Comedy is often no laughing matter. It requires a great deal of talent and hard work to get it right, much of it collaborative. It is notoriously difficult to perform. It is a medium that is often undervalued and misperceived as trivial or mere entertainment. When it’s bad it’s bad; when it’s good, we are so busy laughing that we cannot reflect about it afterwards.
Category: Commercial FIction Reviews
A review of Rush by Lisa Patton
Rush is a great read, a gentle-hearted literary novel of the New South telling an eye-opening, entertaining story with a conscious. The book is impeccably well-written and deserves the accolades that are coming its way.
A review of A Body’s Just as Dead by Cathy Adams
Without exception, her characters are fully realized, interesting and complex; each has his or her own voice. They are from the working class and the underclass, and occasionally the criminal class. Their tragi-comic story is engaged with our times and resonates precisely with the national zeitgeist. A Body’s Just as Dead entertains us, enlightens us, moves us. It is a fine novel and a joy to read.
A review of Waiting for You at Midnight by Vicki Salloum
Salloum bravely brings the reader into her fictional psychological and experienced discomfort zone. We follow Arabella into crowded AA meetings, observing frightening declarations, addiction denials and relationship failures. We watch as her broken heart bleeds, and all the while continually hope and pray for Arabella’s redemption.
A review of The Things We Can’t Undo by Gabrielle Reid
Reid’s informative depiction of one such episode should become essential reading within the national high school curriculum and would also provide a great foundation for supervised classroom discussion groups exploring these issues and the consequences of such actions.
A review of A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal
There is never a dull moment throughout Villareal’s novel. I’m not generally the type of reader who’s into vampires, but this novel is on a completely different foundation. Villareal’s detailed portrayals will be very familiar to readers. His gloamings are out there now – they are those celebrities and political leaders that we worship and imitate. This is a book with wide-reaching appeal, which is going to be very very big. You heard it here first.
A review of Someone Like you by Karly Lane
Lane has chosen Saint Albans, a NSW inland settlement located on the Macdonald River on the same latitude as Tuggerah and Central Mangrove fictionalised as Lochway. Lane’s characters are well-defined and likeable. Her narrative leaves an impression of familiarity and association. Using the central figure as an author automatically opened up a vault of her own personal experiences to relate with and enrich the book’s content.
A review of Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan
Anatomy of a Scandal reads like a story ripped from today’s headlines: a prominent man is accused of sexual harassment. I couldn’t put the book down—I actually felt edgy when I wasn’t reading it, almost like the story was an addiction.
A review of Good Neighbors by Joanne Serling
The seven adults in the circle are the most successful members of their families of origin and have more in common with each other than with their relatives. All remember their parents as “hopelessly authoritarian, yet clueless and also uninterested in parenting.” As it turns out, however, one family’s failure at parenting shakes the group to its foundations.
A review of Lucky Or Not Here I Come by Gerry Orz
Lucky Or Not, Here I Come is the debut novel of Gerry Orz, written when he was just fifteen years old. Immediately the reader can see that Orz is a storyteller who keeps his audience engaged and involved. These attributes also translate well into his ventures in filmmaking.