I Have A Bed Made Of Buttermilk Pancakes
Jaclyn Moriarty
(Picador Pan Macmillan Australia)
420 pages

Jaclyn Moriarty’s first adult novel after two children’s books is a delight to read; her effervescent prose is filled with an almost tangible joie de vivre. Description is difficult: a playful approach to the chronology of events renders a linear summary of what happens in the book nearly pointless. Suffice it to say that the story follows the interwoven threads of the lives of several quirky female members of the extended Zing family over the course of a year, as their strange Zing Family Secret slowly unravels (and is equally slowly revealed to the reader). The book’s subtitle calls it “a fairytale for grownups”, and there is constant confusion between the real and the fantastical – it’s set in a Sydney where it snows, and where people’s lives seem dictated by a small child’s spell book. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable and funny novel; light-hearted but not lightweight.

Owen Heitmann

(Moriarty later revised I Have A Bed Made Of Buttermilk Pancakes as a novel for Young Adult readers and it was republished under the title The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor.)