‘How To Be Remembered’ Michael Thompson Reviewed

Tommy Llewellyn (a name he chose) is a young boy whose entire existence is wiped from the memory of everyone who knows him each year on his birthday, the fifth of January. Fortunately Tommy does not regress to babyhood each time but he grows up and has to start his life all over again to re-establish himself every single time.

A long waitlist for this book at my local library so I considered borrowing an audio book (narrated by Lewis Fitz-Gerald length 10 hours 16 minutes) but downloaded the e-book at the same time as a friend gave me the p-book, saying ‘excellent story’.

This time-slip novel starts off well with a smooth transition, easy to believe, somewhat elegiac, but plenty of compassion. One year old Tommy is sent to a former dairy converted to Milkwood House for lost, abandoned, nobody-wants-them children.

Tommy grows up and the world around him doesn’t know he already had an existence—many in fact. The scenes build, the young (soon to be forgotten) baby/child/teenager/adult matures and his life gradually unfolds amid some dramatic events. The fallout is that everyone around Tommy forgets all about him when his life resets like a bad reboot. Again and again and again. And it also resets the minds of close friends who knew Tommy—even lovely carer Miss Michelle—with no recollection of him nor the circumstances surrounding his ‘departure’.

Four things I must mention:
First, I am not sure if this is YA or an adult book
and
Second, the swearing is a bit distracting
and
Third, initially Tommy doesn’t rail against his Reset circumstances, he doesn’t tell anyone or try to engineer change. Although he feels like an outcast, he becomes accepting of his strange situation, never tempted to reboot, until one fateful hot afternoon
and
Fourth, this story is like a modern fairy tale e.g. don’t analyse too hard!
GBW 2023

A bitter sweet experience occurs when Tommy turns fourteen. Something rather ordinary happened to him. Of course, given his unique circumstances, even the ordinary is going to be a problem. Tommy Llewellyn finds romance and falls in love with Carey Price, a girl older than him and he knows it won’t be smooth sailing. He already has a ‘history’ with Carey but she will never remember the true story. And Tommy is not about to tell her the upsetting details of her near death experience because she believes it was creepy Richie Sharpe who saved her life.

Disillusioned, Tommy sinks into the doldrums, a mass of rage and self-pity with a stolen bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky chaser before winding up in a life and death situation. Will it be hospital, heaven, romance or a chance for Tommy to beat the odds and alter his unique rotating life sentence?

Further questions only answered by reading the book:
Does the reader find out what’s going on?
Is the ‘evil spell’ broken?
Does Tommy take steps towards a normal life?
Can Tommy create his own happy ending?
‘How To Be Remembered’ by Michael Thompson

Sneak peek, fast forward and Tommy does get real world experience via ‘former friend’ Josh Saunders. That’s all I’m divulging. The second half of the book is quite moving and while there is romance it is sliced through with angst and violence, pulling out all the stops. You may or may not like the ending…

If we need one, I think the moral of author Thompson’s story is to do little things to be remembered. Good things, leave a legacy of kindness and hope and love. Everyone leaves a mark on this world. Even indirectly, fleetingly, you are remembered for something you have done during your lifetime.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Author Bio: Michael Thompson has been a successful journalist, producer and media executive for fifteen years. He now co-owns a podcast production company and is the co-host of one of the highest-ranked podcasts in Australia. ‘How to be Remembered’ is his first novel. Thompson lives in Sydney with his wife and two young children.

Similar shades of:
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong
The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
Midnight is a Lonely Place by Barbara Erskine
Dandelion Time: Romance Through Time by Nel Ashley
The Sleeping Angel by Margarita Morris
The Sins of the Fathers by Andy Conway
Lost In Time by A. G. Riddle
At the Edge of the Solid World by Daniel Davis Wood
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Mariana by Susanna Kearsley
Time Out of Time (YA) by Alex Marchant
The Timeslip Series (YA) by Belinda Murrell
The Boy Who Stepped Through Time (YA) by Anna Ciddor
Making It Home (YA) by Suzanne Roche
Playing Beatie Bow (YA) by Ruth Park

Many more I have not yet read or perhaps forgotten…

Time Is… © image Gretchen Bernet-Ward 2023

Book Review ‘The Others’ Mark Brandi

A boy gets a diary for his 11^th birthday, to help with his writing practice. What begins as an innocent account of a child’s daily life quickly becomes for the reader something much darker.

We see the world through the eyes of a child, written with masterful naivety by Mark Brandi that few authors manage to capture. The boy tells us about his daily routine, his schoolwork, the farm work he and his father do, and the names of his favourite sheep. He tells us about his father’s ‘gold tooth’ – the way he knows his father’s smile is genuine, and how he misses seeing it more because the rain hasn’t come. He tells us how he’s learnt ‘being taught something’ is different to ‘being taught a lesson’. Through our story-teller, we begin to cotton on that life on the farm is anything but normal. Our main character has only ever known this world; we know better.

The stick against the tree trunk © Gretchen Bernet-Ward 2021

The story is written in a way that drags you in and pulls you along, unwillingly at times as the brutality of nature is so vividly portrayed (and sketched) by our young protagonist. His father, stern and scarce with his affection, runs through the narrative with an enigmatic, threatening presence – the reader gets to see more than our protagonist does, which adds to the tension. We understand; his son does not.

The cast is light-on. The father and son are central, we have some animal characters, and four people mostly alluded too – his mother, and three Others. The beauty of The Others is that we don’t need anyone else; the sense of Tasmanian isolation and the terror that comes with it really makes the story.

As plots go, there isn’t the traditional rollercoaster ride of some thrillers. Instead, there is a slow rolling on of dread which grows with each secret our protagonist keeps from his father – a note, voices heard in the dead of night, a strange noise in the trees – that finally comes to a traumatic head in the final chapters. The resolution is swift, underwhelming; it leaves more questions than it answers. We puzzle together the last terrible clues and are left with a sense that life could never be the same again.

Only one thing let the book down for me – the voice of our protagonist changed. In the final act he goes from using the childish descriptions of a boy to a very deliberate ‘lyrical’ style of the author. Descriptions took priority and it felt jarringly unnatural from our protagonist to be spouting self-reflective prose. However, for the most part, the ‘voice’ of our main character stayed the same, without ever compromising on storytelling.

The most interesting thing for me was that names were never used. Our main character’s name – Jacob – was never said by his father; only once in a letter, on basically the last page. His father’s name was never given at all. The only character named in full was Jacob’s mother. It was a surprise for me that a story could flow so well without ever really giving itself away – we never quite find out all the details. The mystery is left open for our interpretation, and in the end, that’s the scariest part of all.

I would give The Others 4/5 stars because nothing is perfect but this gets pretty dang close.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward—in collaboration with Dot Bernet.

________________________________

AUTHOR PROFILE

Mark Brandi’s bestselling novel, Wimmera, won the coveted British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger, and was named Best Debut at the 2018 Australian Indie Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year, and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. His second novel, The Rip, was published to critical acclaim by Hachette Australia in March 2019. Mark published The Others in 2021.

Mark had shorter works appear in The Guardian, The Age, the Big Issue, and in journals both here and overseas. His writing is also sometimes heard on ABC Radio National.

Mark graduated with a criminal justice degree and worked extensively in the justice system, before changing direction and deciding to write. Originally from Italy, he grew up in rural Victoria, and now lives in Melbourne and is creating his next work of fiction.

PRAISE FOR THE OTHERS
“Spare yet emotionally sumptuous… laced with page-turning suspense, and a creeping sense of dread that turns into something excruciatingly claustrophobic as it builds to its heart-pounding crescendo”
SIMON MCDONALD, POTTS POINT BOOKSHOP AND WORDPRESS BLOGGER

Author or Businesswoman? The Story Behind Girl and Duck

Real world experience and advice from a published author with dedication, sincerity and passion for sharing her craft.
♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Who is this wonder woman? Read on…

Girl and Duck

This week at girl and duck, we opened The Scribbles Academy. It’s been super exciting and lots of people have jumped on board.

Thank you!!!! I know you’re going to love your Scribbly experience!

But how did this all begin?

What’s the real story behind girl and duck?

I wrote about this a couple of years back. But, in those early days, I was more interested in talking about the community. How passionate it was and how it seemed to sprout from nowhere.

More time has passed and now I want to go deeper. I want you, dear reader, to know exactly how I began my online business.

How and why I started it. And who was there to help me.

Ding Ding Ding! Multiple Income Streams!

Back in 2011, it occurred to me that I might NEVER make a liveable income from writing. No matter how many books…

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