Book Review Archives | Michelle Scott Tucker

Summer Fiction – my top three so far

In the approach to Christmas I was in something of a reading slump but these three novels picked me up and had me reading late into the night. Yes, of course I read more than three books over the summer, and of course I read non-fiction too (and I’ll tell you about those another time) but these three books were simply marvellous. The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. There are far fewer literary page turners than one might wish, so thank goodness for The Weekend. It’s smart, beautifully written and thoroughly [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2020-02-03T20:54:25+11:00February 3rd, 2020|Book Review|4 Comments

The Billabong Books and Me

The books, old and musty, were stashed at the back of a cupboard for want of shelf space. They’d been there for quite a while. A friend of my mother had owned them once, but had passed them on, suggesting vaguely that “Michelle might like them.” I was in primary school, probably, an avid reader but not much tempted by the heavy, old-fashioned tomes, with no dust jacket or blurb to hint at what lay within. Not tempted until boredom drove me, one weekend, to dig out those books. Reader, [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2019-01-14T20:36:15+11:00January 14th, 2019|Book Review|0 Comments

Book Review: Flames by Robbie Arnott

Evocative. Intriguing. Compelling. Flames is a wonderful novel, and Arnott is a terrific new young voice in Australian fiction. In this assured debut, Arnott immerses the reader in the Tasmanian landscape, in weird and often uncanny ways. At a superficial level, we follow the story of twenty-three-year-old Charlotte McAllister. Charlotte's mother has just died and returned (briefly) from the dead, her father is absent, and her brother wants to build her a coffin. In her grief, Charlotte flees southwards to an isolated, and improbable, wombat farm where she discovers more [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-07-16T18:26:20+10:00July 16th, 2018|Book Review|6 Comments

Good biography, bad biography – two brief book reviews

This year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography was Caroline Fraser, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. If, like me, you read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child, then you already know all about Laura Ingalls Wilder. She grew up in the 1800s on the American frontier, with Ma, Pa, blind sister Grace and little sister Carrie. Ma was endlessly patient and good, and jovial Pa was wise and strong and brave. There were blizzards and locusts, danger and drama, all tempered by [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-04-27T12:00:42+10:00April 27th, 2018|Book Review|9 Comments

The Passengers by Eleanor Limprecht – Book Review

Eleanor Limprecht's latest novel is a delight, with compelling characters that kept me sitting up way past lights out. In The Passengers, Hannah and her grandmother Sarah are travelling, on a cruise ship, from San Diego to Sydney. Sarah left Australia at the end of WW2, as a young Australian war bride married to a US serviceman she barely knew, and has never been back since. As their ship moves across the ocean Sarah tells Hannah, a young woman struggling with her own past, how it was that in 1945 she [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-21T23:53:38+11:00February 21st, 2018|Book Review|6 Comments

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke – Book Review

If you've ever wondered whether Australia actually is a deeply racist nation, then this powerful memoir is for you. It leaves no doubt that answer is yes, all the time, and from almost everyone. From the nasty little girl at Clarke's kindergarten who wouldn't play with the brown girl, to the primary school children who constantly taunted, threatened and mocked, to the teachers and school counselors who told the teenager that it was 'only teasing', Clarke's anger about her treatment lends her prose a searing heat. Maxine Beneba [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-25T00:42:39+11:00October 30th, 2017|Book Review|9 Comments

Book Review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

Hunger is so raw, poignant and compelling that it hurts to read it. At the most superficial level Hunger is a memoir about Roxane Gay's body - specifically her very tall (6'3), very large (200 kgs +) body. Gay details her daily indignities and humiliations as a woman of size moving through a world designed for much smaller people. And if that were all Hunger was about it would probably be enough. But at a deeper level Hunger is really about Gay's mental discomfort. Her shame, her anger, her guilt [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-25T00:55:18+11:00August 18th, 2017|Book Review|4 Comments

Book Review: The Daintree Blockade by Bill Wilkie

What does success look like to an environmental activist? Sometimes success is obvious, like the protests against the Tasmanian Franklin Dam project. The protesters there were directly responsible for preventing the dam from being built and so protected a unique wilderness area. But sometimes success is less obvious. A battle is lost but, in the end, a war is won. Such was the case for the Daintree Blockade of the early 1980s. The Daintree rainforest of far north Queensland is every bit as unique and beautiful as the Tasmanian wilderness. [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-23T01:28:46+11:00June 30th, 2017|Book Review|3 Comments

Book Review: Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls

A guest post today, from my gorgeous eleven year old daughter Charlie, a competent but reluctant reader who is also "the most faboulousisitst in the world."* When the book arrived in the post I thought that it was just my mum hassling me to read more. But that night when I opened the book to start reading it I actually enjoyed it. The first page was about a mathematician named Ada Lovelace, and I was hooked right away. I think my mum was very surprised when it took [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-25T12:12:10+11:00June 21st, 2017|Book Review|6 Comments

Book Review: ‘Death by Dim Sim’ by Sarah Vincent

Every day at about 3pm Sarah Vincent would get up from her desk at work and haul her 122kg body across the car park to the food van across the way. Every day she would order three dim sims (or four or five) and eat them. And every day as she lumbered back to her desk she would sneer inwardly as she passed the smokers huddled outside the hospital where she worked, with their hospital gowns, and intravenous drips, and missing limbs - all desperate for their nicotine [...]

Michelle Scott Tucker2018-03-25T01:14:28+11:00April 21st, 2017|Book Review|0 Comments