Cassie McCullough

And one example is with Lou, who's the goddaughter, and there's a couple of lines where you find out that not so long ago her dad dropped dead at 49 of a stroke and then just a few weeks later her mother disappeared, presumably in a national park, in a murder-suicide situation.

And that's it.

For the rest of the book, you're waiting actually for some sort of return to that.

But you just have to accept that that's who Lou is, completely untraumatised by this recent experience.

Maybe it's because she's a lesbian and she's

you know, right on top of things and very clear-minded and knows who she is.

But I just sort of thought, wow, okay, take me to what you were getting to there.

And there's a couple more things.

I don't even feel like in the end I understood what happened with the big reveal and inevitable calamity at the end of this novel.

Well, as you pointed out earlier, there's only so many waves in a day and they have to get diminishing returns on those the more people there are.

And there's also the sense of the wealth that's invading and the empty apartment buildings and mansions on the hill, the glass and sort of tiled mansions that no one's in.

They're not even people most of the time.

You know, 50 weeks of the year, I think they say, they're empty.

Well, despite my hesitations, I am very glad I've read this book and I think it's a good contribution to the ongoing analysis of Australian masculinity, which we seem to talk about a lot, as well as femininity.

Kate, what did you make of it?

Frances Cha grew up in South Korea, Hong Kong and the US, but she now lives permanently in the US.

She's also worked for CNN in Seoul as well.

And this debut novel of hers takes us into the lives of these women.

Well, Kate, I had to look this up, of course, because I'm such an innocent.

But a room salon is kind of a bit like a drinking bar meets karaoke where there's a awful gender imbalance.