Before writing this review, I reread Catriona Menzies-Pike’s award-winning essay ‘Critic Swallows Book’ (2022), a rare piece of Australian literary criticism with a claim to definitiveness, as it was the first clear articulation of something that was crushingly true about Trent Dalton’s début novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), and its successor, All Our Shimmering Skies (2020). The short version of the essay’s argument is that Dalton’s novels are, in fact, terrible. They are badly written, retrograde, juvenile, hackneyed, mawkish, and preposterous. The deeper issue the essay identifies is their moral complacency, which arises directly from their embrace of platitudes and sentimentality.