In "The Age", James Ley considers The Boat by Nam Le to be an "impressive fiction debut."
And in the same paper, Judith Armstrong is impressed by Sophie Cunningham's second novel Bird. As is James Ley in "The Australian" who finds the novel a "family myth writ large".
Nicola Walker gets emotional in her review of Debra Adelaide's novel The Household Guide to Dying in "The Sydney Morning Herald". But in "The Australian", Kathy Hunt seems rather disappointed with the novel: "Adelaide has written a humorous novel that is not funny."
Stephen Oliver's new collection of poetry, Harmonic, has been reviewed in "Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature" by Nicholas Reid, and Oliver has reproduced the review on his website: "...it is full of such moments of luminosity, as it is of landscape newly and freshly seen. Lyricism, if less present than in some of Oliver's earlier works, is thoroughly disciplined, and when released, thoroughly appropriate and beautifully realised. Harmonic is a major achievement, and were I still teaching, it would have a place on my courses on twentieth century poetry. It deserves to be widely appreciated."
In "The Courier-Mail", Heidi Maier finds The Boat by Name Le to be "ambitious and compelling". Stephen Davenport, in "The Independent Weekly", was not impressed with The Steele Diaries by Wendy James, but seems to have completely missed the point. The commenters get really stuck into him. This strikes me as another case of the wrong reviewer for the book.
Short Notices
Paul Allen, in "The Coventry Telegraph" reviews Kittyhawk Down by Garry Disher.
Kimbofo, on her "Reading Matters" weblog, found Sorry by Gail Jones "disappointing", but was more taken with How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland.
David Pullar, on the "PopMatters" website points out that The Good Parents by Joan London is "stylistically simple and rather conventional."
Despite some reservations, Dan Dervin concludes that The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser "delivers on its intriguing premises".
