The villains are perhaps a little too slap-stick — more comic, evil mastermind than genuinely bad — but Jane, the ‘friend’ from school who’s financial woes get Euphemia in trouble is brilliant, and I loved Petal, the pug and I’m not even a dog person. There is enough back story to give the characters substance and Fenwicke even proffers a plausible enough explanation for Rachel’s Switch to give it some credibility. Perhaps that’s her medical background coming through.
Rosie Fenwicke is a doctor, writer and mother of three adult children. This is her first novel, she suggests the first of a series, and is a fine effort, if perhaps a little unpolished in places — not quite the right word here, or a little too much tell instead of show there. For all that, the narrative moves along, its good pace and humour making Hot Flush a most enjoyable read. I look forward to the next one.
This is a thought-provoking, timely collection of essays by a diverse range of New Zealanders, most of whom are academics here or abroad. Their varied perspectives, political, economic, social and cultural are all loosely connected to the theme of fairness.
A. The bookshop began as a hobby in a garage back in 1983, a real bookstore in 1984, and found its present home in Onehunga, Auckland, in 1988. It was founded on my passion and obsession for books of all kinds, and I believe we have created a store with an essence of magic, pleasure and surprise, a repository of learning, knowledge and entertainment. The books in the shop are complemented by the store itself — a several storey 19th-century chaotic shambles of a timber building with well-worn wooden stairs and original wallpaper still hanging (just) from the walls. It is both a cultural icon and an economic anachronism with a unique bookish atmosphere available to all incomes and tastes.
The discovery of the story ‘His Little Friend’ is at the heart of a new book on the life of the young Katherine Mansfield by Wellington author and historian Redmer Yska, who made the find while researching in the archives of the Wellington City Library.
Globalisation is a funny thing when it comes to food. These days you can get a decent ramen in Auckland, a passable flat white in London, and a tasty curry just about anywhere. This was on my mind when I chose to review Oklava, a modern Turkish-Cypriot cookbook, in my hometown of Wellington, New Zealand.
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When I saw Holly Walker, MP, speak at a meeting in Tauranga, I remember thinking how confident and together she was. That was a few years back, and she must have been barely 30 years old. “Whoa,” I thought, “I could never have done that at 30-something.” When she decided to step down as an MP, I confess to being a bit disappointed. Having read a fair bit over the years about the struggles facing women in Parliament, I had started to think that was then, this was now and things had finally changed for the better. I mean, look at Holly Walker. This book makes very clear that’s not the case.
There are endless reasons for picking up a book by an author we don’t know and it can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. But it can also lead to disappointment. This book was unfortunately, disappointing. I chose it because I have a particular interest in the setting. Reunion Island, a tropical French outpost in the Indian Ocean is the home of my ancestors. Michel Bussi writes as though he knows Reunion, and he doesn’t seem to like it.