May 28

May 28 The Idea of Perfection

Author: Kate Grenville
Publisher: Picador (originally)
View on Goodreads

This book may be out of print, because I couldn’t find it via Bookshop or Bookstore Link. However, you may be able to buy a used copy, as I did. Here’s more info about this book on IndieBound.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town of Karakarook, where Harley has arrived to help the town build a heritage museum and Douglas to demolish the quaint old Bent Bridge. From the beginning they are on a collision course until the unexpected sets them both free.

Elegantly and compassionately told, The Idea of Perfection is reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields and Annie Proulx and reveals Kate Grenville as “a writer of extraordinary talent” (The New York Times Book Review).

TL;DR Review

I fell so hard for The Idea of Perfection. The plot does move pretty slowly, but that’s because you’re spending the whole time falling in love with the characters and setting (and having your heart broken).

For you if: You read for characters over plot, or you’re interested in reading an example of amazing use of character and setting in writing.

Full Review

“But out here, she could see people went by different rules. You did not just pick out the best bits of life. You took the whole lot, the good and the bad. You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you. Now and again you were rewarded with the small pleasure of being able to laugh, not uproariously but genuinely, at a small witticism offered by someone who was usually a bore. More than heat and flies, that was what made the bush feel like another country, where anything was possible.”

Y’all. I fell hard for this book. A lot of people on Goodreads have given it four stars. If you had asked me 100 pages in, I probably would have guessed that’s where I was going to land, too. But Kate Grenville’s skill with character and setting is incredible, and the people she’s brought to life here are so, so real, with such real heartbreak, and she wrecked me. This book won the Women’s Prize in 2001, and I can see why.

This is a book about misfits, imperfect people who just want to be loved but are afraid to for fear of being hurt. The plot is simple: Harley Savage is a large, closed-off, no-frills woman who’s been sent to a small town in rural Australia to help them establish a small, local museum. Douglas Cheeseman is a big-eared, mustached, nervous engineer, and he was sent to oversee the demolish of a quirky but unstable bridge that many in the town would like to save. Meanwhile, a local woman named Felicity Porcelline, obsessive-compulsive about bodily perfection, harbors a strange fascination with the town butcher.

The plot of this book moves very slowly; it’s billed as “an amusing and moving story of unlikely love” and “a quirky, touching romance that celebrates something even better than perfection.” And yet Harley and Douglas don’t meet until 100 pages in, and they don’t have more than that initial conversation until nearly halfway through the book. This is why, at first, I thought it was going to be a four-star book for me. But then I realized that Grenville was doing something much different. She was breaking our hearts.

Because these characters. Grenville makes them so real, with such careful and surgically precise attention to the tiniest of moments. Then she will wallop you with something bigger. Many times during this novel I’d be reading along, and then one sentence would stab out so quickly and acutely that I had to close my eyes for a few moments while the emotion hit me. I cried, quite literally, near the end.

And yet if I pulled any of those sentences out for you, all their resonance would strip away. Grenville builds these characters and their heartbreak layer by layer by layer. She also brings the Australian countryside to life, vividly, and uses it masterfully to shape these people and their stories.

I will be bleeding from this one for a while, I think.