I’ve just finished reading Boy Swallows Universe and my heart is still racing. From the beginning that is an ending to the ending that is a beginning, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Admittedly I did just tear through it in four days in preparation to see the stage adaptation this week but honestly that impetus  wasn’t needed – I genuinely wanted to read it in every spare minute I had. Eli Bell is a teenager growing up through the 80s and 90s in suburban Brisbane. […]

All our shimmering skies was beautiful. The descriptions were vivid, the world described alive with colour and feeling and trauma and the watchful eye of a Superego-like sky. The story of Molly, the 12 year old gravedigger’s daughter who thinks her heart is turning to stone because her family is cursed, takes place in Darwin, Australia and it follows the structure of a good old-fashioned quest: a magical object, a walkabout, a wizard, a curse and the struggle to reverse the curse. Molly is not […]

She has a tendency to call dibs on my books, add them to her shelves/beside pile/endless stash of my previously loaned books, and I never see them again. I mean, I’ve made sure that I’m getting them in the will, so there’s that, but every now and then I think I’d like to see one or two of them again before her passing (especially since the women on her side are exceptionally long-lived). Trent Dalton’s second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies, reads like a fable […]