Whitcoulls Recommends: A Beautiful Family and A Dim Prognosis

A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan: In 1987, 10 year old Alix and her family are at the beach for the great New Zealand summer, but everything feels a little off - her teenage sister’s desperate to run with the in-crowd, her mother’s wildly distracted and her father is adrift. Alix befriends another holidaymaker, and they hunt for signs of a girl who went missing years ago, while a creepy neighbour watches everything they do. This hums with foreboding against the sun and sea. It’s magnetic. 

A Dim Prognosis by Ivor Popovich - The author has been a doctor in New Zealand hospitals for the last ten years and describes a system which is itself on life support. It’s not just about the under funding and the bureaucracy of our health care, but he also covers the very toxic atmosphere that a lot of the young doctors work in, with senior doctors protecting their patch and demeaning or humiliating the newcomers; and the disparities between public and private healthcare and how so many of these senior doctors do extremely well from working across both, while patients and other health care workers suffer. It’s required reading for anyone with an interest in our hospitals and how they work - and how they don’t. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks AB.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Joe McKenzie, good morning. Hello, Hey, You've got a brand
new book from a new author, Jennifer Trevellin. She's a
Keiwi author.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
I believe she lives in Wellington, Okay, and this is
set in nineteen eighty seven about a Wellington family who
are heading up the coast for their summer holiday. And
it's told in the first person by ten year old Alex.
But right from the start things feel very different from
the kind of summer holiday that they usually have. They
get there, her sister's a teenager and she wants to

(00:42):
run with the wild in crowd yep. Her mother's very distracted,
very unusually, and her father seems quite adrift, and there's
a really creepy guy in the house next door that
keeps an eye on everything that they do. The thing
that's really clever about the writing of this book is
that it's told in the first person by Alex, who
are as I said, is ten years old, and she

(01:03):
doesn't really understand what's going on around her. She can't
pick up the nuance and the dynamics and see what's
actually happening with her family, but you can as the reader.
It's a really clever device and she does it really well.
I've got a fun fact for you. Jennifer Trevillian sent
this manuscript out to I believe a number of literary
agents and she got a phone call from one of

(01:24):
the most respected agents in the UK, a woman named
Felicity Blunt, who happens to be the sister of the
actress Emily Blunt and is married to Stanley Tucci. So
Jennifer Trevellion has really landed in the middle of some
great company. And boy, she can write. This book is got.
It's kind of full of foreboding and haunting, set against

(01:44):
the New Zealand summer with the sun streaming down and
the beach, but you know there's something sinister going on.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
It could be hard to nail when you're trying to
write from a child's point of view. I think Kate
de Goldie does it so brilliant. Yes she does New
Zealand and is Jennifer good at it as well?

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
She is okay cool. We had Evor Popovich on our
show last weekend of talking about his book Prognosis and
telling us through talking us through what you know, what
he felt was right and wrong with our public health system.
A really interesting book, isn't it?

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yes, it is, and he is a very angry man.
Some of this book is really funny, but it's very
black humor, as you would know. And after all the
news reports we've had over the last while about the
state of our health system, a lot of this won't
come as a shock to many people. But as he says,
and he writes in this book so well, it's a
system that's on life support and it's also a place.

(02:37):
The stuff that I found fascinating was that he writes
about how bullies and sociopaths thrive in our health industry
in the shape of senior doctors. He says there's a
culture problem that's embedded in the system. Talks about the
inequities of a public private system where specialists get to
make a lot of money from public coffers because they're
needed to keep things moving in the public care system.

(02:59):
He talks about the fact that the it is archaic.
An awful lot of stuff in here, which as a
user of the New Zealand health system, you will be
very alarmed about and to be working and it must
be well. As he puts it, it's a very very
difficult environment.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah. No, it's a fascinating read. Thank you so much, Joan.
Those books A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevellin and also
A Dim Prognosis by Evil Popovich. We'll talk next week.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
See you then six to.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Twelve For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin.
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