If Hawking and Mlodinow are proved to be utterly wrong within the next decade, then I’m sure that, being the consummate scientists that they are, they will thrill to the answer and accede to those that will have used their theories to step up to the next level. In the meantime, I’m all for cracking the champers and toasting the multiverse. There’s so much more to love.
Tag: fiction
A review of Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah
Winter Garden is a novel with many layers. Hannah uses a fanciful fairy tale as the link between a mother and her daughters—this is the key that will unlock the secrets that have been hiding in Nina and Meredith’s mother’s past for decades.
A review of Being Light by Helen Smith
Without a doubt, Smith is a master storyteller. A novel with this jig-saw structure couldn’t possibly work without skill. To make such absurdities as fly-away castles and alien abductions so utterly believable is a testament to Smith’s talent. In less experienced hands this story would have been a farce.
Childhood, Family, School, and Personal Will: David Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green
In Black Swan Green Jason realizes that he contains different personalities but can, through his choices, through facing the truth and taking a stand, determine what his own fundamental character will be.
A review of What happened to Joseph? by T.A.G. Hungerford
Working through the almost intensely Australia flora and fauna are memory, nostalgia, mateship, war and its aftermath – the civilian life that follows, and hope. There are poems and stories that simultaneously celebrate and mourn the aging process, poems and stories that look at the nature of relationships, love, the kind of hate that leads to war and genocide, loss, and the alienation that sits in all of our hearts – between civilisation and our rough animal natures.
A review of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My enjoyment of the literary feel of the book and the tension – drew me in and carried me to about a third in, when the plot began to sag with repetition and sameness. It was then I noticed the Atwood literary formula, ie never use one metaphor when two or three will do, in the same paragraph.
A review of The Grease Monkey’s Tale by Paul Burman
There’s no easy solution or happy ending. Instead there are motifs and stories that lead to other stories and characters that are built upon other characters. The ultimate journey here isn’t to a clean truth – there’s no such thing in The Grease Monkey’s Tale. Instead we end up with the strong sense that everything is story – that life itself between the pages or beyond the book is just another story: “the sound of riverbed pebbles chattering and grinding against the hushing of fast water. Hypnotic.”
A review of Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by Frank Wedekind
Wedekind well knows that extreme emotion represents a danger to its possessor as well as to those around him or her. It can easily be converted into (self) destructive rage. His characters in these two stories are respectively a convict and a prostitute, hence he’s not averse either to embracing the downtrodden and the wretched.
A review of A Stranger Like You by Elizabeth Brundage
Layered over and between each other, these passages of inner thoughts, often told in present tense, second person, lend kaleidoscopic views to the story, hopping back and forth through time and focusing on the unique angle seen by each character.
A review of Best Bet by Laura Pedersen
Pedersen revisits a character who has many of the same insecurities and dilemmas as the rest of us. Hallie is in that awkward, post-college stage—trying to cope with the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood as best she can, while admitting that she’s not ready for any of it!