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Fiction

Stephanie Owen Reeder reviews eleven new children's picture books

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March 2011, no. 329

The latest crop of children’s picture books highlights the ability of this versatile genre to cover everything from the ever-popular animal tale, to sparkling stories about fairies, to introspective contemplations on the meaning of life.

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Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith

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March 2011, no. 329

Owen Graves, by occupation a house wrecker and by nature a collector, is summoned to the world’s tallest building by the president of Chicago’s First Equitable Insurance Company...

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This Too Shall Pass by S.J. Finn

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March 2011, no. 329

From Kafka on, we can trace a line of narratives dealing with alienation in the modern workplace, with forces seen and unseen overwhelming individual volition. S.J. Finn’s first novel makes a humorous contribution to this tradition.

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The Raven's Heart by Jesse Blackadder

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March 2011, no. 329
Mary Queen of Scots, widow of the youthful French king, returns from her long exile in France to a country bereft of pageantry... ... (read more)

The Simple Death by Michael Duffy

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March 2011, no. 329

Michael Duffy, perhaps best known as a newspaper columnist and contrarian, and co-presenter with Paul Comrie-Thomson ...

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Black Glass by Meg Mundell

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March 2011, no. 329

Black Glass, speculative fiction with a sentimental edge, explores a nation controlled by an intrusive surveillance culture and subliminal social engineering...

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Chasing Odysseus by S.D. Gentill

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April 2011, no. 330

S.D. Gentill’s Chasing Odysseus provides a fresh perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey for young readers. It focuses on the adventures of Hero and her three brothers – Machaon, Lycon, and Cadmus – during the fall of Troy and on their subsequent pursuit of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, throughout his legendary voyages. The siblings are raised among the Herdsmen of Ida, who are ...

Darkwater by Georgia Blain & This is Shyness by Leanne Hall

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April 2011, no. 330

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervadesthese two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain...

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Prime Cut by Alan Carter

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April 2011, no. 330

Prime Cut sounds like the title of a glossy Hollywood thriller. Fortunately, Alan Carter’s début novel is a gritty and engrossing look at crime and racism in a small Western Australian town. Cato Kwong is a Chinese-Australian detective who has been working in the lowly ‘Stock Squad’ since a disastrous arrest some years before. In the novel’s openin ...

Paris Dreaming by Anita Heiss

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April 2011, no. 330

Having been ‘completely screwed over by men’, Libby Cutmore is on a self-imposed and inevitably short-lived ‘man-fast’. Although she loves her job at the (fictional) National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, memories of New York adventures with her friend Lauren (Manhattan Dreaming, 2010), and Libby’s own sense of exclusion now that her two closest ...

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