Book Review: I Love My Babycinos!

Café culture is as much a part of life for kids these days as pushdown socks with leggings/hypercolour tshirts*/Inspector Gadget/Bubble-o-Bills were a part of our chilhood (assuming for argument’s sake you, too, were a scrunchie-wearing child of the 80’s). Katrina Thomson’s delightfully simple and fun new board book, I Love My Babycino’s, has not left my 2-year-old’s froth-covered fingers since she got it – and that is the true test of a good kid’s book. This book is in fact so special it gets it’s own post!

“Babycino (bab’e-chee-no) noun
A small cup of frothy milk specifically made for children”

Babycino’s vary in their make and price from café to café, and Katrina’s book teaches children not only about the days of the week, but also about different types of ‘cino’s! “On Monday, I have a smiley face babycino…on Tuesday, a BIG frothy babycino….” right through to the best of the bunch (according to Charlotte) – “on Sunday, I have a babycino with two marshmallows”! The pictures are bright, funky and attractive, and the tough board book and rounded corners mean it can safely be chewed on when the babycino cup is empty. Soaking up café culture with your bub is a rather fabulous way to spend some quality time together, talking, reading, people-watching and most importantly giving them an important dose of dairy with their “grown-up” ‘cinos!

Katrina (Thomson, I’m not speaking about myself in third person, even for a Gemini that would be weird) reckons the best babycino has to be “at least 80% froth and definitely not hot”, and tots the world over concur with her two daughters – “it has to come with marshmallows or it’s not a babycino”! They get the best ‘cino’s at Romano’s Café in Station Street, Fairfield – the best because they tick all the boxes: they’re free when Mum buys a drink, and they come with smiley faces complete with Smartie nose and marshmallow eyes! All the coffee chains do simple, free ‘cino’s when you buy a coffee (we like Gloria Jeans because you can add all the sprinkles and stuff yourself) and any café worth the trip will whip up something special for your tots. Most will also do a Minicino, which has a shot of flavour in the milk (one of our FrockYou girls, who is 18, loves them. Ahem.)

Katrina and her girls always loved to read in cafes, so of course the obvious step was to write a book about their beloved babycinos. Due to the overwhelming response, which was happily more than she expected, Katrina has also developed the website and a competition with over $1100 worth of prizes to coincide with the book launch on August 8th! But she’s a busy lady, running the very awesome ID Tee label and of course fitting in time for café-going with her girls, so at the moment plans for a sequel (Minicino Fights Back? The Beauty of Banana Bread?) are on hold. She did however, use the old adage, “never say never”…

I give it two out of two big fluffy marshmallows – it doesn’t leave my handbag and each time we’re at a café (which is, like, everyday) we pull it out and check which sort of Babycino corresponds to the day. It’s a great learning tool and my daughter adores the pictures – the grin on her face when we read it is priceless, but if you can put a price on happiness, in this case it’s just $9.95!

Available from good bookstores, cafes, (check the website for stockists near you or to purchase) and of course you can also buy online at Frock You!)

(*which are back incidentally and perhaps not surprisingly: you guessed it, it’s the wacky kids over at American Apparel!)

Classic Book Review: Perfume

His PIN number is made up of heiroglyphics and he once bred an Oompa Loompa in year 9 science. Here's Marky's C's review of a classic novel:

On page 4 of Perfume, Paris is described as possessing the foulest of stenches – a vulgar olfactory concoction of ‘manure, urine, rat droppings, mouldering wood, spoiled cabbage, stale dust and chamber pots’, to be precise. Yet, the most surprising aspect of this rather unappealing depiction of pre-Robespierrian France is that it was not even written by an Englishman. Apparently, and for this we may rejoice, France is the fecal point of Europe for writers of all languages, and the French fare little better (indeed, how else could they be presented but as traditional, self-centred, smelly, cannibalistic, surrendering pigs?). In Patrick Suskind’s 1985 classic, France emerges as the most putrid, vile and uninhabitable sewer of the entire northern hemisphere (yes, even ahead of Wales). To make matters worse, Suskind even frees a scent-obsessed virgin murderer into its pure countryside. The result is an intense delight of fragrant bliss.

Although it is a ‘story of a murderer’, the procession of murders does not actually occur until the book nears its conclusion. Instead, the majority of the novel is dedicated to a biography of the troglodyte protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, through his peculiar and torturous childhood, his time in the great perfumery of Giuseppe Baldini and his lustful cupidity for all things fragrant. Though the detail is rich and the world truly alive, Suskind allows for a degree of creative license, particularly in the death of Baldini and the woefully pathetic manhunt for Grenouille that somehow misses the giant, dumb and slow killer. Regardless, the character of Jean-Baptiste dominates the reader’s interest, and all other elements of the novel decay into seemingly unimportant fragments. Yet the series of murders feel rushed after the elongated introduction and, at times, Grenouille is the most frustrating of antiheroes – fluctuating between intricate modes of thinking and outright brutish stupidity. Nevertheless, any book that concludes with a rural mass orgy followed by self-sacrifice to savage cannibalism deserves a read, and the fact that the whole story (including its deep descriptions of the contemptible and vile France in which it is set), is no less than perfect, warrants it a place on anybody’s bookshelf. The phrasing is exceptional, utilizing original wordplay on the most forgotten of our senses, and the translation allows it to run smoothly and effectively into English. If you’ve never smelt an 18th century Frenchman, read Perfume.

Book Review: Trainspotting

He keeps a goth in his basement and collects Darren Lyons figurines. His favourite colour is Rachel Zoe's patented new "gilver" and if he was on the Amazing Race, he'd probably be eliminated. Marky C (and his indie bunch) muses on one of the greatest literary works of the 90's:

Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting has recently been re-released by Vintage in a double pack with Oliver Twist, compounded under the loose banner of ‘youth novels’. Certainly, both novels detail the exploits of various groups of young people and their correspondence to, and victimization by, society’s ills. However, Welsh’s seminal debut and Dickens’ Bildungsroman classic share little more common ground than the fact that they’re both works of genius (though the thought of Oliver Twist shagging his dead brother’s pregnant wife during a somber wake must have passed Dickens’ mind at some point).

The initial thing to be noticed whilst reading Trainspotting is that it’s not in any particularly familiar form of English, but rather native Scottish dialect: a combination of words that must be either spoken aloud or pondered for some time. Daunting at first, it soon becomes second nature and serves as a highly effective literary technique in which to develop some memorable characters.

Primarily, the novel is narrated by Renton (portrayed by a young Ewan McGregor in the 1996 film adaptation). A former literature student of Aberdeen University, Renton’s drug habits see him cop the title ‘junkie’ both from the myriad of aggressive people encountered throughout the book and from his own acquaintances; one of whom, Begbie, is an alcoholic psychopath secretly disliked by his group. The casualty list of hurricane Begbie is high; ranging from his pregnant girlfriend, an assortment of bar attendees and staff, and anybody with the indecency to look him in the eye. However, the HIV casualty rate is similarly high, with the demise of the formerly athletic Tommy one of the book’s saddest developments. Naturally, any novel exploring explicit heroin use bound to be targeted by do-gooders intent on censoring anything that resembles unchristian immorality, and Trainspotting certainly has, but Welsh is objective in his depiction of smack use. Sure, the high is ‘a thousand times better than any orgasm you’ve ever had’, but the criminality, depression, bleakness, anger, relapses, illnesses and death outweigh any glorification.

Characters come and go (as do references to Bowie, the Smiths, Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground), but, oddly for a book so enthralling, no primary plot underpins the story. Written from chapters that oscillate between first and third person narrative; between male and female narrators; between stream of consciousness and story retell; Trainspotting bridges the near-impossible divide between effective literary experimentation and quality content. And it might just even be better than Oliver Twist.

Book Review: Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, by Paul Carter

She spends alot of time on long-haul flights and thus devours books the same way she devours Sour Cream and Chive Pringles. Cat W shares her thoughts on what sounds like a rollickingly good read:

Following on from the lovely Renee’s fillum review of a few weeks back, the one with Brad Pitt and a 47 word title, comes a book with a similarly long title but belonging to a completely different genre – Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, by Paul Carter. Although it was released something like a couple of years ago, I consider it the height of rudeness that this riotous work was not bought to my attention earlier. I love a book that makes me laugh out loud and for me, this one manages that and then some.

Don’t tell Mum I Work on the Rigs has the potential hallmarks of a travelogue, you know the ones where I spent a year on the Mediterranean and here are all the wonderful things I learnt whilst I frolicked through olive groves and entertained dashing Italian guys, or I hiked through Alaska now read about how macho I am for fighting a polar bear. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind reading the odd travelogue myself and have read quite a few in the past, but the more I read the less I give a shit about said adventures (unless they’re my own or my friends,’ lets get this straight). Carter offers his readers a little more substance in this book; it details his travels throughout some of the world’s most remote locations whilst following a career working on oil rigs, a tough, gritty bitch of a job that does not suffer pillocks. Carter makes no bones about how difficult this work is, but his ensuing adventures manage to leave nothing to the imagination. One gets the impression that he is in fact a bit of a wild man, and maybe just a few of his life tales may have been missed out here due to the fact that they’re simply unprintable.

Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs tells of Carter’s career travels to numerous far-flung and diverse locales - the Russian tundra, Borneo, jungles of Asia, Sumatra, the Middle East, Tunisia, Nigeria and the North Sea, among others. The stories he tells of the people he meets along the way, as well as the animals (!) and situations he gets himself into are recounted with a kind of chilled out alacrity, and one of the reasons this book is so easy to read is because Carter is just a bloody funny guy. Peppered with hilarious anecdotes about a pubescent monkey called Joe, Stetson-wearing know it all Texans, almost dying of dysentery and being served cocktails by an orang-utan on a ocean freighter, Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs is 200 pages of obsessively readable exhilaration that anyone with an open mind, an appreciation for the left of field and an immunity to a little swearing will enjoy.