RaveThe Australian Book Review...I can report that, apart from a couple of typos (though, if you ask me, ‘slipped’ is a more evocative word with three Ps) and one or two lazy descriptions, such as dubbing rugby league legend Reg Gasnier’s sidestep ‘a kind of poetry’, James’s prose barely has a scratch on it ... He might label the trilogy ‘unreliable’, but I don’t believe him for a minute ... James isn’t so coy. Certainly, he provides his readers with cute, wholesome stories about antics in the bushes, backyards and streets – billycart races, snake confrontations, swimming, sunburn and lollies – simple elements that, if left in their crude form, would amount to sentimentality and little more. But that doesn’t happen with James’s memoir because it contains intricate psychological wiring. He is a sad, clever funny-man, an observant loner, a dreamy only child whose father died too soon, someone who suspects in early boyhood that there may be shortcomings in his nature and worries himself into a state of feyness about it.
