TV Show - Glitch

Just finished watching Seasons 1 and 2
Premiered:  7/9/2015 Netflix - Season 1 (but I think that was in Australia, in America it was 2016) Current season 2 began 9-14-17
Number of Episodes:12 (6 each season)
Length of Episode: 60 minutes
IMBd:  7.6
RT Audience Score: 90
cag: 6 (Loved, loved, loved it)

Characters:  James Hayes, chief of Police (Patrick Brammall)
                       Dr. Elishia McKellar (the doctor who helps Chief Hayes try to figure everything out)
                       Kate Willis (dead wife)
                       Sarah Hayes (current wife)
                       John Doe (Rodger Corser) a highwayman?
                       Charlie Thompson (Sean P. Keenan) WWI hero
                       Kirstie Darrow (18-year old from the 1980s)
                       Maria Massola  (pious wife, mother, and schoolteacher)
                       Paddy (Patrick) Fitzgerald (the town's first mayor)
                       Beau (the boy who witnesses the dead digging themselves out of their graves)       

My comments:  I was immediately sucked into this series, and the 12 episodes were over much too quickly!  The cast, all unknown to me since this is an Australian production, were mesmerizing, as was the story, the characters, and the setting (the fictional town of Yoorana).  I love it when you're constantly wondering what will happen next, right along with the characters. The lead - a young cop - discovers his dead wife is one of the people who have come alive.  Also "risen" are:  an 18-year-old girl who died in the 80s, a young WWI era war hero, an Italian-speaking refugee (?) from the early 20th century, the first mayor of the town, who died in 1864, a 39-year-old mother who died in 1969, and a mysterious (and might I say extremely hunky) 40 year-old who we learn about more slowly than the rest.  SO GOOD!!!  How did this happen?  Why?  How are these people connected?  Will they ever be able to leave the boundaries that appear to kill them if crossed?

Storyline from RT:  A drama series where six individuals suddenly appear in a cemetery in the middle of the night with no recollection of who they are or where they come from. Trying to identify these people, and the truth behind how they are connected, will turn the life of the police officer put in charge of the investigation upside-down.

7. Jellicoe Road - Melina Marchetta

2006 Australia, 2008 USA, HarperTeen
419 pages
YA
Rating:  Awesome/5
Michael L. Printz Award

Setting:  Australia, somewhere in the Sydney vicinity.
OSS:  A 17-year-old orphan, still yearning for the mother who abandoned her, traces all sorts of secrets that ultimately lead to her own future.
1st sentence/s:  "My father took 132 minutes to die."

There are reviews of this book all over the web, mine would never do it justice. It was everything I look for in a perfect novel.  A seamless, well-plotted storyline; lovely writing; characters that become real, they're so well written, and a mystery.

Taylor Markham has little memory of her growing-up years with her drug-addicted mother, she only knows that she was abandoned at 11 and sent to a boarding school on the Jellicoe Road.  The only adult in her life since that time has been a woman named  Hannah, who works at the school but lives in a house on the riverside, quite close by.  And now it is Taylor's last year, and for six weeks a school ritual is about to begin - "wars" between the townies, the school, and the Cadets who come each year to camp and live in the wild.  From the lives and memories of five close friends 18 years previously, to the lives of five who will end up being close friends in the future, I am left to ponder love and family, grief and forgiveness, secrets and honesty.  Wow.  what a book.

The last line of the blurb on the jacket is what made me begin this book (finally): " If Taylor can put together the pieces of her past, she might just be able to change her future."

Oh, how many times I've taken this out of the library and returned it without beginning.  And to think I almost didn't read it this time, either.  What a shame.  This book is bound to be a favorite.  Incredible story-weaving, and gorgeous word-weaving.

39. Pink -Lili Wilkinson

Harper Teen, 2009 Australia, 2011 US
310 pgs.
HC $16.99
YA
Rating: 4

This book has a bit of a different premise than the norm - a highschooler who dresses all in black, including her dyed hair, and has a "cool" girlfriend---happily accepted by her parents---decides she wants to go to a tough school, study hard, and try to discover her real self. Her parents love it that she has "come out", and they like Ava to be as nontraditional as she possibly can be. But Ava isn't so sure...she wants to be "normal," and isn't even sure if she is, indeed, a lesbian. She's never given boys a chance. She has to fight her parents to go to this tougher school. And she can't wait.

So she somehow gets her hair back to it normal color and dresses for her first day at the new school in a pink sweater, a sweater that she loves. So begins a comedy of errors as Ava traverses the halls of popularity, geekdom, boys, and difficult schoolwork.

The majority of the book is about the musical that the school puts on. It's ultra-cool to be a singer/actor, and you're a pariah if you work on the sets and backstage. Because of a horrible audition, Ava has to balance herself between both groups of kids. And, she has told no one about Chloe, hoping she doesn't run into her when she's with her new friends.

Cute story. I enjoyed it a lot.

48. The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton

Washington Square Press
published in Australia in 2008
paper, $15.00
552 pages
for: adults
Rating: 5

I really enjoyed this cleverly woven story of three generations of women. Set in Brisbane, Australia and Cornwall, England, it flips back and forth - quite flawlessly, actually - between the period from 1900 through 1913, to 1975, and then 2005. It is a mystery, with a cottage on a Cornwall cliff that contains a walled secret garden as one of the characters. It is also intertwined with the fairy tales written by Eliza, which adds another dimension to the rich story.

In 1913 Nell is abandoned on a ship that is making its way from London to Australia. Many years later, she tries to piece together the story, figure out who she is and where she came from. After she dies, her beloved granddaughter Cassandra picks up the pieces and continues the search, trying to figure out the mystery of which her grandmother had never spoken.

We meet Eliza, orphaned daughter of beautiful Georgianna, who left Blackhurst Manor to flee an obsessed brother and follow her heart. Georgianna's husband is a sailor, and when he is killed, she chooses to live in poverty in London with her twin daughter and son rather than return to Cornwall. The son tragically dies and Eliza is swept back to Blackhurst to "entertain" her sickly cousin, Rose. Years later the cottage on the cliff, connected by an intricate maze to the manor, becomes Eliza's. It sits empty for 60 years until it becomes Nell's, then another 30 until it becomes Cassandra's. And it is Cassandra that eventually unearths all of its secrets and works diligently to make it her new home.

I couldn't put this book down. Even though I had a pretty good idea of the outcome, it was nice to see all the extra, intricate pieces of the story fall into place. I very much enjoyed Kate Morton's writing, and will look to find the book she wrote a few years previously, The House at Riverton.

52. Tales from Outer Suburbia - Shaun Tan

Arthur A Levine Books/Scholastic,
Australia 2008, US 2009
$19.99
96 pgs, YA
Rating: 4
Endpapers: Tiny grey-pencil sketches from the stories on cream background

Fifteen bizarre short stories - all that make you think, look further and deeper, put two and two together to make seven or fifty-four.....

Contents: a different postage stamp for each story - the denomination is the page number and the illustration is the same as within the story.

Illustrations: all distinctly different from each other, in most cases they either tell the story or are needed to tell part of the story.

A sampling of stories: ERIC: a foreign exchange student comes to stay with a family. He is the size of a large nut and lives in the pantry. One day he leaves without saying goodbye, but has left a garden planted in tiny bottlecaps , boxes, and found-things.

BROKEN TOYS: An Asian man dressed in a deep sea diver's garb (see cover) arrives mysteriously with a broken wooden horse and is allowed to mysteriously enter the grouchy next-door-neighbor's house.

DISTANT RAIN: A collaged story of lost bits of poems adding themselves to an enormous ball of poems that rains all over the city.

GRANDPA'S STORY: A weird pre-wedding trip...both in pictures and words.

All quite bizarre, using weird parts of the brain to decipher, a book of stories that will really grow on you.

The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness - Colin Thompson

Published: Sept, 2008
For: (See note below)
Rating: 4
Read: Jan. 2009
Endpapers: Tiny brown and white print with pawprints (after I read the book and looked again I realized the prints were of a 3-pawed dog with a "peg" leg - clever)
Font: Cool - looks like hand printing
Australian

Round, roly-poly George lived with his grandmother and was very lonely and sad. "Most Friday afternoons on his way home from school, in that time before the weekend when lonely people realize just how lonely they are, George visited the dog shelter." (Boy, do I know what he means!) The very last cage in the back and bottom of the shelter was where the dogs were kept that were about to be euthanized. That is where he found 3-legged Jeremy - another lonely soul. George and his grandmother took Jeremy home and built him three different kinds of new legs. And life was to be much better for many years to come for them all. A friend at last. And even George and his grandmother's relationship seemed closer after Jeremy's arrival.

Gentle humor. Funky illustrations - very brown. I really like this a lot.

NOTE: It mentions the fact that Jeremy's about to go to "the big kennel in the sky" a number of times, so unless you want to explain that to very young children, I'd stick with older ones you know will understand the idea of euthanasia.