In a formally experimental conceit that tips its hat to B. S. Johnson and Ali Smith, this is a novel of two halves printed back to back and upside down ... This is a novel about the immigrant experience ... Early on in this section, Lyle drops another hint about the book’s structure. “Which comes first, the future or the past?” he asks ... It’s an explicit signal to link the two parts of this book, to see the horrifying endgame of Minna’s seemingly benign orientalism ... This is just another point of connection between what seem on the face to be two very different stories, but whose power lies in the imaginative work the reader has to do to link them, to find clues to the future in the past. It’s a brilliant use of negative space, and contributes to the lasting power of this fine and stereoscopic contemplation of the migrant experience.

Each work teaches us how to read it, engaging more or less with formal or genre conventions, and thereby shaping our understanding. With her new book...Michelle de Kretser asks us to shift from the familiar ... Whether you begin with Lili or Lyle, the range and verbal pleasures of de Kretser’s considerable gifts are compelling. Both sections explore themes of gender, race, and displacement ... The relationship between Lili and Lyle...is intuitive, rather than overtly drawn ... De Kretser captures with luminous specificity Lili’s experiences as a young woman in provincial France in the early Eighties ... Lili gradually awakens to the complexities of race and class, and in these moments of heightened awareness de Krester’s biting sense of humor is often on full display ... De Kretser is a wonderful writer, and woefully underrated in this country. Though her skewering satire is pointed and painful, her gallows humor keeps the reader smiling.

Slyly intelligent ... It’s typical of De Kretser’s sophistication that she leaves the link between these narratives entirely up to you – even the order in which they are to be read is left to the individual reader, given the book’s reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design ... Lili’s story unfolds as a coming-of-age vignette portraying the lonely restlessness of unfocused sexual desire and shapeless creative ambition. Regular moments of comedy erupt ... Yet there’s steel, too ... There’s a certain riddling quality here. While the doomy tendency of Lyle’s segment all but snuffs out the heady sense of possibility captured in Lili’s thread, the book’s overriding sense of anger and alarm also mingles with satirical glee. Even if she obviously has the apocalyptic drift of the present in sight, De Kretser passes on to the reader the inescapable feeling that she’s also having fun, in this engaging amalgam of lament and warning shot.

Michelle de Kretser’s fiction does more than beckon us in; it requires us to show up. The reward is room to wonder in both senses of the word. But her new novel demands tactile participation ... There’s a whiff of gimmick about it, but also that rarest of high-literary delights: play. And knowing that we’re responsible for the shape this book takes makes us all the more attentive – alert to wormholes and echoes, and de Kretser’s briar wit ... Every page of [Lili's] story feels charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch; a lurking wallop. It’s magnificent, peerless writing ... De Kretser paints a burlesque – a comedy with a rictus face ... To begin Scary Monsters, you must turn your unfavoured half of the book upside down. It’s a tidy, hardworking metaphor ... Lyle and Lili’s stories may read like counterweights, but the truest monster of this book is the possibility that there’s only one way to read it: our complacency and its terrifying punchline.

Depending on which end of the reversible book you start at, you are either plunged into the slightly noirish reminiscences of an Asian Australian woman looking back on her time as a trainee teacher in France, or a dystopian satire about an Asian couple negotiating Australian values and aspirations in a Melbourne of the near future ... In the nostalgia-tinged half of Scary Monsters, De Kretser explores the exuberance, inventiveness, energy and silliness of youth, the intensity of friendships, the lustful longings for intimacy and the manner in which young women are forced to negotiate ever-present threats ... De Kretser’s satire is close to the bone ... We can choose which 'novel' to read first, and it doesn’t really matter which: discontinuity is built into the very structure of Scary Monsters. Such dislocation is echoed by the lives of migrants. But the author is also making a wider literary point: that novels don’t have to contain continuous narratives, or demonstrate a consistency of style. In De Kretser’s writing, plot lines often thin to the point of vanishing, and lives are not joined up. We, the readers, can join the dots if we choose ... Some may find this aspect of the novel irritating; for others, it will be invigorating. Michelle de Kretser excels at wrongfooting her readers. Scary Monsters is a provocative and exhilarating game of snakes and ladders.

The novel’s reversible format, with different covers on each side, invites us to choose which narrative to read first and, in so doing, de Kretser asks what is most important: the past or the future? ... The casual racism and treatment of migrants Lili witnesses in France serves as a precursor to de Kretser’s terrifying vision of a surveillance state in Australia that detains asylum seekers 'on an offshore island forever'. In this part of the novel, de Kretser allows her scary monsters free rein, while her evocative descriptions are replaced with cold exposition ... De Kretser clearly relishes demonstrating how close we are to this dystopian future where 'government hatespokespersons' dominate the media and a 'climate no-policy' has already wreaked havoc. What lingers in the mind, however, are the connections she makes between past prejudices and a future society devoid of values or compassion.

One side of the book belongs to Lili, and the other side to Lyle. Their two stories are distinctly standalone, yet thematically conjoined ... Scary Monsters is an account of vulnerability, exploitation, alienation, and the construction of meaning from context. Using the dichotomies of fear/humour, light/dark, past/future, male/female, de Kretser subtextually explores the Beauvoirian concept of self and other, as well as Camus’ absurdity ... De Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, writes with skilful emphasis on location and interpersonal observation. Her descriptions are ripe with sensory details, and her words hold the enviable weight of existential complexity ... Scary Monsters will resonate most with humans who enjoy a well-told-tale, especially post-modern feminists with a penchant for literary intertextuality.

Time becomes arbitrary in de Kretser’s remarkable presentation of past and future ... As contrasting as the details of their lives are, both Lili and Lyle must relentlessly navigate the challenges of being perpetual outsiders who are judged, overlooked, dismissed, targeted, used, and abused. Wrenchingly poignant, brilliantly biting, de Kretser provides an indelible, ageless examination of the migrant experience.

Dark, subtle ... Much of the power comes from the matter-of-fact voices of the two protagonists, making for a disturbing and entirely believable depiction of social upheaval and repression, respectively. The sum leaves readers with a stirring look at the eerie links between past and present.

When Lili’s story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser’s inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present ... Justifications for this format are clear in both novels ... De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.