Across two continents, two mothers and daughters are bound by a dark mystery.
On a winter’s day in the Dandenong Ranges of Australia, pianist Ginny returns home to her eccentric mother, Harriet, trying to find out the truth about her father’s disappearance. In an effort to distract her daughter’s interrogations, Harriet proposes they collaborate on an exhibition of paintings and songs.
… paintings and songs.
Meanwhile, on the edge of Dartmoor, artist Judith paints landscapes of the Australian Outback to soothe her troubled heart, as her wayward daughter Madeleine returns home… and fills the house with darkness.
“A Perfect Square is a fine novel about the power of art to heal, and to disturb.” – David Whish Wilson, Zero at the Bone
“Similar to Kandinsky’s brush that flawlessly moves from concrete to abstract, and from material to spiritual, the novel delicately blends family romance, art history, esoteric theories, and human drama as it traces the main protagonist’s search for her father that imperceptibly becomes the search for wisdom and transcendence.” – Vladimir Golstein, Professor of Russian literature, Brown University, NY
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A Perfect Square is an absorbing literary thriller by author Isobel Blackthorn, which delivers a well-executed and thought-provoking ride towards a diabolically chilling climax.
Exquisitely written, the novel weaves its way around two, hauntingly similar stories, both based upon mother-daughter relationships, within which the daughters are troubled by absent fathers and wanting more attention or empathy from their artistic mothers.
The author, like an artist slowly dabbing paint upon a canvas, methodically yet tauntingly brings to life complex, damaged characters, their pasts, their struggles to relate to each other and the paths they are set upon.
By the time truths are revealed, the reader is fully involved and caring about the fate of the characters, fates that are disturbingly interchangeable, if not for the timing…
Timing, by the way of moon cycles, as well as art, music, creativity, synchronicity and mysticism are themes that litter this unique and intellectually engaging story. There is much to savour in the symbolism offered and in the beautifully crafted prose. But driving the reader forward is the sinister plot that slowly unfolds…
The novel begins with Ginny moving back home with her mother, Harriet, after breaking up with her boyfriend of three years.
Harriet, wanting to snap her daughter out of her depression, suggests to her that they could hold a joint exhibition. They decide after some contention that Harriet would create nine paintings; and Ginny would compose nine songs… inspiration for their works to be sourced from the moon’s movements in relation to the planets. Not every mother’s cheer-up remedy, but for Harriet, who Ginny perceives as “a mother so lacking in depth, so pretentious and arty”; it is the best she can devise.
Ginny agrees to the exhibition but as far as she is concerned she is: “in her mother’s house because she had nowhere else to go, here to reassess her life, here to make sense of her recent past, a past that catapulted her back on the search for answers, for revelations, for anything that would help her understand why she didn’t have a father.”
As Ginny pushes her mother to open up about her father, Harriet remains “too tight-lipped”, turning Ginny’s quest to understand the past into “a real present tense endeavour”.
Harriet, while wanting to protect her daughter, is not thrilled to have her back home, miserable and pushing for answers about her father. At the crux of it, Harriet fears that her daughter’s mood will “thwart her creativity”.
As mother and daughter are locked in each other’s orbit, like the moon and the planets that they are seeking inspiration from, their relationship waxes and wanes, and there are ups and downs, light and shade.
They approach their art as differently as they approach life, but in their own way they unlock their creativity. As the exhibition is finally pulled together, much more is unlocked and released.
Interspersed between mother and daughter tensions, is the unravelling of the story of Judith and her wayward daughter Madeleine.
Madeleine is also eager to seek out a relationship with her estranged father… but unlike the protective Harriet, Judith encourages contact.
What finally is produced, through the author’s cleverly paced revelations, is a dark, unsettling picture – the last dabs of paint are applied and the reader is left to watch in horror as the intertwined stories resolve.
The reader is no longer looking at crescents but a full moon, bright and harsh in its full circle. But light brings a new start too, after the dark.
There is so much to this layered novel. It is every bit a thriller – holding the reader, serving up pages of simmering suspense and startling secrets.
The author’s writing style is poetic, complex, fresh. Descriptions are purposeful and suggest much about the characters. For instance, Ginny’s obsession with paisley clothes, is her clutching to her childhood.
There is a strong sense of the feminine throughout – beyond the female characters and their strong female friendships, the reader can’t help but feel the over-riding feminine power of creativity, caves and cycles.
If looking for an intriguing, well-crafted story that at the end will have you biting your nails… then pick up A Perfect Square and immerse yourself in it. I strongly recommend it.
A perfect square is a number that can be expressed as
the product of two equal integers
mathwarehouse.com
I had the great pleasure to be offered a copy of A Perfect Square by Isobel Blackthorn in exchange for an honest review. Having loved Isobel’s last release, The Drago Tree, I was only too happy to oblige.
A Perfect Square is published by Odyssey Books, an independent Australian publisher and is now available for purchase (I recommend it!).
Set amid the fern glades and towering forests of the Dandenong ranges east of Melbourne, and on England’s Devon moors, A Perfect Square is a literary thriller of remarkable depth and insight.
Reading Isobel Blackthorn’s stories is like engaging in high calibre wordplay. The words wash over you, move through you, and lift you intellectually. I always feel smarter with having engaged with Isobel’s intricate use of description and word structure; more connected with the world I have been part of, and drawn in to the love, pain, confusion, realisation, and happiness of her characters as they travel along the paths she has set out for them. They feel to me like real people. I want to know them. I wonder whether perhaps I do; not in this fictional incarnation, but in the people, the artists, I know grappling with creativity and self realisation.
In A Perfect Square, Isobel shares with us the story of daughters; artistic, creative, rebellious daughters. Two families, similar in makeup and dynamics, but on opposite sides of the world; connected yet unknown to each other. The main characters are living in Melbourne. Harriet an artist and Ginny a musician; mother and daughter skirting around each other, their relationship strained by an absent father, Ginny’s ex boyfriend, differing artistic temperaments, and opposing philosophies. Harriet, in an effort to reconnect with Ginny proposes a combined exhibition: music and art, and the phases of the moon.
The second family, Judith an artist and daughter, Madeleine university student, appear to be living similarly strained lives albeit in England. The links between the four women, artistically and familial, are subtle and are slowly revealed as the story is woven.
Isobel’s use of synaesthesia as the trigger for Harriet’s artistic flow is resonating; describing in words a particularly visual concept that has correlation to a writer opening the flood gates to let ideas flow; hearing dialogue in the voice of characters, and seeing in the mind’s eye the characters body language, all working together to become a story. And Ginny’s creative flow; turning concept into story and then into music. By the way, Isobel, when can we hear the music that goes with this?
This is a literary work. Full of rich and detailed description and sentences that can take you on a journey from one paragraph to the next. You will need time to read this so that you can absorb the quality and appreciate the lyrical flow of the story. Do not be daunted! You will be carried gently and with purpose from start to finish, pausing occasionally to contemplate the ideas presented to you, and then, nodding in agreement with the story, moving on to the next and the next until you come to final understanding.
As I write these paragraphs in review of A Perfect Square, I realise that I’m writing about movement; in music, painting, storytelling, life. I want to turn on my favourite music and let my creativity loose. But this story, like any journey, is also about the processes and the steps needed to get to a certain point. The connecting of the two storylines is also cleverly and artistically done, and I am left wanting more. This is exactly where a writer wants her readers to be; so connected with the characters and story that they want to know what happens next in their lives. Well done, Isobel!
I bring away two quotes from A Perfect Square.
“Too many composers view composition as something that happens to the individual, not something the individual steps inside.”
“Her creative sensibilities knew that above all it was the flow that mattered, the sequence and the intervals between the pairings, and that somewhere within it all she would find the music.”
This is an intriguing novel. Harriet is an artist in Australia with a resentful daughter the blames her for separating her from her father. Judith is an artist in England with another resentful daughter. Neither mother has been quite truthful. How the two far distant lives will intertwine will keep you turning the pages. Yet, this story is more than that. The art that it covers draws you in also.