Buongiorno is full of easy and delicious meals that make for a lovely family brekkie on the weekend, or something special and different for guests who like being entertained in the am (if you have young kids, its a lot more…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A Review of A Writer’s Guide to Queries, Pitches & Proposals by Moira Anderson Allen
If you have a serious piece of work like a novel to sell, The Writer’s Guide to Queries, Pitches & Proposals is a necessity in order to ensure you maximise your chances of getting your book read by an agent or publisher.…
A Review of At the Crossroads by Frankie Schelly
Through the eyes of these four women many of the controversial issues of today’s Church are discussed. Schelly perceives accurately the crisis of an institution built heavily on medieval theology inadequate for today’s social problems. Women are accepted as equals…
A review of Going Home by Michael de Valle
But it is when de Valle brings death itself directly into the story that his prose really shines. The complex relationship between life and death are the centre of action in “Two slices of blue”, a story about a child who is given back his eyesight from a donor’s corneas. The tightness of the narrative is superbly handled as de Valle moves back and forth between the moment of death/damage, a wife’s realisation that she’s lost her husband, and a parent’s experience of their child’s accident and subsequent operation.
A Review of Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The whole tone is a bit Alice in Wonderland like, and even has a talking cat, silly songs, cryptic messages, characters that metamorphosis, and the kind of almost surreal play between waking and dreaming, life and death, shadow and light which made…
A Review of French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene
French Spirits begins with the earth’s axis tilting away from the sun and sliding “down into the narrow pit of gray winter months” and ends in the Burgundian winter mists, the warmth of life and human celebration contrasting with the eternal…
A Review of Timepieces by Drusilla Modjeska
For readers not intimately familiar with Modjeska’s work, Australian art and literature, or interested in the problems of creating a work of art/literature as an artist/writer, the book will be hard to identify with and overly intellectual. Nevertheless, the essays…
A Review of Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
So often novels have style but little substance and often there is a struggle to express substance but the project is doomed without style. Here is a book with both in abundance and a sense of poetry that illumines both…
A Review of Dreaming Water by Gail Tsukiyama
At times the narrative was almost too pretty for its subject – too sentimental. As a reader, I wanted more anger, more pain, more depths into Hana and Cate at least. They are both so good, so radiant, even when…
A Review of J M Coetzee’s Disgrace
David Lurie is a man who has, at fifty two, sorted his life and his sexuality out nicely. He has a tidy job teaching poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, a once a week visit to a discrete…