* I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Dr Mercy Blain's house burns down, and is totally destroyed. That's made worse by the fact that she's had a breakdown, and has not left the house for two years. Now she has no choice, and must face life and other people once again.

On impulse, Mercy buys an old Daihatsu campervan and takes off with her dog Wasabi, desperate to get away from Adelaide and go to "the other side". Small disasters await her at every turn, and she is frequently reduced to tears, but she gradually starts to overcome some of her fears. As her trip progresses, we start to learn more about Mercy's past, and just what was behind her original breakdown.

This is a really readable and well-written book. Kim Lock captures the countryside and the climate of the Australian outback very well, and she manages to avoid making caricatures of the characters that Mercy encounters. In a foreword, Lock reveals that she too had a mental breakdown before writing the book, and that experience seems to make Mercy a believable and highly empathetic lead character. ( )

Not an especially good read for me. It seems to belong to the genre of books written about Australia which are designed to appeal to the American market. A bit too much outback road trip and not quite enough underlying depth for my liking. ( )

Sweet, easy listen. A bit of an Eleanor oliphant vibe but not quite as good. ( )

It is escapism, and it's often funny, but it's entertainment with a serious side in the sense that the author deftly portrays the disabling effects of anxiety and the pressure that can bedevil a high achiever.

I did like the portrayal of Wasabi.  (I've had two Dachshunds, both of them imaginatively called Gretel.)  But see how perceptively the author alludes to the punishing workload of medical interns here, and moves on to the character's loneliness and her need for love:

She'd bought him just before she started her internship, naïvely thinking that the end of med school signalled the beginning of control over her own life.  Maybe a cat would have been a better choice, Mercy thought to herself in the early days, coming home in the bleary dawn after night shift to an avalanche of exploded paper up and down the hallway.  Or even a goldfish, she had thought, walking an excitable, yapping, twisting Dachshund in the dark streets at two am before work.

But Mercy had gotten Wasabi for the same reason anyone gets a puppy: because they embody happiness.  Their fuzzy little faces are gorgeous and irresistible. Their love is unconditional. And no matter how long Mercy was gone, no matter how wrecked she was when she came home, no matter how she had snapped at him or even ignored him, Wasabi was always there.  He never blamed her, never criticised her, never expected her to actualise him.  Always wagging his tail.  Always happy to curl up on her lap and be petted for as long as Mercy needed. (p.178)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/25/the-other-side-of-beautiful-by-kim-lock/ ( )

The Other Side of Beautiful is a wonderfully engaging contemporary novel from Kim Lock.

“It was almost midnight. It was the eve of Mercy’s thirty-sixth birthday. None of these things—not the orange flames nor the agog neighbours, not the birthday nor the deafly ringing ears—were Mercy’s biggest problem, either.”

Watching her home burn to the ground, her pet Dachshund, Wasabi, cradled in her arms, Mercy Blain fights to hold herself together. Panic attacks have prevented her venturing further than her driveway for two years, and now she is standing on the road, surrounded by neighbours and emergency service personnel, her sanctuary destroyed. Desperation forces her to turn to her not-quite ex-husband as a temporary refuge, but his new live-in boyfriend is not exactly welcoming, leading Mercy to impulsively purchase a vintage (read small and dingy) camper van. With no desire except to be anywhere else, Mercy impulsively decides to leave everything behind, and drive from Adelaide to Darwin.

“She wanted it to be over—she wanted to be on the other side of it all.”

While Mercy’s journey is an impulse, it’s a brave move to drive the 3000km+ from southern to northern Australia, anxiety or not. Having left Adelaide with not much more than the clothes on her a back, Wasabi, and, rather unexpectedly, the boxed cremains of a stranger, she has no choice but to endure the stress of interacting with strangers to source supplies. The route is also popular with ‘grey nomads’ and other travellers, and though the camper van, adorned with a message ‘Home is wherever you are’, provides Mercy with privacy, she’s rarely truly alone. Her road trip ‘companions’ are charming, kind and persistent, and eventually Mercy responds when they reach out.

“A panic attack was her body preparing to run for its life. Digestion halted, all rational cognitive function ceased and she became a helpless passenger in a runaway body.”

Panic disorders are often misunderstood. When not in the middle of an attack, Mercy, a doctor, is aware her fears are irrational but she feels powerless in its grip. her crippling ordeal with anxiety, triggered by three traumatic incidents which occurred in a single week, has an authenticity which is borne of the author’s own experience. I found Mercy to be a very sympathetic character, especially as I learned more about her circumstances, and I was invested in both her emotional and physical journey.

“Or she could find somewhere in that great in-between, that place of nuance and clarity and balance. That place where she could do her best, do what she needed to do, and not let the fear of pain and hurt, all the infinite what ifs, crowd her mind until she could do nothing….”

Written with heart, humour and compassion, I enjoyed being a passenger on this journey through Australia’s stunning interior landscape, alongside a character I really came to care about, and her sausage dog. The Other Side of Beautiful is genuine, gracious and entertaining. ( )