What do you think?
Rate this book
Do the Wrong Thing: Book, the First
THIS ISN'T THE BEGINNING. I'm not sure what it is but I've decided to start here…
Ummm, ok, I’m just going to start talking and then the words will come out without me thinking about them because what—what I did was… IIIII—I—I tried to kill myself.
So begins Ava Mueller’s account of her life and misadventures. She grows up on a farm with devout immigrant parents. Her mother fluctuates between suicidal threats and violent outbursts and her father, checked out of life long before Ava enters the scene, goes through the motions, tending crops, providing for his family and praying.
When a high school teacher tells Ava she should write, her world is shattered. "Boys go to school, girls help their mothers: this is what the Bible says,” her mother tells her. When Ava pushes for school, her mother issues an ultimatum. Ava chooses school.
Soon, she’s kind of crazy. Heartbroken, mistrustful and lonely, she quits school, drifts in and out of jobs, sexual relationships and friendships. Is there any point to, or value in, my own contact with air, reality and life? She thinks.
If you liked My Struggle, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark and My Name is Lucy Barton, this Northern Gothic novel is for you.
Book One takes the reader from Ava’s first memories to the end of high school.
Praise for Do the Wrong Thing:
Flies in the same circle of brave story telling as Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. Van Delst writes beautifully, with sensitivity, imagination, insight and humour.
—Tom Gormon, Retired Forensic Therapist and Neophyte Author
It's like Gen X Alice Munro. FAB. Van Delst is the QUEEN of the arched eyebrow!
—Patricia Hammond, idiosyncratic singer, reconstructs parlour songs from 1800s
I fell more and more in love with Ava. She is so full of enthusiasm that she never speaks in simple sentences, but definitely compound-complex sentences all strung together with commas, colons, semis, and dashes, and when I read I read all in one breath. I got very excited and enthusiastic, and I laughed out loud, and also had to read parts to my loving husband, who was trying to read The Economist on his iPad. Oh, God, it’s catching!
—Lorna Blake, retired Home Ec teacher who really should finish that memoir of her Northern European family’s union establishing days in Canada.
Van Delst writes like a dark angel, and reads with transgressive humour.
—Linda Lawson, recovered from a 20-year benzo addiction. Now writing a play about it.
Ava, the heroine of Do the Wrong Thing, is resourceful but also naive and foolhardy. At one point, she decides she is pure evil and therefore must not have any friends, for example. Later, she is quite literally mad with loneliness. When she does what she considers the wrong thing, she is doing the right thing. Sound familiar? There is a little bit of Ava in all of us.
—Elizabeth MacLean, sold everything she had and took off for Vietnam at 60. Then published her first book, The Swallows Uncaged
Do the Wrong Thing is deep! Van Delst is very good at unpacking that mother/daughter “stuff”—and she leaves it strewn around, making the reader kind of put it together themselves—especially where they relate to it vis-à-vis their own mothers or daughters.
Ummm, ok, I’m just going to start talking and then the words will come out without me thinking about them because what—what I did was… IIIII—I—I tried to kill myself.
So begins Ava Mueller’s account of her life and misadventures. She grows up on a farm with devout immigrant parents. Her mother fluctuates between suicidal threats and violent outbursts and her father, checked out of life long before Ava enters the scene, goes through the motions, tending crops, providing for his family and praying.
When a high school teacher tells Ava she should write, her world is shattered. "Boys go to school, girls help their mothers: this is what the Bible says,” her mother tells her. When Ava pushes for school, her mother issues an ultimatum. Ava chooses school.
Soon, she’s kind of crazy. Heartbroken, mistrustful and lonely, she quits school, drifts in and out of jobs, sexual relationships and friendships. Is there any point to, or value in, my own contact with air, reality and life? She thinks.
If you liked My Struggle, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark and My Name is Lucy Barton, this Northern Gothic novel is for you.
Book One takes the reader from Ava’s first memories to the end of high school.
Praise for Do the Wrong Thing:
Flies in the same circle of brave story telling as Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. Van Delst writes beautifully, with sensitivity, imagination, insight and humour.
—Tom Gormon, Retired Forensic Therapist and Neophyte Author
It's like Gen X Alice Munro. FAB. Van Delst is the QUEEN of the arched eyebrow!
—Patricia Hammond, idiosyncratic singer, reconstructs parlour songs from 1800s
I fell more and more in love with Ava. She is so full of enthusiasm that she never speaks in simple sentences, but definitely compound-complex sentences all strung together with commas, colons, semis, and dashes, and when I read I read all in one breath. I got very excited and enthusiastic, and I laughed out loud, and also had to read parts to my loving husband, who was trying to read The Economist on his iPad. Oh, God, it’s catching!
—Lorna Blake, retired Home Ec teacher who really should finish that memoir of her Northern European family’s union establishing days in Canada.
Van Delst writes like a dark angel, and reads with transgressive humour.
—Linda Lawson, recovered from a 20-year benzo addiction. Now writing a play about it.
Ava, the heroine of Do the Wrong Thing, is resourceful but also naive and foolhardy. At one point, she decides she is pure evil and therefore must not have any friends, for example. Later, she is quite literally mad with loneliness. When she does what she considers the wrong thing, she is doing the right thing. Sound familiar? There is a little bit of Ava in all of us.
—Elizabeth MacLean, sold everything she had and took off for Vietnam at 60. Then published her first book, The Swallows Uncaged
Do the Wrong Thing is deep! Van Delst is very good at unpacking that mother/daughter “stuff”—and she leaves it strewn around, making the reader kind of put it together themselves—especially where they relate to it vis-à-vis their own mothers or daughters.
138 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 29, 2018
1 person is currently reading
11 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 24, 2023
The Mueller Report: Ava Mueller has a lot to say. There's stuff she doesn't talk about too. But she has a voice and hearing her brings joy to this reader.
This volume, marked as book one, details childhood and adolescence, but there are some aspects from an adult perspective, and —refreshingly— at times the piercing adult voice looks back at what has happened. The result is smart, funny, nervy, punchy, so morbidly true it is hilarious, and enriched with an overwhelming rush of details of a yearning isolated childhood and life on a farm.
Farm cats, rabbits, being friends with the most popular girl, eating liver, discovering the individuality of siblings, self-loathing, wanting to be a missionary and save the children—Ava Mueller is surrounded by dreams, ideas, relatives, farm animals, family photos, the Bay City Rollers, and an embarrassing lunchbox.
This is a short book, 130 pages, and leaves one wanting more.
This volume, marked as book one, details childhood and adolescence, but there are some aspects from an adult perspective, and —refreshingly— at times the piercing adult voice looks back at what has happened. The result is smart, funny, nervy, punchy, so morbidly true it is hilarious, and enriched with an overwhelming rush of details of a yearning isolated childhood and life on a farm.
Farm cats, rabbits, being friends with the most popular girl, eating liver, discovering the individuality of siblings, self-loathing, wanting to be a missionary and save the children—Ava Mueller is surrounded by dreams, ideas, relatives, farm animals, family photos, the Bay City Rollers, and an embarrassing lunchbox.
This is a short book, 130 pages, and leaves one wanting more.
September 6, 2018
On several occasions, I was fortunate to hear Malcolm van Delst, a writer based in Vancouver, Canada, read aloud from a work-in-progress called Do the Wrong Thing. The extracts she read left me puzzled and intrigued: I was unable to grasp exactly what the book was meant to be about, and exactly what she aimed to achieve. Do the Wrong Thing seemed to consist principally of details and fragments – often, details of fragments – set down more or less at random, from the life of a young woman whom I took to be the author herself. Now that I have read book one of Do the Wrong Thing (others are yet to be published), I am still puzzled, but the mists have cleared enough for me to relish the journey even while the destination remains obscure.
It’s unwise to review something that has yet to appear in its entirety, as any surprises in store can overturn assumptions and thoroughly embarrass the reviewer. Suffice to say, Do the Wrong Thing is – so far, at least – a kaleidoscope of memories linked by subconscious attraction and the sudden remembrances provoked by the work of recording them. This might sound chaotic and unsatisfying; however, if one relaxes into the book, so to speak, and travel with no thought to arriving, things start to happen. To use an analogy that quickly sprang to mind while reading, it is as if we are watching a family’s 8mm home movies, randomly and with little context other than the comments and exclamations of the hosts. It is we who do the job of interpretation.
In some ways, Do the Wrong Thing is a metafictional novel (memoir? meditation? remembered dream?) par excellence, for it contains deliberate errors, metatextual tags, lists and poems, plus the occasional illustration. The writer’s own voice breaks through the text with apologies and excuses and explanations of her difficulties in remembering/reconstructing the past. Gradually, one comes to know the mind of the rememberer, and/or the mind of the central character, until the immediacy of the encounter between reader and author feels exhilaratingly personal and intimate. It is as if we are in the unmediated presence of another consciousness.
Conventional minds such as my own tend to baulk at this kind of approach, but Do the Wrong Thing is powerfully seductive: it is possible to enjoy it almost against one’s will. Ava’s journey from toddler to puberty is accompanied by parents, uncles and aunts, school friends, cats and farm animals and, above all, an ever-expanding host of brothers and sisters (it is a Roman Catholic household). There is an oddly timeless feel to this largely rural milieu, so that it is abruptly surprising to learn we have reached the 1970s, for example, when David Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers caused teeny-boppers’ hearts to flutter.
The perils of childhood and the kind of mystified insightfulness it often possesses are brought to bear on parents, in particular, but also on the changing loyalties and precarious alliances between school friends, as well as the menacing unknowability of certain teachers and older brothers and cousins. Children have to be tough and remember to forget the things that frighten them.
There is a gathering storm behind book one. Teenage years are the next to be recollected, I presume, and they have been presaged by an increasingly virulent rejection of organized religion (the gruesome crucifixions and bleeding hearts on display throughout the family home are thoroughly repellent). Something nasty might be waiting patiently for the opportunity to strike; at any rate, some significant break, some defining moment, will surely take place because, one senses, it is from beyond that pivotal point that recollection and reassessment are made possible.
Where exactly is Do the Wrong Thing headed? Does it know? These questions cannot yet be answered, but we can look forward to making up our own minds as more is revealed. I, for one, will be along for the ride.
It’s unwise to review something that has yet to appear in its entirety, as any surprises in store can overturn assumptions and thoroughly embarrass the reviewer. Suffice to say, Do the Wrong Thing is – so far, at least – a kaleidoscope of memories linked by subconscious attraction and the sudden remembrances provoked by the work of recording them. This might sound chaotic and unsatisfying; however, if one relaxes into the book, so to speak, and travel with no thought to arriving, things start to happen. To use an analogy that quickly sprang to mind while reading, it is as if we are watching a family’s 8mm home movies, randomly and with little context other than the comments and exclamations of the hosts. It is we who do the job of interpretation.
In some ways, Do the Wrong Thing is a metafictional novel (memoir? meditation? remembered dream?) par excellence, for it contains deliberate errors, metatextual tags, lists and poems, plus the occasional illustration. The writer’s own voice breaks through the text with apologies and excuses and explanations of her difficulties in remembering/reconstructing the past. Gradually, one comes to know the mind of the rememberer, and/or the mind of the central character, until the immediacy of the encounter between reader and author feels exhilaratingly personal and intimate. It is as if we are in the unmediated presence of another consciousness.
Conventional minds such as my own tend to baulk at this kind of approach, but Do the Wrong Thing is powerfully seductive: it is possible to enjoy it almost against one’s will. Ava’s journey from toddler to puberty is accompanied by parents, uncles and aunts, school friends, cats and farm animals and, above all, an ever-expanding host of brothers and sisters (it is a Roman Catholic household). There is an oddly timeless feel to this largely rural milieu, so that it is abruptly surprising to learn we have reached the 1970s, for example, when David Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers caused teeny-boppers’ hearts to flutter.
The perils of childhood and the kind of mystified insightfulness it often possesses are brought to bear on parents, in particular, but also on the changing loyalties and precarious alliances between school friends, as well as the menacing unknowability of certain teachers and older brothers and cousins. Children have to be tough and remember to forget the things that frighten them.
There is a gathering storm behind book one. Teenage years are the next to be recollected, I presume, and they have been presaged by an increasingly virulent rejection of organized religion (the gruesome crucifixions and bleeding hearts on display throughout the family home are thoroughly repellent). Something nasty might be waiting patiently for the opportunity to strike; at any rate, some significant break, some defining moment, will surely take place because, one senses, it is from beyond that pivotal point that recollection and reassessment are made possible.
Where exactly is Do the Wrong Thing headed? Does it know? These questions cannot yet be answered, but we can look forward to making up our own minds as more is revealed. I, for one, will be along for the ride.
September 6, 2018
Do The Right Thing: Book One
Three years ago when I first heard Malcolm van Deist read from Do The Wrong Thing, I immediately thought she was doing something right. First off she is a terrific reader and the text tells the story. Oow! what a story. The scenes seem real; the text walks me on living roads.
I was able to stroll along both the real and the imagined road.
Recommend?
Yes, to anyone who wants scenes of a young girl’s life on the farm.
The protagonist, hopes it's a good story — “One with an invisible power, like AIDS or Ebola; like a virus, too small to see but having the power to kill.”
Eva’s character is sweet and driven to grow up while she is getting the most out of life.
What I liked the most:
It was a fast read and I liked the message from each of the scenes - Notice the world, Be kind to animals and Dream!
Three years ago when I first heard Malcolm van Deist read from Do The Wrong Thing, I immediately thought she was doing something right. First off she is a terrific reader and the text tells the story. Oow! what a story. The scenes seem real; the text walks me on living roads.
I was able to stroll along both the real and the imagined road.
Recommend?
Yes, to anyone who wants scenes of a young girl’s life on the farm.
The protagonist, hopes it's a good story — “One with an invisible power, like AIDS or Ebola; like a virus, too small to see but having the power to kill.”
Eva’s character is sweet and driven to grow up while she is getting the most out of life.
What I liked the most:
It was a fast read and I liked the message from each of the scenes - Notice the world, Be kind to animals and Dream!
September 16, 2018
Poignant storytelling.
Do The Wrong Thing is a gripping and very intimate read. It made me look differently at my memories and what made me me, and I realized that some memories did make me me: perhaps that's the reason I didn't have that many. A lot of lines in Do The Wrong Thins, such as “I'm not capital anything, anyway, except Bad Ass” are just mind-blowing. This book is a brilliant way to spend the fall evening.
Do The Wrong Thing is a gripping and very intimate read. It made me look differently at my memories and what made me me, and I realized that some memories did make me me: perhaps that's the reason I didn't have that many. A lot of lines in Do The Wrong Thins, such as “I'm not capital anything, anyway, except Bad Ass” are just mind-blowing. This book is a brilliant way to spend the fall evening.
September 5, 2018
(I read a pre-release copy that the author sent me.)
This is fiction, in the form of a memoir. The book has an interesting interplay with the fourth wall, and takes the reader in and out of a fictionalized reality. I enjoyed getting to know the narrator/protagonist, and appreciated the depiction of rural Ontario in the 1960s and 70s. I'm anxious to read the next books in the trilogy.
This is fiction, in the form of a memoir. The book has an interesting interplay with the fourth wall, and takes the reader in and out of a fictionalized reality. I enjoyed getting to know the narrator/protagonist, and appreciated the depiction of rural Ontario in the 1960s and 70s. I'm anxious to read the next books in the trilogy.
October 1, 2018
Malcolm van Delst is a very insightful writer. I enjoy the way in which she was able to capture the everyday things in life, in the book, Do the Wrong Thing, Book One. Ava, the main character will make you laugh and frustrates you at times, while at the same time, causes you to empathize with her. Prepare yourself to be transported into Ava Mueller’s life.
October 8, 2018
The book's main protagonist Ava is different from me in age, appearance, outlook and lifestyle. She was raised on a farm in North America and I was raised in a big metropolis in Europe. My father was an angel and my mother was a witch. Still, I emphasized easily with Ava's predicaments; I felt for her every time she did the wrong thing, and especially when she picked herself up by the bootstraps. The fitful prose of the book matches perfectly Ava's disposition. I look forward to reading Book Two, which will take Ava to the maturity (???) of her 20s and 30s. A good complement to Do the Wrong Thing would be Educated; A Memoir, by Tara Westover. Both very constructive reads.
November 5, 2018
A wonderful book!
Heard Malcolm read excerpts of her book, "Do the Wrong Thing", at the book launch. I was totally caught with the wit and perspective of her growing up "Doing the Wrong thing". Her intuitive study of the characters in her life engages the reader from beginning to end.
A must read for sure!
Heard Malcolm read excerpts of her book, "Do the Wrong Thing", at the book launch. I was totally caught with the wit and perspective of her growing up "Doing the Wrong thing". Her intuitive study of the characters in her life engages the reader from beginning to end.
A must read for sure!
May 15, 2020
Glimpses of Ava growing up reveal such a complex inner world. This book invites readers to begin understanding a little of the beauty and pain of Ava's life, but not without leaving us begging for answers. I want to know what happens next. My journey of family and faith is different from Ava's but I can identify with her search for significance and destiny. Very engaging read!
September 24, 2018
Malcolm van Delst is a generous writer with deep and hilarious insight into her protagonist's life, the people around her, and the way the world works. Her first novel is poignant, irreverent, and good company to curl up with or disappear into on your commute. More!
November 24, 2018
Enjoyed the unique format - couldn't help but get into and experience the protagonist from the inside out. It was a pleasure to see the clarity and understand the reality of a girl on her way into the adult world.
March 21, 2020
The main character, Ava, is so likeable, and I wish I could protect her with a shell so she wouldn’t feel any hurt from the world. Her naive honesty makes you want to hold her hand through life, while the narrative end up holding yours through hers.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews