Lily and Janks have organised their lives to make sure their daughter, Jewelee, will have the best possible life she can. The best possible start that will ensure she does not travel down the path of life they did.
When Jewelee does start to head down that same path, mixing with the wrong crowd and engaging in delinquent behaviour, they decide to move suburbs away from the addicts and crime. They do everything they can to turn her life around.
The narrative is told from both Lily’s and Janks’ perspectives with the chapters alternating back and forth. Lily works cleaning houses every day, and the lives and houses of their clients make for interesting reading. Janks works at a food factory. Together they just scrape by each week, living payday to payday. They both want Jewelee to go to university and, with both saving to achieve this, there is rarely a cent to spare.
Problems arise when Jewelee wants to go on a school excursion to Greece. Lily and Janks simply do not have the money. So Janks, unable to get a loan from a reputable bank, with no credit rating, borrows the money from a bikie gang, without telling Lily. But the money will have to be paid back and where will he find it?
This is a novel about the struggles of a middle-class family. It opens the reader’s eyes to how many families battle daily to keep their heads above the poverty line, especially when trying to provide a better life for their children. Other Houses is populated with rich, believable characters which had me engaged in their struggle and hoping they could overcome, what at times, seem insurmountable and dangerous odds.
Reviewed by Neale Lucas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paddy O’Reilly’s short story collection Peripheral Vision was published in 2015.
Her novel The Wonders was published in 2014 and was the winner of the Norma K Hemming award and nominated for the Kirkus Prize.
The Fine Colour of Rust was released in 2012 and shortlisted for the ASAL Gold Medal.
Paddy’s first short story collection, The End of the World was published to critical acclaim in April, 2007. The stories in the collection had won a number of national and international story awards.
Her debut novel, The Factory, was Highly Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction. Broadcast in 15 episodes as the ABC Radio National Book Reading.
The novella ‘Deep Water’ was published in 2007 as one of four in the novella anthology, Love and Desire, edited by Cate Kennedy.
She has also written screenplays and worked as additional screenwriter for films which have been nominated for AFI awards and screened nationally and internationally.
Paddy has been Asialink writer-in-residence in Japan, a fellow at Varuna: the Writers’ House, writer-in-residence at Kelly Steps Cottage Tasmania, The Lockup Newcastle, Bundanon Trust, and the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has also been presenter and reader at the International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto and Arkansas, and a full fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, USA.
Paddy spent several years working as a copywriter and translator in Japan. She now lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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