A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.
In de Valera’s linked short story collection, a cop and his goofy friends grow older in coastal Australia.
Narcotics agent Michael O’Neill is getting a bit old to still be going undercover, but he lives for his job. When his superiors send him to Australia’s rural Northern Rivers region to bust a heroin dealer known as God, he heads for the hippie-inhabited hinterland—a popular spot for drug users and dropouts ever since the Nimbin Aquarius Festival popularized the area in 1973— accompanied by his crystal-elephant–collecting girlfriend, Azure, and his colleague Baby Johnson, who suffers from PTSD and likes to read stories about Conan the Barbarian. After a successful bust, the crew decides to stay in the area, where they meet an assortment of countercultural characters that help keep life interesting: Star, a single mother with a checkered romantic history who grows and sells marijuana in order to buy a wood stove; an eccentric, mentally ill man named David and his on-again, off-again wife, Doreen, who recently quit a Christian cult; and later, God, aka Lawson, who acclimates to civilian life after a seven-year stint in prison—at least until he starts to lose his sight. The collection spans the 1970s through the 2010s and beyond, painting a portrait of Australia’s hippie generation as it ages. De Valera’s prose is fresh and surprising, as here in a 2002-set story about Lawson: “On the day he planned to kill himself, the day he’d decided had the best chance of success, he rose at six as usual.” The stories are all slice-of-life pieces, but they’re far from predictable, lurching forward and backward in time and between different characters’ perspectives. (The final chapter, “Another Lifetime,” takes place in 2137 and features future incarnations of Michael and Azure.) It’s such an unexpected assortment of genres—crime stories, drug tales, SF—that it can’t help but circumvent readers’ expectations. It makes for a great beach read, whether on the coast of New South Wales or the other side of the world.
A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9942745-2-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Old Tiger Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
