As a collection, Blueberries is frequently peripatetic and content to wander a number of avenues (often within the same essay) ... A vexed relationship with temps perdu also haunts the collection, and the need to escape—or at least manage—its subtler cruelties is finely conveyed ... Savage evokes a world of ‘[f]antasy futures not lived, having never lived’ ... It is a vivid description of the accounting that comes with age, the dilettantism and vivid pretensions formulated during (and often defining of) youth limned in wry detail ... Blueberries is a remarkable collection. From the material of our frequently wanton and violent world, Savage has woven together a book that is at once tenacious and wondrously alive.
Composed in a variety of styles, the only similarities the fifteen essays share are the questions they pose: What does it mean to be a writer? And what does it mean to be? This intensely cerebral debut collection operates like a set of mismatched china. The essays are charming, quirky, and at odds with each other. But categorizing the collection as 'essays' feels inaccurate. The combination of memoir, reportage, poetry, and prose lacks a lateral narrative, and reads more like poetic musings than cohesive, fully-fleshed arguments. Some pages are written in a more academic style, while others are like the pages of a diary. Savage navigates as many forms as the places she travels, though no one style is superior to the other. Together, though, they carry equal importance in Blueberries. Savage has a proclivity for placing secondary details at the forefront of her stories ... Savage’s lens is, at times, overwhelmingly privileged. This isn’t necessarily a detriment. She is aware of her whiteness, but doesn’t make amends for it; she is, after all, an accessory to larger systemic issues ... Some statements could be read as politically incorrect, but at least they’re thought provoking ... Savage is skilled at imparting language to universal feelings that are difficult to articulate.
Memory is not marked on a calendar or in police reports but is instead a constantly re-played series of remembrances, or 're-remembrances.' That the self exists in narrative form lies at the centre of Blueberries, as Savage explores the sites of identity—trauma, gender, class, religion, the body—in clear, rhythmic prose ... Blueberries is a book of reflections, in the sense that Savage appears to us reflected in the events and objects she describes. It is not a memoir. She is writing about the self, or selves, and how they are contained, whether in space or time or the trappings of culture.
Savage is sharp in her critique of the cultures and institutions of ‘aggressive accumulation’ and ‘expansion' ... Blueberries evokes most powerfully the pressures and forms of complicity that govern the lives of young white women in the patriarchal, neocolonial, neoliberal place called Australia ... These are the best moments in Blueberries: when Savage’s intensely critical gaze is turned to her own life and to those whose lives, like mine, are set in some of the same grooves. Yet there are other moments—sometimes in the very same essay or even paragraph—when she comes close to co-opting the lives of others, making them refer too quickly to her experience or minimising their differences in kind and scale ... I hesitate in charging Blueberries with solipsism, since...there’s a deep thoughtfulness and insight contained in this volume; some beautiful writing, too ... Gloomy like blue, Blueberries also has an uneasy energy ... Savage’s thought is always turning corners, or knotting about itself, or rushing forward as if she’s racing us to the finish line—only to collapse, exhausted, like a runner who’s peaked too soon ... At some points, however, Blueberries seemed to me overly invested in staging its own critical failure and, in the process, the droll knowingness of its author ... Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual—that it’s a ruse, yet another trick—and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author. Which is to say that it testifies in her defense.
