Karen Chisholm takes a look at the third of Leigh Redhead's series of detective novels featuring her ex-stripper Simone Kirsch. She finds that Cherry Pie "takes a slightly darker, more edgy direction than the first two...we're definitely moving from totally light, funny and riotous into something slightly edgier and harder. Both Peepshow and Rubdown were great books, Cherry Pie is hinting at an even more interesting future."
You would think that Dorothy Porter's new verse novel, El Dorado, would have received more reviews by now. Maybe reviewers baulk at the idea of having to examine such a hybrid, thinking it toohard, or inaccessible. Anyway, Maggie Ball has taken up the challenge on the "M/C Reviews" website, and finds it "a linguistically powerful novel, which is both internally effective and at the same time, greater than the sum of its parts."
In the Online edition of "Greater Kashmir", Kala Krishnan Ramesh enthuses about Margo Lanagan's short story collection, Black Juice: "Only rarely does the writing inside books actually warrant the fulsome praise lavished on it by blurb and shout lines; as far as Margo Lanagan's Black Juice is concerned, 'breathtaking', 'dazzling', 'wonderful, 'exceptional' don't exaggerate. Lanagan's way with words is breathtaking; she spells them into magic, she cajoles them into chores, she commands them into soldiery, she sings them, she speaks them, she dances them, and they in turn cast an unfaltering spell over the reader. It is impossible not to recognise Margo Lanagan as a words-person who has laboured long, intent and persistently at the craft of languaging stories."
