Tag: book review

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JENNETTE MCCURDY I’m Glad My Mom Died.

My latest review, I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Hollywood child star, Jennette McCurdy, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. This one took hold of me in strange ways. Memoir is not my favourite genre and I'd never heard of McCurdy but she writes powerfully and in the voice of the small child, betrayed by the one she loves and trusts the most. It is compelling from the start, where the title lets us know she frees herself, to the end, where we find out how and when and what came next. And laugh-out-loud funny too. Hats off.

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The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor

The characters in The Late Americans are in their mid-twenties – elite graduate students in the arts at a mid-western university town: Seamus the poet, dancers Noah and Fatima, Stafford the painter. This is a coming of age novel, a reckoning with adulthood which may have begun in adolescence but is still in progress. It is a fraught time.

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The In-Between, Christos Tsiolkas

Reading Christos Tsiolkas is a bodily experience. Smells, tastes, touch inhabit the pages. When a character makes the sign of the Cross, there is a pull to mimic the quick touches of thumb, index and middle fingers to the forehead and abdomen, right and left shoulders. Tsiolkas’s characters celebrate their bodies – they are a source of delight, to their owners and to lovers. And he writes good sex.

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ANNA KATE BLAIR The Modern

This is a novel to savour, its language crystalline, its acute observations tumbling one after the other. In the opening paragraph, Sophia sits at her computer terminal ‘shining the sentences’ for display labels. An Australian, she has moved to the east coast of America where she completed her PhD and now she is nearing the end of a post-doctoral fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Things she would have said herself, Catherine Therese

Catherine Therese follows up her memoir The Weight of Silence with a novel featuring an abrasive yet sympathetic protagonist. My mother thought Catch-22 was one of the funniest books ever written. My dad thought it one of the saddest. Things She Would Have Said Herself reminded me of their observations, careening between tragedy and hilarity.

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Astute observations of a locked-down world

Ronnie Scott’s second novel explores themes of abandonment, attachment and the idea of home. Characterised from the beginning by a sense of uncertainty, Shirley is a novel where anything can happen, and probably will. Names are ambiguous, sexuality is fluid, relationships are impermanent; the world is in flux.

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Beat in her blood, J.K.Ullrich (Wild Type Press 2022)

Set in Baltimore in the near future, medical science is outrunning regulation and a black market of robotic limbs and implants has developed for HPM – human performance modification – servicing a willing population. So willing, people are ready to chance their luck with shady doctors moonlighting in back-alley operations. 

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Marshmallow, Victoria Hannan

After the success of her debut, Kokomo, in 2020, Victoria Hannan’s second novel is another study of friendship. Its five characters have been friends since university. They are now in their thirties and each is grappling with a pre mid-life but post first-flush weariness. But this weariness is not ennui; through their shifting points of view, Hannan brings us their shared sorrow.

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The Airways, Jennifer Mills

Someone recently tweeted that if we gave male violence the same attention as Covid, men would have been under curfew for ever. Published in 2021, this prescient novel deals with both themes, taking the sickness inhabiting the world as an extended metaphor. Though the book’s few time-markers place it in separate periods in the millenium’s teens, the before times, both the virus and the impact of male predation are woven throughout as real and malevolent presences.