An informational, if not entirely immersive, cross section of the Australian population.
Mallia offers a debut collection of short stories about the lives of small-town Australians.
Over the course of this book, readers encounter a slew of seemingly separate tales of the members of a community from an imaginary town just outside Melbourne. Readers meet Bear, a trucker who cares for the children of his ex-girlfriend; Jeri, the 10-year-old son of a single mother and an absent father; Bianca, a young woman searching for her grandfather’s burial site; and Alice, a “bag lady” from the Aboriginal Wurundjeri tribe. White and Indigenous characters grapple with their identities in a culture that contains both subtle and overt racism. Secrecy is another recurring theme, and mystical elements, such as spirits, sacred land, and apparitions, are sprinkled throughout. But although each story deals with a different main character, these same players recur in other tales, sometimes revealing unexpected connections. The author employs a matter-of-fact, almost detached tone as she details these lives, giving the collection a feel that’s akin to an anthropological study at times: “Kyle had lived here for about eighteen months, was well liked by his associates and friends, and had recently bought a house on the hillside below the now defunct university.” Occasionally the author gets more tactile, though, as when she tells of a man with “a short, chunky physique, stumpy fingers always sporting a Band-Aid or two, and sandy-blond hair cropped close so the curls hugged his scalp tightly.” She also paints a rich landscape that nearly becomes a character in itself: “I could smell the eucalypts, their scarlet flowers scattered across the dry earth after a night’s feasting from flying foxes.” Even roadkill comes alive through Mallia’s masterful word choices: “Already the internal gases have started to swell the carcass so that it looks like a prickly piñata.”
An informational, if not entirely immersive, cross section of the Australian population.Pub Date: March 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-3067-5
Page Count: 226
Publisher: PartridgeSingapore
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
© 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.
