Meg Mundell

(8.5)I began this book without reading the blurb but knew it came recommended. How disturbing to read a book published in 2019 about a pandemic stricken Britain. Who could have imagined that this would actually be the case worldwide within 12 months. So much of the language i.e. PPE gear is now part of our everyday vocabulary. The book is set in the 2060's and presents a dystopian world, the ship forging its way through a sea polluted by rubbish, carrying a group of migrants, who have been screened and vetted for habitation in Australia. Is this the way of the future. Scarily it may be so.
This book was so relevant to these times.… (más)

Did you know that

• homelessness in Australia increased by 14% between 2011 and 2016?


• some 116,000 people go to sleep without a secure home on any given night?


• around 16,000 of these are children under 12?


• 8000 of them are the most visible of the homeless community, sleeping rough on the streets?


• Older women—those aged 55 and over— was the fastest growing cohort of homeless Australians between 2011 and 2016, increasing by 31%? (See why, here).

And yet we hear very little from the people experiencing this situation...

Edited by former Big Issue editor Meg Mundell, (whose latest novel The Trespassers I recently reviewed) We Are Here, Stories of Home, Place and Belonging gives a voice to 42 diverse artists who have experienced homelessness. Some contributors are well-known names that will surprise you, while others are emerging writers. There are also four visual artists whose artwork is placed among a profusion of photographic images which complement the four themes of the collection:

• Home Truths


• City Streets


• Cast Adrift and


• Belonging.

In the foreword by Tony Birch, he reminds us that any one of us, regardless of our economic and social status, could easily find ourselves homeless. In a supposedly egalitarian society such as Australia, many people live only a few absent pay packets away from poverty. (p.x) Meg Mundell's Introduction tells us that the stories in this collection reveal just how easily, if our own luck turned bad, we might find ourselves unhoused. (p.xiii) She also tells us that

Homelessness is often seen as a result of bad choices made by flawed people. This convenient myth supports the illusion that it could never happent to 'us', ignoring the well-documented structural causes and unforeseen life events that can render people homeless.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/12/we-are-here-stories-of-home-place-and-belong...

… (más)

After the last election, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australians don't care about anything that's important. Not about climate change, not about refugees, not about homelessness, older women adrift without a secure income, or the stinginess of Newstart. (And maybe not even embarrassed about our recent betrayal of small neighbouring countries in the Pacific though it's too soon to say). Electors were of course having to choose between a party that openly panders to the lowest common denominator, and a graceless party torn between being electable and having some kind of ethical stance. Not much of a choice, really.

But because I tend to like my fellow-Australians, I prefer to think that what look like mean-spirited choices happen because they are just busy, and too preoccupied (often by sport) to pay proper attention. Tired out at the end of the day and content to invest whatever energy is left in watching The Bachelorette or women's footy or some crime drama with or without guns. I'm like that too, when MasterChef is on. I'm on bypass for the entire season because the show starts at the same time as what passes for current affairs on the ABC. That kind of switching-off is very bad for democracy. But telling voters that they ought to pay attention so that they can make informed electoral choices is never going to work. One of the things we are most complacent about is democracy.

Which is partly why I think Meg Mundell's new book is so brilliant. The Trespassers is gripping reading, unputdownable from the first chapter, and inhabited by characters impossible to forget. The near-future in which the book set, is (rather like Rohan Wilson's Daughter of Bad Times) not really the future at all. The story's timeline is only a few decades away, but the events that propel it are already happening now. This novel will lure people into paying attention and they will love reading it even as it compels them to face unpalatable truths.… (más)

Black Glass, debut novel by Meg Mundell, caught my eye because it was shortlisted for Aurealis Awards in both the SF and YA categories. (And being written by a woman, hence counting towards my SF Aussie Women Writers Challenge also helped.)

The narrative style and presentation of the story and characters is exactly the sort I usually dislike. The scenes, as well as presenting the two most central characters in a reasonably conventional narrative, alternate scenic mood scenes (sometimes with a temporary character as a focus), often (always?) in present tense, and dialogue without any framing.

I’ve stopped reading books written like this in the past because they annoyed me. But you know what? Mundell pulls it off really well. I was captivated from the start, never bored and the ending packed an unexpected punch.

The setting is Melbourne, a depressing near future. A dystopia but a plausible one, scarily close to our world now. Just a little bit more technology, regulation and surveillance than today. Unlike certain other YA dystopias I could mention like The Hunger Games, Uglies or Divergent, there is no bizarre disconnect between our world and the world of Black Glass. (Infinitely so when you compare with Divergent — good book, but I found the back story mind-bogglingly implausible. You’re unsatisfied with the world so you sort yourselves into factions resembling Hogwarts houses? REALLY?) Also, it’s set in Australia, so it gets bonus setting points for not being doomed-US.

The most science fictiony element, and my second favourite part of the world building (my favourite being that it was set in Melbourne and I enjoy visiting home vicariously), was the side story of Milk the mood engineer. He uses scents and subtle changes in lighting to evoke moods and emotions in whoever is in range of his devices. His mission is to artistically make the spaces he works with more harmonious and the people in them happier. I thought it was a fascinating concept and explored with surprising depth in the relatively short novel.

The central-most characters, Tally 13 and Grace 16, are sisters who, up until the first chapter or so, have spent their lives following their deadbeat father around small Australian towns, often leaving town at a moment’s notice. The story starts when an accident kills their father and separates the sisters. They had been planning to run away to the city (Melbourne) “soon” but now they are forced to make their way there separately.

We follow the girls, the city and a few miscellaneous characters, sometimes obliquely, as they make ends meet, get by and wonder where their lives are going. By the time I was reading the climax, I was sceptical of a satisfactory ending but by golly, I was not disappointed. On the other hand, without spoilers, I can understand other people not feeling the same way.

I’m not sure I’d call Black Glass YA. The other characters are mostly adults and a lot of the concepts explored are things you don’t necessarily want kids to have to worry about. Of course, the reality is that many kids today do worry about similar things to Tally and Grace. I wouldn’t stop a twelve year old from reading it, but I would also encourage them to wait a few years. I could see it as the sort of book that might be studied in year 11 or 12, though.

In any case, it’s an excellent piece of writing. I highly recommend Back Glass to not only science fiction fans but everyone. Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, science fictional element in Black Glass is so minor you’ll barely notice.

4.5 / 5 stars… (más)