Rhiza Edge
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Book title: Flip by Rebecca Fraser
Reviewer: Brittany Kempaiah
Flip tells the story of Denim, a kid looking for a home, and a way to process the grief of losing his mother and the life he had with her. While it is a story about loss, and fitting in, and most beautifully, it is a story about the power of found things—one that explores the concepts of renewal in a way young people can understand.
Flip explores several subjects important for young people to consider and discuss. While the experience of grief plays a large role, it also explores the innate desire young people have to fit in while paradoxically standing out. It touches on the idea of bullying and the motivations that hide behind the confronting and unfeeling actions of...
Hardie Grant Books
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Book title: The Sea in the Metro by Jayne Tuttle
Reviewer: Charlotte Snedden
Poignant, funny, tragic and enjoyably crude, Jayne Tuttle’s The Sea in the Metro manages to deeply explore challenging concepts in an engaging, raw reflection on her time living in Paris. Jane has given birth to her and her husband's first child (lovingly referred to as the ‘Chunk’) in a country far from their family. Here, the constant rush of people and ever evolving art scene has left her struggling to stay afloat both financially and creatively. Attempting to write a novel in between family and financial commitments leaves her constantly stressed, impacting her relationships as she tries to navigate a different culture with her newfound motherhood.
Despite...
Scribner UK
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Book title: Since the World is Ending by Indyana Schneider
Reviewer: Sarah Cupitt
Since the World is Ending is a visceral translation for the architecture of feeling.
I have never been seduced by a book before, and I devoured its entirety within a day because of its inherent pace and the urgent pull of its prose. ‘Since The World Is Ending’ inhabits a sustained emotional chord that manages to articulate the unspoken language of the heart with an absolutely brilliant clarity and force. This is a book that demands attention, insisting on being felt as much as it is read.
Maya’s night and day create a rhythm that frequently mimics a musical score, employing cadence and dissonance to amplify the emotional stakes of her life pulled...
Transit Lounge
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Book title: The Maskeys by Stuart Everly-Wilson
Reviewer: Jelena Curic
I once had a neighbour who got mad at us for dumping grass cuttings on his lawn. In the end, there were no hard feelings; we still shared a drink at the street Christmas party, he didn’t burn down our house.
In Stuart Everly-Wilson’s The Maskeys, the neighbours are the kind that you do not want to piss off, and the grass they deal with is not being dumped on anyone's yard, more kept way out in the mountains under a watchful eye.
Australian readers can’t get enough of what goes on in small country towns and especially if that town has a crime family that has a stranglehold on it. Everly-Wilson gives us a family that is so dysfunctional it makes your husband's...
ABC Books
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Book title: Twelve Golden Gifts by Spiri Tsintziras
Reviewer: Lathalia Song
Author Spiri Tsintziras offers ‘Twelve Golden Gifts’ is this new hybrid novel, working in the space between memoir and self-help. Readers are gifted with rich detail, first and foremost are the depictions of food: salmon, steak, colourful veggies flavoured by garlic, olive oil and heat. No, this is not a recipe book, although I did wish to know more!
As the reader, you are invited to Spiri’s friends & family tables, as Spiri and her husband George navigate caring for their elderly parents through lockdowns, dementia and care home transitions. There’s even a helpful list of tips at the end of the book for carers of elderly parents, that explain the...
Ventura Press
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Book title: Be a Good Girl, Valerie by Marcia van Zeller
Reviewer: Kirsten J. West
Marcia van Zeller’s Be a Good Girl, Valerie is one of the most thought-provoking fictional texts you’ll read this year.
Zeller’s protagonist Valerie is an ex-journalist in her sixties who has resigned herself to anonymity and who limits her interactions with anything beyond her computer screen. This changes when two young women appear in Valerie’s life, with two different predatory situations that require her intervention and experience to navigate. Finding her voice and her courage, Valerie becomes entwined in a sexual harassment claim that threatens not only her own crumbling career, but forces her to confront old demons that she has ignored. Her journey...
Walker Books
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Book title: The Keeper of the Octopus by Neridah McMullin
Reviewer: Charlotte Snedden
Despite a significant portion of Australians living near the water, it can be difficult to introduce younger audiences to the current struggles our native aquatic ecosystems are facing. Neridah McMullin addresses these challenging concepts in her highly engaging children’s book, The Keeper of the Octopus.
After Pippy Cocklebiddy’s mother has passed away, she is left struggling with feelings of grief and abandonment as she waits for her father to return home from the sea. Surrounded by the ocean, Pippy explores her local surroundings accompanied by her numerous collections of local friends and animals, being rescued after falling from her ship by a...
Wakefield Press
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Book title: The Missing Photograph by Christopher Race
Reviewer: Dr. Benjamin D. Muir
I delight in bizarre books, and I have read many. I would go so far as to say that I have read so many books that are intentionally unorthodox (and often marketed as thus) that most forms of writing one might reasonably determine are formally or conceptually novel (no pun intended) for the sake of novelty fail to register to me as thus. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them. I delight in them. It’s very hard, however, to incite me to registering a piece of writing as novel or inventive, especially where nonfiction and essays are concerned. Much like the eight tones and twelve semitones in Western musical composition, the range of human hearing from...
Fremantle Press
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Book title: Trapped! by Julia Lawrinson
Reviewer: Myra A.
In her latest book, acclaimed children’s author Julia Lawrinson rekindles the heartening rescue story of the Italian miner Modesto Varischetti, who was entombed in the mines of Western Australia in 1907. What makes Trapped! an endearing novel is that it is told through the lens of the miner’s son. We journey with the young Giuseppe — Joe, as he is referred to in the book — from Gorno, Italy, where his circumstances living with a mistreating uncle compel his papà to take him along, to Bonnie Vale, Western Australia. There, Joe navigates life as an Italian schoolboy learning the language of the Britishers, while his papà makes a living in the mines.
The tale of Modesto’s rescue has...