PositiveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)Clark’s collection of fiction braids the real and the surreal. Perspectives are skewed playfully but an intent to explore serious matters often lies beneath the whimsy ... Clark’s prose-style is unembellished; her sentences often short and blunt, but their economy lends power to the story ... As with any collection of fiction, there are some offerings that won’t resonate with all readers. Some tales are not as strong as the others, don’t feel quite finished or seem as though they are excerpts of longer pieces. But regardless of their external settings, or whether they are social realist or surreal or a combination of both, most of the tales in She is Haunted are seen through a prism of loss and absence ... The prose on the whole is unspectacular; understated and at times underwhelming rather than techno-boosted by imagery or any other fancy poetics, but by unending and perverting expectations, Clark controls her narratives, ensuring that the reader’s curiosity is piqued. Most of her stories have surprising, eyebrow-raising elements. You may think you know where she is going, but to her credit, Clark often swerves into an unexpected detour. Sometimes, she just leads you into cul-de-sacs ... Her vision and writing of the female experience is curious and expansive, conveyed as it is through these short fictions that take in the messiness of life and arbitrariness of death. The connective tissue between these stories is simply and deeply the bonds of human relationships, whether tenuous or durable ... not a collection with neat endings arrayed with characters whose motivations are easy to discern. It’s tempting when first looking at the cover to position it the right way up so one is looking at it in landscape format but as the book reminds us, nothing in life is that straight-forward and served on an even plane.
Ella Baxter
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)Readers beware, there are suicide mentions that may be triggering and various scenes that may arouse discomfort, disgust or nervous tittering, but there’s no judgement or moral censure by Baxter of the various proclivities of participants of the BDSM scene ... Sex aside, there’s also much love in New Animal. The book is an unabashed celebration of non-nuclear families ... Baxter’s writing is so forthright, her protagonist so raw and unmediated in her feelings, thoughts and flailing at the \'arrowhead of sorrow\' that New Animal makes for compelling reading ... It’s an intense, viscerally affecting book, with the quotient of tenderness to violence in an equal scale.
Adam Thompson
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Punchy and uncompromising ... may be fictional, but there’s no doubting the emotional truth and grit at the core of these stories. It’s a potent collection by an author who mined the richness of both his ancestry, his work within the Aboriginal community and his island home for tales about black and white relations, colonialism, class friction, racism and the despoilment of heritage and environment ... Indigenous culture and politics – all the blurry nuances of categorisation and identity – are explored with forensic delicacy that belies the power behind the hand ... Tonally, Born Into This moves with fluid versatility, from righteous anger to sly satire ... With its wit, intelligence and restless exploration of the parameters of race and place, Thompson’s debut collection is a welcome addition to the canon of Indigenous Australian writers of the calibre of Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, Tara June Winch and Ellen van Neerven ... It serves as a salient reminder that there is no monolithic Aboriginal Australian; the book thrums with a cacophony of voices and experiences. Some of his characters hide their vulnerability and loss amid fronts of machismo, others are more like tinnies bobbing in a raging ocean beyond their control. Like the native trees being razed, they were \'born into a hostile world and expected to thrive\'. This book bears witness to their struggles.
Claire Thomas
PositiveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)I found Ivy, the middle character, nestled as she is between the more complex Margot and Summer, to be a bit of a disappointment in terms of characterisation. Thomas does a disservice to her by giving her a fairly anodyne role in the book ... Overall, Thomas’ writing is a pleasure to read: spry, confident and coolly intelligent ... Beckett’s play is used as a catalyst for recollection of events in the protagonists’ own lives. However, this device can be a little too heavily relied upon for progressing the narrative ... Of course Thomas is illustrating the truism of art reflecting life but the connective tissue of symbolic incidents between performance and reality does feel a little too easily matched up.
