Review: One of the most unlikely and satisfying love stories I’ve ever read.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 8, 2014
Wolf Pear is, hands down, an absolute delight – like sinking one’s teeth into a ripe and luscious tomato fresh off the vine. For that is what a wolf pear is – a tomato. And this novel is about as juicy and tasty as its title suggests.Now you might ask yourself – how can anyone call a book about a poor woman who has been bullied, pushed, shoved, and taken advantage of all her life and a grief-stricken, haunted police detective on the trail of a serial killer, a delight? I guess you had to be there because delightful it is.From the opening pages, as Esther Crooke scrambles to bury a body in the soil of her garden, through Detective JD Cusack’s cross country chase, always steps behind a killer, Gray hooks the reader into the story with effortless ease.To hide the makeshift grave, Esther puts in a crop of tomato plants given to her off the back of a truck headed for an experimental farm. And boy or boy, do those tomatoes grow, achieving exactly the opposite of what Esther had hoped – her attempts at camouflage shine a spotlight on her makeshift grave.As JD Cusack’s past secrets and special ability brings him closer and closer to the killer, Gray neatly winds in all the loose ends of the story like an expert knitter finishing off a scarf.This book abounds with location and character details that cause the reader to chuckle out loud or sigh with sadness.Esther owns and runs the Crooke Books & Café, a converted house out on the highway. “Its roof pitched like a witch’s hat slashed with orange rust.” A startling juxtaposition of description tells all in a handful of words. The café is filled with books Esther has collected, none of which are for sale. Sit down, have a coffee, some of Esther’s famous carrot cake or her sticky date pudding and read a book. Patrons choose their tables based on the reading material nearby. Aren’t you dying to go to this place? Books for Esther are precious, “Miniature cameos of the world.”At one point, Esther confronts a picture of herself in the local newspaper as she fends off a reporter and photographer who have come poking their nose into her tomato crop. “She had seen her real self in the newspaper – an ugly monster with claws and teeth and a chin like Jabba the Hut.” Oh my – read that and try not to sigh.The place names are another source of delight – the town of Boonup, taking a trip up to Woorumbilly and the Jabiru Hotel.Wolf Pear is a finely crafted story that pulls no punches when describing how the innocent suffer and yet the reader is forced to laugh at the incongruity of life while coming to see that always redemption awaits, growing wild and free like the wolf pears in Esther’s garden/graveyard.