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Formaldehyde
Lives are turned upside down by a bureaucratic error in this Kafkaesque work of neo-absurdism.
‘Original, intelligent and compelling – a rare combination. Formaldehyde pulls off a complex narrative with frequent time and point-of-view shifts without ever losing the reader. For a novella that borders on the Kafkaesque, it has a good deal of heart. The interconnecting stories are handled adroitly – the clever structure never gets in the way of the writing, which is sharply observed, assured and witty. Smart but never showy. The most original novel I’ve read for some time.’
- Graeme Simsion
‘Immerse yourself in Jane Rawson’s Formaldehyde if you like the seriously weird or the creepily wonderful. This story has small but persistent claws; under cover of its smooth, conversational narration you will be clasped and dragged into some tough, strange places. Let it take you there. Let it blow your tiny mind.’
- Margo Lanagan
‘Skipping across different times and genres, Formaldehyde is a wonderfully strange and inventive story of love, loss and severed limbs.’
- Ryan O’Neill
‘Original, intelligent and compelling – a rare combination. Formaldehyde pulls off a complex narrative with frequent time and point-of-view shifts without ever losing the reader. For a novella that borders on the Kafkaesque, it has a good deal of heart. The interconnecting stories are handled adroitly – the clever structure never gets in the way of the writing, which is sharply observed, assured and witty. Smart but never showy. The most original novel I’ve read for some time.’
- Graeme Simsion
‘Immerse yourself in Jane Rawson’s Formaldehyde if you like the seriously weird or the creepily wonderful. This story has small but persistent claws; under cover of its smooth, conversational narration you will be clasped and dragged into some tough, strange places. Let it take you there. Let it blow your tiny mind.’
- Margo Lanagan
‘Skipping across different times and genres, Formaldehyde is a wonderfully strange and inventive story of love, loss and severed limbs.’
- Ryan O’Neill
188 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2015
5 people are currently reading
618 people want to read
About the author
Jane Rawson
14 books145 followersJane grew up in Canberra and travelled via San Francisco and Melbourne to Tasmania, where she works as a writer for a conservation organisation. Her first novel, A Wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award and her second novel, From the Wreck, won the Aurealis Award and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She is also the author of a non-fiction guide to surviving and living with climate change called The Handbook and a novella, Formaldehyde, which won the 2015 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize. You can read her essays in Living with the Anthropocene; Fire, Flood, Plague; and Reading like an Australian Writer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
October 11, 2016
This little book (it’s a novella) blew me away. Magic realism is probably too old-fashioned a term to apply to such a modern story, which I think defies labelling. It crosses genres as well as times from 2000 to 2022 with its clever structure.
It kicks off with what seems like a Kafkaesque bureaucratic bungle at the Identity Office, which is hilariously similar to Centrelink. The story covers love, loss, severed limbs and impossible pregnancies. Surprising, shocking, heartwarming, heartbreaking, insightful, absurd … just wonderful. So original. And so well-written.
It kicks off with what seems like a Kafkaesque bureaucratic bungle at the Identity Office, which is hilariously similar to Centrelink. The story covers love, loss, severed limbs and impossible pregnancies. Surprising, shocking, heartwarming, heartbreaking, insightful, absurd … just wonderful. So original. And so well-written.
October 17, 2015
I read Jane's book in draft form about 15 years ago and was surprised and delighted by it. Great fun to read it again and be reminded of those times so many years ago.
Jane's book is weird. Arm transplants, Dostoyevsky, football (or rugby), impossible pregnancies. You just have to go with it and enjoy the funny bits and the poignant bits.
I do miss the mixtape though. In a fit of frustrated anti-nostalgia, I threw away all of my old tapes, not sure if I kept that one. Maybe I should have kept the liner notes.
Jane's book is weird. Arm transplants, Dostoyevsky, football (or rugby), impossible pregnancies. You just have to go with it and enjoy the funny bits and the poignant bits.
I do miss the mixtape though. In a fit of frustrated anti-nostalgia, I threw away all of my old tapes, not sure if I kept that one. Maybe I should have kept the liner notes.
October 11, 2015
3.75/5 why don't they set texts like this for high school English?!
May 10, 2020
Jane Rawson is terrific. Her strange, imaginative and somewhat bizarre tales grab and hold you however improbable the storyline. This first novel is funny, sad, creepy and engaging. Great read straight through on a cold and rainy weekend.
June 20, 2016
Formaldehyde by Jane Rawson is a weird book. I picked it up at Continuum because I've heard lots of good things about the author and because I was unlikely to see it in paperback form again any time soon. I have A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists in my TBR but haven't gotten around to it, so this was my first experience of Rawson's work.
This was, as I have already said, a weird book. I have to admit, I was expecting more speculative fiction than I got, but there wasn't zero. The story follows four people, two each twenty-two years apart, and some of the ways in which their lives intersect. There's Paul, whom one could call the main character, although the story doesn't really revolve around him. Paul's story starts when he finds himself declared dead although he clearly isn't (actually, this confused me for a little and had me thinking he might be a ghost or something), and leads him to embark upon trying to get the paperwork fixed so that he can exist again.
Along the way, he meets a girl called Benjamin and has a brief fling with her. The other two characters, whose stories are mostly told twenty-two years earlier, are Paul's parents, Derek and Amy. The two women have the most speculative elements in their stories, surrounding Amy's pregnancy and Benjamin's age, but I probably shouldn't say more than that. The book masterfully ties the lives of four people together in unexpected ways.
Although this is not quite the kind of book I would normally read, I enjoyed it. I am definitely interested in reading more of the author's work, although I imagine I will lean more towards more speculative stories than this one. Meanwhile, I recommend Formaldehyde to fans of absurdist or Kafkaesque stories.
4 / 5 stars
You can read more of my reviews on my blog.
This was, as I have already said, a weird book. I have to admit, I was expecting more speculative fiction than I got, but there wasn't zero. The story follows four people, two each twenty-two years apart, and some of the ways in which their lives intersect. There's Paul, whom one could call the main character, although the story doesn't really revolve around him. Paul's story starts when he finds himself declared dead although he clearly isn't (actually, this confused me for a little and had me thinking he might be a ghost or something), and leads him to embark upon trying to get the paperwork fixed so that he can exist again.
Along the way, he meets a girl called Benjamin and has a brief fling with her. The other two characters, whose stories are mostly told twenty-two years earlier, are Paul's parents, Derek and Amy. The two women have the most speculative elements in their stories, surrounding Amy's pregnancy and Benjamin's age, but I probably shouldn't say more than that. The book masterfully ties the lives of four people together in unexpected ways.
Although this is not quite the kind of book I would normally read, I enjoyed it. I am definitely interested in reading more of the author's work, although I imagine I will lean more towards more speculative stories than this one. Meanwhile, I recommend Formaldehyde to fans of absurdist or Kafkaesque stories.
4 / 5 stars
You can read more of my reviews on my blog.
September 30, 2015
Formaldehyde is the story of Amy, Benjamin, Derek and Paul whose interconnected lives are revealed using an unusual time-shifting narrative told over 22 years. Paul discovers one day that he is 'dead' and that his father Derek, isn't actually his father. The fact that Paul is white and his father is black never really occurred to him while he was growing up. As it turns out Benjamin was in the hospital where Derek worked, having an arm transplant, when Derek started developing romantic feelings for her before she suddenly disappears one day. Fast forward 22 years later when Paul meets Benjamin at the Identity Office and they hook up romantically.
It all seems rather convoluted at first but Rawson manages to pull off this complex story which becomes clearer as certain revelations are made and the dots are connected. I totally believed the quirky lives of the characters which reminded me of some of the 'colourful characters' I met while living in San Francisco even though the city itself isn't directly referred to in the text. The story could be set anywhere. There was a certain eeriness, almost Ballardian feel to the story, which was symbolized by the amputated arm and brought into focus by the emptiness and lack of connection that seems to be given off by each of them.
I have to say I was fully drawn into this story with its weird and wacky characters. There was no shortage of black humour and the occasional awkward sex scene which interspersed the sense of desperation and hopelessness that hung over each of their lives. Formaldehyde is a little like life itself ... short but wide.
Jane Rawson kindly gave me her book to review and also agreed to be interviewed which you can read here.
It all seems rather convoluted at first but Rawson manages to pull off this complex story which becomes clearer as certain revelations are made and the dots are connected. I totally believed the quirky lives of the characters which reminded me of some of the 'colourful characters' I met while living in San Francisco even though the city itself isn't directly referred to in the text. The story could be set anywhere. There was a certain eeriness, almost Ballardian feel to the story, which was symbolized by the amputated arm and brought into focus by the emptiness and lack of connection that seems to be given off by each of them.
I have to say I was fully drawn into this story with its weird and wacky characters. There was no shortage of black humour and the occasional awkward sex scene which interspersed the sense of desperation and hopelessness that hung over each of their lives. Formaldehyde is a little like life itself ... short but wide.
Jane Rawson kindly gave me her book to review and also agreed to be interviewed which you can read here.
December 20, 2015
Dear Jane - firstly, this was on my "Currently reading" shelf for ages but that doesn't mean I took ages reading it - I kept lending it to other people! FINALLY I GOT TO READ IT!!!!
Jane Rawson's writing makes me miss my tram stop, makes me laugh out loud (guffaw even) and in the next paragraph will make my heart feel grazed with astute hurt and then soothed with tender insights. I know - that is no mean feat. She can somehow straddle emotion and mind freaking plots without being pretentious or over sentimental.
I can't recommend ANYTHING Jane Rawson writes highly enough. I find her concepts just delightful and her characters and internal emotion completely engrossing....and then there are laughs. In comparison, her bright contortionist mind reminds me of Atwood. Our own contemporary Australian sort of Atwood.
Best of all, Rawson invents a future that despite freaky slip stream brain-fryingly strange happenings, is underpinned with characters are hopelessly flawed and definitively human. It makes everything else in the narrative accessible.
What a brilliant, original, mind blowing, jam packed, delightful and utterly readable novella.
Jane Rawson's writing makes me miss my tram stop, makes me laugh out loud (guffaw even) and in the next paragraph will make my heart feel grazed with astute hurt and then soothed with tender insights. I know - that is no mean feat. She can somehow straddle emotion and mind freaking plots without being pretentious or over sentimental.
I can't recommend ANYTHING Jane Rawson writes highly enough. I find her concepts just delightful and her characters and internal emotion completely engrossing....and then there are laughs. In comparison, her bright contortionist mind reminds me of Atwood. Our own contemporary Australian sort of Atwood.
Best of all, Rawson invents a future that despite freaky slip stream brain-fryingly strange happenings, is underpinned with characters are hopelessly flawed and definitively human. It makes everything else in the narrative accessible.
What a brilliant, original, mind blowing, jam packed, delightful and utterly readable novella.
December 30, 2015
Another tightly-constructed gem from Melbourne author Jane Rawson.
Told across two time frames (the years 2000 and 2022) and via four voices (Paul, Amy, Benjamin and Derek), the plot is a puzzle box of a mystery with a severed arm at its heart.
The stand-out, as always with Rawson's work, is the wry, worldy narrative voice. Paul has just had his identity erased from the system and being "dead" has ceased to exist:
"So I walked into the office and it was ten to ten, and no one even looked up, and no one yelled at me and I thought, really, this is what's wrong with modern society. No goddamn discipline. How can I be expected to act like a decent human being when no one defines and enforces the boundaries of my behaviour?"
Told across two time frames (the years 2000 and 2022) and via four voices (Paul, Amy, Benjamin and Derek), the plot is a puzzle box of a mystery with a severed arm at its heart.
The stand-out, as always with Rawson's work, is the wry, worldy narrative voice. Paul has just had his identity erased from the system and being "dead" has ceased to exist:
"So I walked into the office and it was ten to ten, and no one even looked up, and no one yelled at me and I thought, really, this is what's wrong with modern society. No goddamn discipline. How can I be expected to act like a decent human being when no one defines and enforces the boundaries of my behaviour?"
July 11, 2025
Quite a disturbed thing. Credible in that it may be the first book I have read cover to cover without pause - perhaps that's because I was too horrified at every point to put it down (and would not face picking it back up). Certainly original and engaging, if not slightly grotesque, chaotic, meaningless and occasionally written in a stultifying quasi-Instagram caption manner. I never find that repeated capitalised expletives do much for the stylistic craft of a sentence...
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September 6, 2015I loved this strange book about identity, love and lost time. It's not an easy read but is written with an enviable assurdedness and its strong voice kept me turning pages. It's funny, punchy, filled with pop culture reference. If you are looking for something a bit different to read I would highly recommend it.
Full disclosure: Rawson and I share a publisher.
Full disclosure: Rawson and I share a publisher.
December 31, 2015
Rawson’s winning novella is funny in the darkest, driest way possible. I laughed out loud and I was confused and I was shocked and a little bit sad. It’s surprising, quietly political and has a freshness that I enjoyed so much.
Full review here: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/10...
Full review here: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/10...
September 8, 2015
Like all great books this feels like it has a whole strange world bound inside it. It made me laugh and surprised me, all while keeping to its unsettling internal logic. It also has a whole heap of heart, as four characters seek each other out across time.
March 11, 2025
Always a treat to read authors that came from the same state as me, though that doesn’t stop them from judging their merit as a writer.
The first thing that caught my eye about Formaldehyde was of course its name, then its cover. It portrayed such an oddball character with its severed hand encased within a jar, so I picked it up from the second-hand bookshop I was perusing. I was met with some general confusion over the story (like whether the main character, Paul, was actually dead and this was some sort of weird meta portrayal of society just giving up on him, or mental illness, or something not just…actual…which was a bit of a disappointment) and some surprising funny/realistic dialogue. The steam I had for it did die off a little bit though, it got a bit boring, but it helps that this is a novella, so it didn’t stick around longer than it needed to. I found it a bit underdeveloped in parts; Paul's reunion with his mother put me off, considering she was just living next to the woman who’s had her arm for several decades now. There is an air of confusion shrouding the whole thing really – Paul’s mother getting pregnant even though she was in a lesbian relationship (I assume that either her lover was transgender or she got assaulted, but nothing is even hinted at ever), her as a whole, Benjamin’s complete indifference to not aging for 22 years (and getting rid of her arm encased in the jar immediately getting rid of this). Maybe I’m just missing something, that there’s some metaphor that I’m not picking up, but what it was going for just…didn’t land as it should have.
But I did like it, I never held those things against it, Benjamin’s seemingly unageing self did aid the story and make it more intriguing, but I just felt that it wasn’t as developed as I liked it to be. It was a bit absurdist but just needed to be reeled in somewhat to not be off-putting.
7/10
The first thing that caught my eye about Formaldehyde was of course its name, then its cover. It portrayed such an oddball character with its severed hand encased within a jar, so I picked it up from the second-hand bookshop I was perusing. I was met with some general confusion over the story (like whether the main character, Paul, was actually dead and this was some sort of weird meta portrayal of society just giving up on him, or mental illness, or something not just…actual…which was a bit of a disappointment) and some surprising funny/realistic dialogue. The steam I had for it did die off a little bit though, it got a bit boring, but it helps that this is a novella, so it didn’t stick around longer than it needed to. I found it a bit underdeveloped in parts; Paul's reunion with his mother put me off, considering she was just living next to the woman who’s had her arm for several decades now. There is an air of confusion shrouding the whole thing really – Paul’s mother getting pregnant even though she was in a lesbian relationship (I assume that either her lover was transgender or she got assaulted, but nothing is even hinted at ever), her as a whole, Benjamin’s complete indifference to not aging for 22 years (and getting rid of her arm encased in the jar immediately getting rid of this). Maybe I’m just missing something, that there’s some metaphor that I’m not picking up, but what it was going for just…didn’t land as it should have.
But I did like it, I never held those things against it, Benjamin’s seemingly unageing self did aid the story and make it more intriguing, but I just felt that it wasn’t as developed as I liked it to be. It was a bit absurdist but just needed to be reeled in somewhat to not be off-putting.
7/10
January 12, 2025
The style of this was so different to the thriller I'd been reading begore I had to restart it after a few pages in, and having cleared my head. Here, then, is a novella that's both a slightly surreal disjointed narrative of four separate but tightly linked individuals, and a tightly plotted story of love and loss.
Our four main characters don't know for sure how exactly tgey are all linked and by the end it is, really only we rraders who know everything. Well, almost everything, because there are parts of this story that rely on stuff that could be described as supernatural or magical.
Overall a really enjoyable story apart from some fairly uncomfortable (for me) stuff to read involving the loss of limbs in the opening chapters. It gave me some shudders to read, that's for sure, but I do have some squeamishness.
Our four main characters don't know for sure how exactly tgey are all linked and by the end it is, really only we rraders who know everything. Well, almost everything, because there are parts of this story that rely on stuff that could be described as supernatural or magical.
Overall a really enjoyable story apart from some fairly uncomfortable (for me) stuff to read involving the loss of limbs in the opening chapters. It gave me some shudders to read, that's for sure, but I do have some squeamishness.
April 7, 2025
This book is so, so good and I cannot recommend it enough! A lean, funny, extremely sharp mystery/slice of life which juggles four points of view and two timelines and makes it look easy. If you liked Rawson's breakout hit From the Wreck, this is its weirder, grimier sibling - Like a bit of K-Ming Chang's Bestiary or Sayaka Murata's Earthlings got into the grain at some point.
Absolutely fantastic!
Absolutely fantastic!
September 29, 2025
3.5 ⭐️ nothing crazy but i did enjoy - a good 3.5. the way everyones stories come together throughout is soooo cool and i think the length was perfect. i was a good bit confused at the start and it took a sec to settle in but i do think thats just me. i think the concept was cool and it would be 4 stars but it just was missing something for me [maybe lesbians, maybe more gore, maybe more plot or emotions].
July 23, 2018
This is the second of Jane Rawsons' books that I've read and I love her style: quick, current, appealing characters and the ability to warp time effortlessly. That said, I've felt let down by the endings in both stories. They seemed to dissipate rather than close. I'm totally ok with loose ends but these seem more to lose momentum and drift off.
May 16, 2017
A really unique, short read about an intertwined cast of characters across time - quirky, funny and satirical. After this I definitely need to read more from Jane Rawson!
May 28, 2017
This book is insane and I loved it. Potentially the weirdest thing I've ever read.
August 11, 2018
Gave up on this one, clearly not in my wheelhouse
April 23, 2022
I haven’t read something like this in a while, the story (and it is a great story) of an absurd Kafkaesque bureaucratical hell is fun, dark and original, wow!
April 2, 2024
An Australian take on classical Russian literature; doesn't quite land for me.
April 5, 2025
A little confusing at times, making it all the more rewarding and enjoyably when you understand. Found it to be a highly engaging and rich story, a very easy read!
February 1, 2016
'Inventive' isn't always a positive description of a novel, but when it's combined with 'well written', 'fast paced' and 'tight' then you're on a winner. And Formaldehyde is indeed a winner.... of hte Viva La Novella award (which I'd never heard of until seeing it on the front cover).
The story jumps between several characters and two time periods (2000 and 2022). I'm not sure that I want to tell too much about what happens in case it gives away spoilers, but we learn the following information about each character in their first couple of chapters:
- Paul finds out that the reason he's lost his job is that he no longer officially exists
- Derek is a nurse who has responded to a streetcar accident and falls in love with one of the injured
- Amy has miraculously conceived a baby with her lesbian lover
- Benjamin..... [I don't think there's anyway to introduce Benjamin without major spoilers]
Over the course of 176 pages, the relationships between the characters becomes clear. Paul is really the central pivot. His quest to uncover why his identity was deleted, and his fight to get it restored, are the foundations upon which everything else rests. Both quests are resolved by the end, but not necessarily in predictable fashion. This makes for a story that is both compelling and satisfying.
I'd also like to point out that this is a very funny book. I'm not a huge fan of comedy in literature, but Rawson did it just right in Formaldehyde - frequent smiles and occasional laughs, none of it overdone, and toned down with sufficient drama and pathos.
I have deleted a star from my review because the opening chapters were difficult. It takes a while to piece together what's happening. It took me at least half the book to become comfortable that I understood what was happening. It might have been just as easy to abandon it if I'd been in a less tolerant mood during this time.
One good thing about novellas - even if you don't like them, you know they're going to be over fairly soon. This made it a lot easier for me to persevere when I was struggling, and it paid off in the end. I can recommend this book, but I give the warning that it won't necessarily be easy.
The story jumps between several characters and two time periods (2000 and 2022). I'm not sure that I want to tell too much about what happens in case it gives away spoilers, but we learn the following information about each character in their first couple of chapters:
- Paul finds out that the reason he's lost his job is that he no longer officially exists
- Derek is a nurse who has responded to a streetcar accident and falls in love with one of the injured
- Amy has miraculously conceived a baby with her lesbian lover
- Benjamin..... [I don't think there's anyway to introduce Benjamin without major spoilers]
Over the course of 176 pages, the relationships between the characters becomes clear. Paul is really the central pivot. His quest to uncover why his identity was deleted, and his fight to get it restored, are the foundations upon which everything else rests. Both quests are resolved by the end, but not necessarily in predictable fashion. This makes for a story that is both compelling and satisfying.
I'd also like to point out that this is a very funny book. I'm not a huge fan of comedy in literature, but Rawson did it just right in Formaldehyde - frequent smiles and occasional laughs, none of it overdone, and toned down with sufficient drama and pathos.
I have deleted a star from my review because the opening chapters were difficult. It takes a while to piece together what's happening. It took me at least half the book to become comfortable that I understood what was happening. It might have been just as easy to abandon it if I'd been in a less tolerant mood during this time.
One good thing about novellas - even if you don't like them, you know they're going to be over fairly soon. This made it a lot easier for me to persevere when I was struggling, and it paid off in the end. I can recommend this book, but I give the warning that it won't necessarily be easy.
October 25, 2016
I found this book to be a little bit like Palimpsest, in that it’s a story with multiple viewpoints of people whose lives are loosely connected through some sort of alluded to magical realism and that both stories are completely original.
But, for that reason as well, this book is nothing like Palimpsest.
The story tracks between 2000 and 2022 and follows the viewpoints of four different characters.
Derek is a nurse who is married but no longer in love with his wife. He happens to meet a woman called Benjamin and the two of them form a close bond while she's still a patient in his hospital.
Amy is his wife and becomes pretty certain she's a lesbian. However, after she gets her heart broken by the woman she gets involved with, she comes back to Derek only to realise that she's pregnant. Just not to him.
Benjamin is in the hospital due to an arm being amputated and another one being grafted on. When she finds out Derek is still married, she discharges herself from the hospital without ever saying goodbye to him.
All of these things are happening in 2000. Of them all, at the beginning at least, only Paul (the fourth character) exists in 2022. His story is one of finding that his identity has been scrubbed as a result of what gets call a 'clerical error', leaving him without housing, a job or any money to his name.
The beauty of this book is that it's not exactly as lineally written as laid out above, though I'm pretty sure I haven't given any real spoilers. The prose is lyrical and amazing and I just couldn't keep myself from turning pages once I actually got into it.
But, for that reason as well, this book is nothing like Palimpsest.
The story tracks between 2000 and 2022 and follows the viewpoints of four different characters.
Derek is a nurse who is married but no longer in love with his wife. He happens to meet a woman called Benjamin and the two of them form a close bond while she's still a patient in his hospital.
Amy is his wife and becomes pretty certain she's a lesbian. However, after she gets her heart broken by the woman she gets involved with, she comes back to Derek only to realise that she's pregnant. Just not to him.
Benjamin is in the hospital due to an arm being amputated and another one being grafted on. When she finds out Derek is still married, she discharges herself from the hospital without ever saying goodbye to him.
All of these things are happening in 2000. Of them all, at the beginning at least, only Paul (the fourth character) exists in 2022. His story is one of finding that his identity has been scrubbed as a result of what gets call a 'clerical error', leaving him without housing, a job or any money to his name.
The beauty of this book is that it's not exactly as lineally written as laid out above, though I'm pretty sure I haven't given any real spoilers. The prose is lyrical and amazing and I just couldn't keep myself from turning pages once I actually got into it.
Read
September 16, 2015This book’s a gem. An eerie gem. I’ve had it on my mind since finishing it. I’ve been mulling it over, trying to work it out, but suspect I never will. The mood is gothic, the setting contemporary, the grimness ever present and yet (how is this done?) simultaneously held at bay. Or at arm’s length. How long is an arm? To what degree are our arms our arms? How much of us is in our physicality? How much of us is in our heads, the heads of others? This book is in my head and won’t be leaving any time soon. I’m glad of that.
September 18, 2015
Another great Viva winner. Jane's voice is strong and consistent with her first novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists. This is just as whacky with its sense of displacement, and I loved how it pulled the various character threads together in a way that gradually made sense. Heartfelt is probably the best word to describe it, real yet totally surreal.
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January 3, 2016I am a judge for the 2015 Aurealis Awards. This review is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any judging panel, the judging coordinator or the Aurealis Awards management team. To be safe, I won't be recording my thoughts (if I choose to) here until after the Aurealis Awards are over.
September 26, 2015
This a different kind of good book. It started out fine. became a little confusing, but when I figured out how it all fit together it was an excellent book. I will reccomend it to everyone who likes something different. I received this book from Goodreads for free.
January 19, 2016
Smashed this one in a day. A clever little novella with twists and turns to keep you guessing. A bit strange but I really enjoyed it for its weirdness, which it embraces wholeheartedly.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews