Category Archives: Reviews

OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO

Dr Seuss ISBN 978-0-00-790680-2

I first encountered Oh The Places You’ll Go only recently – this year in fact – and it struck me at once as very distinctly different from all the other Dr Seuss that I was familiar with. What was Dr Seuss attempting with this slim volume? It cannot have been to provide education or encouragement for children, except perhaps for the preternaturally precocious savant. This is a dark, twisting story about ambition, creative endeavour, failure and depression. It is a tale of an adult life full of adult worries and it is frequently deeply cutting. Continue reading

MATESHIP WITH BIRDS

Carrie Tiffany ISBN: 9781742610764

In 2005, debut author Carrie Tiffany wowed fans of historical fiction with her award-winning novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. Set in 1934, an era of small-town Australia was brought grimly to life as narrator Jean Finnegan sought to bring science to the wheat fields of the land.

Fast-forward to 2012, and Carrie’s anticipated follow-up novel, Mateship with Birds, captures a revealing snapshot of 1950s rural Victoria in all its sexually repressed glory. Continue reading

A SUITABLE BOY
Vikram Seth (Phoenix Fiction: UK, ISBN 978-1-8579-9088-1)

Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, famously one of the longest novels written in English, is a sprawling and eloquent tale of love, family, politics and any number of other themes, set around a fictional Indian city in the mid-1950s.  Evoking Middlemarch with its breadth of characters, its thematic investigation of momentous political events and human relationships, and its realism, A Suitable Boy is, as its blurb alleges, a love story—but as with Middlemarch this love story does not emerge as expected.  The novel, focusing on the Mehra, Kapoor, Khan and Chatterji families, contains many interlinking plot threads which draw slowly together and apart to form a magnificent story.

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To truly enjoy the work of the late David Eddings[i], the reader must be aware what they are getting themselves into.  It helps if you aren’t all that familiar with the fantasy genre, and it helps if you’re young and don’t know any better.  Before you set out, it is also ideal to choose which Eddings series you are going to start with.  It is inadvisable to attempt to read both The Tamuli and The Belgariad and their respective sequel series[ii], because the very point of the books is to be formulaic and it is quite easy to become tired of that formula, unless you pace yourself carefully.  Or unless you just don’t care.  Just not caring is another helpful quality if you wish to fully enjoy Eddings’ fiction. Continue reading

THE DRESDEN FILES BOOK 3 (GRAVE PERIL) (Audiobook Version)

Jim Butcher (Author), James Masters (Reading by)

At The Melbourne Review of Books we attempt to bring intelligent discussion to all forms of fiction, whether popular genre works or more obscure literary pieces. We want to bring something thoughtful to the discussion, not just a simple I liked this or I didn’t.

The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher is a phenomenally successful urban fantasy series mixed up with mystery and gumshoe flavours. Unlike a lot of urban fantasy, it is less of a supernatural romance romp and more of a supernatural crime thriller, though the genre sort of demands some sex somewhere, so you will get that too. Continue reading

STRAVINSKY’S LUNCH

Drusilla Modjeska ISBN 0 330 36186 4

Amongst ordinary things, among cups and saucers, couples chatting in a courtyard, trees, the expression on a face, there may also be questions about what one sees, and what it means. For the artist, these questions might be about Life, they might be about Love, they might be about Art, and the way in which a person may—but here is the tension—live and love and create.  Continue reading

TINDER

Sally Gardner ISBN-10: 1780621493

Many years ago, a strange thing occurred. I was browsing the fiction shelves of a well known, and now defunct, multinational bookstore whilst discussing the reasons books for adults were no longer illustrated (with another person, I’m not entirely mad). One argument was that it was too much trouble for publishers to illustrate books. Another, that adults in order to feel like adults must not read books with pictures in. No luscious illustrations or flowery words for grown-ups. Goodness, no.

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Judecca is a fascinating piece of storytelling and a good example of the ways in which the new media universe has changed what is possible and how people tell stories. Judecca is a webcomic that updates more or less weekly and started way back in 2009. It is beautifully, hauntingly illustrated by Noora Heikkilä, and is co-written by her and Jonathan Meecham. Continue reading

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE

Neil Gaiman ISBN 10: 1472200314

One of the reasons that Neil Gaiman is a very interesting writer is the way in which he mixes the mundane and the preternatural. When dredging through the mundane for stories, we all tend to go back to our own lives to pick over. And for this reason I suspect, there are Neil Gaiman stories that look semi-autobiographical on the surface. A couple of the short stories in Smoke and Mirrors give off that illusion. I say illusion because I suspect that stories that seem to (maybe) be about someone who was maybe Neil Gaiman (maybe) in an earlier time of life are no more deeply autobiographical than any story is autobiographical. And all stories are a bit autobiographical. They cannot help but be anything else.

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THE CASUAL VACANCY

J.K. Rowling ISBN 978-1-4087-0420-2

Alright. Yes. Vindictiveness would be standard English, but I wanted to play on The Casual Vacancy, and so I used a -cy ending instead.

But more to the point, vindictiveness is also the standard in J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, her first post-Potter book. This is a very grim, very interesting, very powerful and somewhat disconcerting book. I’ve read some reviewers complain that The Casual Vacancy – being as it is a very adult book about serious and troubling things – is difficult to read because it is written in a style not much different from the style of the Harry Potter books. I’ve read other reviewers complain that without the wonderment of the Potter universe what’s left behind is a grimy world without much redemption. I’ve also read a lot of reviews that sort of flailed around, accusing the prose of being workmanlike or of being overwritten or they accuse the story of being melodramatic or too dull or something, anything to justify a negative feeling about the book. Continue reading

MURDER AND MENDELSSOHN

Kerry Greenwood  ISBN978-1-74237-956-2

It’s murder most musically foul in Kerry Greenwood’s latest novel, Murder and Mendelssohn. Phryne Fisher, the stylish private detective with nerves of steel, keeps her trusty pearl-handled pistol strapped to her silk garter as she investigates not one but two villains plotting to harm those she holds dear.

As with all twenty books in this series, it is the year 1929. Whilst times are changing, the world is still conservative; people know their place and a respectable reputation is everything. Fortunately the rich, titled and beautiful Phryne Fisher makes her own rules, and society gracefully acquiesces to her will whether she is dancing in her undergarments, piloting an aeroplane or apprehending villains. Continue reading