Category Archives: Reviews

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The Breakfast Club Meets Armageddon

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WE ALL LOOKED UPweall
Tommy Wallach
Simon & Schuster, March 2015, RRP $14.95

What happens when you take an over-achiever, a jock, some stoners, and girl with a ‘reputation’, and then throw in an asteroid that will probably end life as we know it? The answer is We All Looked Up, the debut novel from Brooklyn-based writer and musician Tommy Wallach.

In a time when the Young Adult dystopian novel seem to have taken over the world, it is refreshing to read a story that has the human reaction to the threat as the main focus, rather than the threat itself. There is no great autocratic conspiracy, no government-sanctioned virus that has escaped from a secret lab, just a high probability that the asteroid that is heading close to Earth may be on a collision course. This possible impending cataclysm is used a vehicle to explore how we would react if we knew we only had a few months to live, not only on an individual level but as a society as a whole. Continue reading

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Where There Are No Patterns…

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bentos_sketchbookBENTO’S SKETCHBOOK
John Berger
Allen & Unwin, March 2015, RRP $29.99

How to review this book? Where to begin? In what mode to work? I have looked around at a few other reviews, and I wonder a little if most of them have missed the point. Certainly, in some instances that is to be expected. A review of Bento’s Sketchbook in a magazine of art will focus mostly on the beautiful inked and painted work, and the high quality of reproductions. Such a venue should be allowed to miss the point, or rather, they should be allowed and expected to focus on other points of special relevance.

But I wonder a little at reviews in more wordy outlets that have focused entirely on John Berger’s honest close-up examination of everyday life, or his concerned, vibrant discourse on global issues of greed and capitalism run amok. I think those reviewers have missed the particular point they might have arrived at, and how am I to go about trying to explain why, and how, and what the point was anyway.

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Rust, Dust…and Blood

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9781922182838DAY BOY
Trent Jamieson
Text Publishing, June 2015, RRP $29.99

Day Boy is a dark and dusty dystopian tale following a year in the life of Mark, a Day Boy, living in a regional Australian town ruled by The Masters. Following in the bloody footsteps of The Passage by Justin Cronin and The Quick by Lauren Owen it is a literary vampire novel in which the V-word is never mentioned, not in the blurb on the back and hardly, if ever, between the covers–for fear, I think that the V-word may frighten away less adventurous readers influenced by the anti-vampire prejudice arising from the Twilight Saga. Continue reading

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The Magi Can Go Home Too, Everyone Can Go Home

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ThisHouseIsNotForSale_smTHIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE
E.C. Osondu
Granta, June 2015, RRP $29.99

E.C. Osondu second story collection, This House is Not For Sale is a collection of short stories surrounding the residents of the Family House.  It is a slim volume that packs a punch, provoking thoughts about the nature of truth and story.  Characters and events take on a mythic quality as they are related by the unnamed, unidentified narrator.

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School Finds: The Fox, The Captain’s Doll and The Ladybird by DH Lawrence

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DH LawrenceThe Fox/The Captain’s Doll/The Ladybird
D.H. Lawrence
Penguin Classics 2006, First Published 1923, RRP $24.99

When I began teaching Year 12 Literature I inherited a horrid list of texts. Often the VCE Literature list reflects the interests of old ladies, jaded and bitter about the world. One of the texts I had foist upon me was Thea Astley’s collection of short stories Hunting the Wild Pineapple. It was as horrendous as it sounds. The problem was that the students had bought it and it was in their lockers, some had even read it. But I couldn’t do it. It was repulsive and I felt like the bromine poisoning from the over consumption of pineapple would surely end my Literature journey. So I sent it to the compost and made a late change.

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

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SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORIUM Book Cover SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORIUM
Caitlin Doughty
Allen & Unwin, RRP $27.99
April 2015

Death. It’s not a topic most people like to linger on. And those who do perhaps feel they are indulging in morbid and shameful thoughts. Our modern Western societies seem to have done away with death, making it as foreign and invisible as possible so that the living can get on with living… and with spending money.

For me, however, death has always held a fascination. My bookshelves contain probably more books dealing with death and burial practices than might be considered decent. And perhaps the less said about my obsession with the Black Death and with transi tombs, the better.

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Loud and Dreadful Sound, which Sky and Ocean Smote

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FloodOfFire_smFLOOD OF FIRE
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray, May 2015, RRP $29.99; eBook RRP $16.99

Flood of Fire is the final book in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and concerns the first Opium War, the eventual Chinese defeat, and the seizure of Hong Kong by English forces.  Sorry, um, spoilers I guess?  It introduces some further new characters in Kesri Singh, the brother of Deeti, Bahram Modi’s widow Shireen, and Neel’s son Raju.  We also catch up again with Zachary Reid, who’s had a bad time of it since last we saw him, after taking the fall for events at the end of Sea of Poppies.

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It’s Only Blood

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HeadscarvesAndHymens_smHEADSCARVES AND HYMENS: WHY THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS A SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Mona Eltahawy
Hachette, April 2015, RRP $29.99

It’s hard to not be struck by the universality of sexism and sexual abuse while reading Headscarves and Hymens, a snapshot of sexual politics in the Middle East. Eltahawy paints a picture that is all too familiar. Women mustn’t travel alone, or even walk the streets, for their own “protection”. Wives who are beaten by husbands are asked, “What did you do to provoke him?” And it seems that women everywhere walk the tightrope between purity and wantonness, virgin and slut. You’ll be judged for what you wear, and blamed for provoking any abuse you experience.

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Writers Never Show Their Teeth

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THE STORY OF MY TEETH
Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Granta, $24.99
April 2015

Story of my teeth

Firstly, if clowns and questionable dentistry are not your thing I am just going to warn you that there is a scene in Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth containing both creepy clowns and discussion of teeth and dentistry—enough so that you will be falling asleep with your mouth firmly closed and keeping one eye on all large projection screens in the near future. However, do not let that put you off entering the world of Gustavo ‘Highway’ Sánchez, main narrator of The Story of My Teeth and self-proclaimed best auctioneer in the world, who on the first page announces that he wishes to tell the story of his teeth. This tale is also Highway’s life story–and not just for the fact that teeth generally being in one’s mouth throughout one’s life imply that the teeth and the owner of the mouth have the same story.

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The Trolls Go Marching One-By-One

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Troll Mountain Book Cover Troll Mountain
Matthew Reilly
Pan Macmillan Australia, RRP $24.99
June 2015

A few years ago I travelled very briefly through Scandinavia. In Norway, I embarked on a train journey through mountainous forest and snowy terrain to get to the town of Voss, nestled at the head of a fjord like a punctus at the end of an exclamation point. The town is horseshoed in by steep hillsides and the fjord itself is bordered by sheer cliffs of mottled grey stone—as fjords generally are.
It was here that I realised trolls were real. And if they were real, then in all probability—as I’d long suspected—so too were elves and other fairy creatures.

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A Painted Ship upon a Painted Ocean

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River of Smoke (2)RIVER OF SMOKE
Amitav Ghosh
John Murray, June 2011, RRP $27.95

The second in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, River of Smoke first takes up some 40 or 50 years after the events of Sea of Poppies, to reveal the ultimate fate of several of the characters.  Since the end of the last book left things up in the air*, this choice threw me a bit when I started it.  Perhaps I have a tendency to become complacent when reading certain things, so am particularly confused when shown an unexpected curve ball.  I wondered if, perhaps, this second book took place entirely at this juncture.  Fortunately for my state of mind, the novel does quickly return to the 1830s and the continuing development of the first Opium War.

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Transformation Through The Words Of Desire

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Book cover for The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine by Krissy KneenTHE ADVENTURES OF HOLLY WHITE AND THE INCREDIBLE SEX MACHINE
Krissy Kneen
Text Publishing, April 2015, RRP $29.99

I confess. I adore Angela Carter. I adore her overblown, pretentious style mixed with her joyous embrace of the lewd and taboo. I adore that even when she failed, you know that she failed with every ounce of inspiration on the page. And yet, I was initially hesitant to read The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, a book influenced by Carter’s least accessible book, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman; a book that exhausts me just at the thought of cracking the cover.

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