Five teenagers are connecting in an online forum, for young people who doubt their paternity, without knowing their identities. They feel comfortable sharing their fears. When four of them realise they attend the same school it is awkward as they are less than friends. They each have their issues. Emma although feisty needs hearing aids, Read More …
I am a big fan of Caroline Overington’s early novels. No Place Like Home is one of my favourite books. However, since that one, her works of fiction have not engaged me in the same way that her previous ones did. She seemed to change tack, from stories based in social justice issues, set in Read More …
In Sally Piper’s second novel, The Geography of Friendship, she tackles grittier issues. The old hierarchy of school friends continues when Lisa calls Nicole and Samantha and asks them to retrace the steps of the trek they took as young women over twenty years before. The layers of these women, as they were at school Read More …
I read The Fortress by S.A. Jones at the same time that I started watching the award-winning TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale, and was reading my son A Wrinkle in Time, which has just been made into a movie. There was much overlap in the issues raised in each of these. They are all based Read More …
In Danger: A Memoir of Family and Hope by Josepha Dietrich, is just that. She details her diagnosis of breast cancer at thirty-five-years-old, four years after her mother’s death from the same disease. She had a baby at the time, and both she and her son had nearly died at his birth. He had complications Read More …
James Moloney is a prolific writer for all ages from young children to adults. I have read a few of his books for young adults and some of his fantasy novels. His latest, The Love That I Have, is quite different to these. It is written for adults, but the main protagonist is sixteen-years-old, so Read More …
Christian White’s debut, The Nowhere Child, is a great thriller. He writes the main character Kimberley in the first person, and captures her very well, which not all men can do. She is thirty when she is approached and told she may have been abducted when she was two-years-old, and Stuart, the man telling her Read More …
I have read most of Liz Byrski’s fiction and enjoyed them all. Her latest, A Month of Sundays was no exception. Four women from an online book club, who have never met in person, agree to spend five weeks together in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Alarm bells were ringing! They are all Read More …
Boy Swallows Universe, the debut novel for Walkley award winning journalist, Trent Dalton is the most dynamic book I have read in a long time. As you would expect, beautifully written, it covers issues of drug use and trafficking, domestic violence and brutality at an extreme level, but told through the eyes of teenaged Eli, Read More …
Second Sight is the second novel for Aoife Clifford, and I initially found it hard to get into because of all the characters, storylines and timelines but once I was in I was hooked. Eliza has escaped Kinsale, a town where the ‘population … expands and folds depending on the weather and locals know never Read More …
