REVIEW

Review - Days Are Like Grass, Sue Younger

Reviewed By
Karen Chisholm

A family drama / saga styled novel, with crime overtones, DAYS ARE LIKE GRASS is beautifully written. Moving, descriptive, populated by fully realised characters there is much in this novel that is thought-provoking, and profoundly affecting. 

Avoiding any sense of voyeurism or manipulation, Sue Younger has constructed a multi-layered story about consequences, and past and present actions. Paediatric surgeon, mother, lover, Claire is a woman with a past. She's driven to want the best for her patients - often times victims of abuse and disadvantage - her controlled nature creates difficulties in her professional and personal lives. 

Many years before a young female hitch-hiker disappeared in New Zealand, after accepting a lift from a man she didn't know. Claire, on the other hand, knows the man and lives with the consequences of his actions every day. The man was her father, someone many people think is a rapist and murderer. Claire has lived with the whispers and the looks ever since. Why she's returned to New Zealand with her fifteen-year-old daughter Roimata and her fiance Yossi makes sense on one level, and seems unfathomable on another - especially when a local reporter notices the connection when reporting on the tussle over the fate of a young patient.

In the middle of the friction between her own past and present, between the parents of her young patient and Claire's own insistence on the correct pathways for treatment, there's extra pressure when Roimata's father's family reach out as well. Somehow in the middle of all of this, the calm, loving, patient Yossi even starts to feel like a problem as he agitates to get married, for them to be a traditional family, even as he seems increasingly content with his life.

Needless to say a lot of drama, a lot of pressure, and a lot of potential for things to get badly out of control. All of which feels perfectly realistic as Claire is such a fragile, tightly wound character, not destined to cope well with the piling on of problems. As a central character for such a story, she's an interesting undertaking. Frequently unlikable, nearly constantly frustrating, the default setting for most readers will be to turn to the opposing forces. It's tempting to call something like that a "brave" move on the part of the author, but it actually makes enormous sense in terms of the narrative. This is the story of a difficult life, impacted upon by pressures that couldn't be avoided, blighted always by the spectre of her father. Claire's flawed, human, and whilst you might not agree with everything she ever does, says or believes in, you can't help but empathise with a woman who is struggling to let go of control, struggling with the difficulties of easing up on barriers she's spent a lifetime constructing.

Whilst this reader might have some issues with the definition of DAYS ARE LIKE GRASS as a crime novel, in that the consequences of crime are more indirect than usually expected, I'm more than happy to be accused of quibbling over minutiae. It is most definitely an exceptional reading experience.

BOOK DETAILS
BOOK INFORMATION
Author
ISBN
9780994104762
Year of Publication
BLURB

A beautiful New Zealand summer. An ugly past that won’t stay buried.

Paediatric surgeon Claire Bowerman has reluctantly returned to Auckland from London. Calm, rational and in control, she loves delicately repairing her small patients’ wounds. Tragically, wounds sometimes made by the children’s own families.

Yossi wants to marry Claire. He thinks they’ve come to the safest place on earth, worlds away from the violence he knew growing up. He revels in the glorious summer, the idyllic islands of the gulf.

But Roimata, Claire’s fifteen-year-old daughter, is full of questions. Why is Claire so secretive about her past? Why won’t she talk to the man who could solve the mystery that dominated her childhood?

When a family refuses medical treatment for their boy, Claire’s story is in the headlines again.

All Claire wants to do is run.

This is a novel about the wounds a family can make. About a woman caught between the past and the present. And about her need to keep everybody safe.

Especially herself.

Review Review - Days Are Like Grass, Sue Younger
Karen Chisholm
Monday, November 13, 2017
Blog #amreading Days Are Like Grass, Sue Younger
Karen Chisholm
Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Add new comment

This is a book review site, with no relationship whatsoever with any of the authors mentioned here.

We do not provide a method for you to contact authors for any reason and comments of this nature are automatically deleted.

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.