Pendragons 🐉

Thursday 8 September 2016

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung

Luna & Saturn September 08, 2016 0 Comments

As promised, here is the review on the sweet memoir by Alice Pung.

Series: None

Author: Alice Pung

Genre: Memoir

Publisher: Black Inc.

Pages: 282 pages (Paperback)

Favourite Quote

Swift Synopsis:

Alice Pung's debut memoir recounts her growing up in Australia, where she tries to balance the East and West, Asian and non-Asian way of living. An insightful peek into a chapter of Alice's life, Unpolished Gem is a tale about identity, growing up and love.

Review:

The memoir is an honest to heart recount that takes place in your average Melbourne suburb. It depicts a migrant family with seemingly petite dreams, but for the dreamer, it is anything but small.

The narrator is extremely observant of her surroundings and at times very serious topics are raised, but they’re often put through a light-hearted lens. One of the anecdotes she shares that’s really heart-warming and personal is her family making paper chains from Target catalogues, because they are so beautiful. And one of the best things in this book is how the little things in life are given so much attention to.

But Alice is also honest when she shows the fractures in family, such as adults using her (a child) to spy on each other and teaching her to hate; she is the “word-spreader”. It’s really cool how we know all the places Alice talks about: Footscray, Braybrook & Springvale - we’ve been to all these places.

The writing itself is sweet and in terms of chronology, it flows really well, but the ending is somewhat jarring. Alice talks about her first love, but there’s so much internal dialogue that it seems whiny. The ending of the book is quite abrupt - quite a few plot holes are left. Maybe it’s because they hadn’t been resolved yet, because this is life, but we get the sense Alice is holding some things back.

However, Alice should be congratulated for putting her writing - her life - out for the world to read, enjoy and criticise, because that takes real guts. We think she pulled it off magnificently. This memoir upturns stereotypes of Asians, and really captures the Australian-Asian life; the clash between cultures is something we’re sure many face, like us.

On an ending note, this book has sweet writing, and if you read it, read it because a whole new perspective of Australia is shown. The world doesn’t get enough of these types of stories.

Thanks to our friend who let us borrow this book. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Rating!! (Out of 5 stars)

Monday 5 September 2016

Meeting Amie Kaufman, Rainbow Rowell and Jay Kristoff/ Part 2: Rainbow Rowell

Luna & Saturn September 05, 2016 0 Comments

Hello everyone! This is part 2 of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and we’ll be talking about RAINBOW ROWELL!

It was pretty obvious from the beginning she was to be the star of the session. When the people were guiding us to the session, they all said ‘Oh, you’re here to meet Rainbow Rowell right?” No mention of Amie Kaufman:(:(:(:(

Anyway, Rainbow was a sweet and friendly speaker. She had a very quiet way of speaking, but she wasn’t quiet (if you get what we mean). However, she informed us that she was the kind of person when they love something, they LOVE it. For her, there was no moderation. It was you either loved it all the way, or you hated it all the way. And her love was for X-Men comics and Wham! the band (pretty cool name for band right?)

Being an author was her third profession. We’re pretty sure one was a newspaper columnist but the other has escaped our minds. She told us that those two previous careers helped influence her writing. Being an newspaper columnist especially, influenced her strategy for writer’s block.

She just writes.

She writes whatever is on her mind, no matter how aimless or bad it is. With her job as a columnist, if she didn’t write, she was fired (a very good incentive). So she said that was how she beats writer’s block. Rainbow though, much like her protagonist Cath, tended to fall back on dialogue as she felt it built character.

Rainbow is a romanticist. She writes romance because she feels romance is neglected in novels. She said love stories don’t enough romance.Too often, the focus’s on fighting monsters and the love was the secondary plot. Her 'child' (it was strange when she likened the book to a child), Eleanor and Park addresses this problem.

Amie talked about how These Broken Stars is going to be made into a TV series and IIluminae into a movie, and somebody asked about Rainbow’s books. Rainbow said she was most worried if somebody took Eleanor and Park as the characters are not ‘Hollywood’ figures and the producers might change the whole soul of the novel. (The way Rainbow wrote made us think books were sentient- a child with a soul).

We talk too much. Sorry about that. We’ll try being more concise next time. To finish this off, it was Rainbow’s first time being in Australia. Her son NEVER wanted to go to Australia (and space too) as he did a unit in school about good old Aussie and instead of loving us, he FEARED us! Apparently drop bears and murderous snakes and stuff make Australia the survival of the fittest. But both Rainbow and her son enjoy Australia now. :):)

Session ended, we got our book signed and GOSH WAS THE LINE LONG! Despite that, everyone could get a picture with Rainbow and she managed a small convo with us too. She found out we were twins and was happy when she knew we read Fangirl. She also really likes that people share books. :)