This is a meditation on identity. Or perhaps it's a meditation on finding your identity. Whichever, it is a meditative experience. Omar Sakr's other published works are poetry. Son Of Sin is his first novel and his prose reflects his poetic style. For example, this is a description of a sunset: "...the sun was losing …
Book Review – Gay Bar, Why We Went Out
The author, Jeremy Atherton Lin, is ten years younger than me. Which made reading Gay Bar, Why We Went Out all the more interesting hearing from the perspective of someone who started his gay bar adventures when I was embracing a scene he was still navigating. Plus, his tales take place in LA, San Francisco …
Thoughts on ‘Strangers On a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith
This is not a book review. It's about what I learnt from reading this classic novel and has some elements of critique in it. A month ago I posted a blog about how anything you read influences your work in progress. My current project is written in third-person. All but one of my published works …
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Book Review – They’re a Weird Mob – Nino Culotta
I discovered 'youse' is actually a word! My parents used to use youse as in 'all of youse', and even wrote it in handwritten notes. And like Nino, the main character in They're a Weird Mob, my parents were born in Europe. Early in life I had to teach myself the difference between borrow and …
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Book Review – Anything But Fine by Tobias Madden
I don't usually read Young Adult novels. This book showed up on my socials several times and I browsed, no, I glanced at a bit of information about it. I believed it was a contemporary novel about a rising ballet star who has an accident that changes his life. Well, the last part is correct. …
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Book Review – Desperately Seeking Spinach by Petrina Binney
As the cover says, this is a short story. It is cheap or free depending on your relationship with Amazon. Petrina Binney read the opening of her story during the IQARUS online book conference, and on hearing it, I needed to download it. This is a tongue in cheek take on celebrity and obsession. The …
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Book Review – Art of Magic by KJ
Cath sets the bar high. She expects a lot from her partners, her friends and herself. This is what she learns to let go of in the enjoyable novel, Art Of Magic, by KJ. She also has trust issues as we find when she still doesn't have faith in her mother accepting her sexuality, or …
Book Review – Honeybee by Craig Silvey
I was asked what I was currently reading at an author event. I replied 'Honeybee by Craig Silvey, but it's not a page turner'. As the event was queer focussed, gasps came from the audience. My fellow author and participant in this event, Rebecca Langham, came to my rescue once again as she often does …
‘Boy Swallows Universe’ – Book Review
The first thing you experience when reading Dalton's debut is its prose. The first few chapters seem surreal. A brother writes sentences in thin air. Your end is a dead blue wren. Other images are painted that while poetic, don't make sense. Soon, it finds reality, and a stark one at that. Eli is a …
Book Review – The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
Many reviewers consider this novel a meditation on art. This is true as it's really not a story driven piece. Several times I put this book down for a while to consider what I'd read. But it was never going to be a 'did not finish' book. I had to take it in stages as …
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