10 deadly stories

In 2012 I participated in ALIA and TAFE NSW's Promote Client Access to Literature subject as part of National Year of Reading. One assessment was to create an annotated bibliography on a blog (or - a blog reading map) based on a UN calendar event - I chose the International Day of the World's Indigenous People. I highlighted 10 deadly stories from Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand and the US in adult and young adult fiction, and creative nonfiction : http://10deadlystories.blogspot.com.au/.
I am grateful to Dr Anita Heiss for her Black Books list which was my starting point http://anitaheissblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/anitas-bbc-black-book-choice-reading.html. 

twenty - banksy by will ellsworth-jones

Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall by Will Ellsworth-Jones
Published 2012
Review available in ArtGaze magazine December 2012

‘I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.’ – Banksy.

A bit of a misleading book title; what made you think you were going to meet the real Banksy, see what he looks like, read about his childhood? This book is not shelved in the biography section, and yet it is one of the most interesting unauthorised biographies I have read. Arguably the most recognisable name in graffiti, Banksy appears to have grown up rough in Bristol and early on chose the anonymity for which he is known (or not known). It’s an ironic ploy that has worked for and against him ever since.
Ellsworth-Jones asked, ‘how important is Banksy in the whole urban art world?’ and discovered that Banksy ‘kick-started the market. He’s a household name. Everyone’s grandma knows Banksy.’

This book reveals that everyone’s grandma actually knows Banksy’s art. If you disregard the mystery surrounding him; the interviews in shadow, the disguised voice, the loyalty and closed-shop of his team Pest Control, and the fact that nobody’s saying who Banksy really is, what you have left is the art. The pictures on walls; the stencils, the wry social comment – it all works well with an artist not desperate for his fifteen minutes. Without a preconceived perception of the artist as a man, the art can speak for itself. 

I found myself relating to the author while reading. He’s not involved in the art world except for having an artistic appreciation for location-based art. He didn’t meet Banksy, and only owns a knock-off stencil image despite waiting patiently online while others queued overnight. Whatever your knowledge of or interest in Banksy being labelled a street artist, a vandal, a national treasure or a sell-out, you’ll find this the strongest biography of Banksy you’re going to get to read unless his mother writes an exposé of his early years. Does he even have a mother? Yes, there’s a little about her and a revealing incident from Banksy’s pre-teen years, but no happy family photographs. There are few photographs of any of the pieces referred to in the book, but it’s easy enough to go online to find them. Or go on a cross-country trek as the author did using a guide book to find the Banksy image in its natural habitat.

This contextual element of urban art is explored intelligently by the author. Although Banksy graffities on surfaces that he does not own as is the nature of the art, his celebrity drives people to protect his pieces with perspex or have the wall for their own. Meanwhile his contemporaries are fined or jailed and their pieces whitewashed. Contradictory viewpoints are explored with Banksy saying that ‘public reaction is what supplies meaning and value’, and @ashlee arguing that ‘the point of street art is for it to exist in its natural environment. It is by nature temporary.’ Without the urban desolation of its Detroit factory yard environment, does his ‘I remember when all this was trees’ piece have as much impact sitting in a gallery?

Banksy has an uneasy relationship with galleries. After having snuck some detourned paintings into The Tate, he has now exhibited at Bristol’s Gallery and created a high-price market for street art. Banksy squared this with the audience and himself with Pest Control verifications and posting online ‘For the sake of keeping street art where it belongs I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place’. When celebrities and millionaires collect Banksy’s ‘for sale’ artwork, both his personal wealth and popularity increase. Banksy may have been feeling a little hypocritical but felt like he had an important message to convey about the absurdity of paying large sums of money for street art taken out of its context. His ‘I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit’ print may have referenced the 25 million pound sale of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, but it is also confronting (or amusing depending on your viewpoint). A commenter on his website noted this piece was the ultimate ‘portion of irony eating itself’. Whether street art should only be accessible to those who can appreciate it in situ, or however Banksy makes his money, I am grateful to him for opening my heart to street art.

Banksy’s site www.banksy.co.uk/index.html

Street art images below by me on instagram

nineteen - Death Cure by awesometastic guest reviewer

Death Cure by James Dashner
Chicken House (2012)
Review published July 2012 in the local newspaper

'WICKED is good' Teresa said out of the blue, as if talking to herself... "WICKED is good" she repeated, much louder, turning her seat  to meet the others' gazes.
Death Cure is the gripping finale to the thrilling Maze Runner Trilogy. It dives deeper into the mind of Thomas, who feels angry as Teresa seems to pull away from him and joins WICKED's side. Thomas and the group are faced with more problems as they are classified as 'Munies' and the people on the streets hate them. Thomas become closer to Brenda and they continue to develop a great friendship. Thomas and the others like Newt, Sonya, Minho, Frypan and Janson always get into to tough spots but everything gets better in the end.
The whole series is incredible. 
For the lovers of the Hunger Games and the Gone series, this book is a must read. It is full of unpredictable twists and turns that you never saw coming. I would recommend this book to anyone and i greatly enjoyed reading this book.  Death Cure is wonderfully written and throughout the whole book i was left asking the question: is WICKED good?

Review by awesometastic young person!!

eighteen: Black Glass by Meg Mundell

Black Glass 

by Meg Mundell
Scribe Publications (2011)
Review published February 2012 at M/C Reviews 
Meg's response on Facebook : Alison, I think I love you...thanks Ramon for pointing me to this ace review


.. the story is fragmented, like broken glass...

If fiction reveals our cultural journeys, speculative fiction confronts us with dystopian visions of where we could be heading. Debut Australian novelist Meg Mundell shines with her layering of Big Brotherly surveillance and alienated citizenry over the culturally-rich first-world city of Melbourne.

Tally and Grace are sisters seduced by the mythology of the big city. After years of being continuously covertly relocated across the Regions, the sisters are plunged into homelessness when their father’s meth lab explodes. This first explosion rips the sisters’ world apart. Physically apart at the time, they escape separately to the city, each believing the other dead, but holding on to the hope that has long sustained them.

Black glass is a barrier, a means for one group to spy on another. It is the concealed surveillance cameras, the one-way glass at the casino and the health club, the reflective glass of the tall inner-city buildings. It is a thematic device used to effect in Black Glass. The story is fragmented, like broken glass, in its narrative viewpoint shifts, its fragile relationships, and its subversive government-monitoring style headings.

Mundell’s rich use of fragmentation in scene, dialogue and form evokes strong feelings of paranoia and emptiness. Characters are inter-related, but must chart their courses alone. The sisters’ separate entries to the city are documented, ironically as they are ‘undocs’; unverified and unregistered citizens. They spend the majority of the story apart, but are determined to find one another again. The odds, in this disturbing quest novel, are against them. 

Decadent, dirty and dangerous, Melbourne emerges as a shady character in a future-shocked world. It’s all ‘thick coils of heat’ and ‘filthy cracks’. Its ‘tea-brown’ (47) river is choked with plastic, its fountains dry. Streetkids live in her tunnels, and everyone is drawn to the spectacle that is the carnival.
Tally meets Blue, an indigenous undoc in the south interzone, and he teaches her the streets. They get involved in a little illegal marketing which ensures Tally gets around town to look for her sister.Grace doesn’t make it easy for her. She believes Tally dead and any thought of her gets pushed deep down. In her blind quest to make it as an actress, mirrored in today’s desperation for fifteen minutes of reality fame, Grace is targeted by low-rent sex workers in record time and is surrounded by deviancy her whole time in the city. She changes her name and her appearance and fools herself well. While Tally is flashing her one digital image of Grace around, Grace is becoming someone else.

Someone else being creative with the truth is Damon Spark, hack journalist, purveyor of journotainment. He’s there, being subversive and morally indignant in turn, at the climax; the undoc uprising that’s coming as the police cleanse the streets to create an illusion for visiting dignitaries. Sadly Damon’s protestations are more for his perceived integrity than for the fate of the city’s underclass.

The most original character is Milk, a moodie. His migrant father had a lawyer son and a dentist son, and... Milk who spends his waking hours manipulating the mood of the room on a much higher level than a DJ at a nightclub. He is a magician who can control and alter moods with colours, lights, sounds, and edge-of-awareness scents. His work is observed by government operatives who hire him under the pretence of spring-cleaning the city, injecting harmony and goodwill. He is deceived by the perceived respect, he’s a ‘government consultant’ (215), and ignores the sinister intent in which ‘the public just needs a nudge in the right direction’ (213).

‘There are those who make a positive contribution to the city, and those who do the opposite. They’re just a drain on resources and they don’t portray the place in the best light (213).’

Cue the destruction and fallout of character lines intertwining as undocs and sympathisers protest at the security summit. As the city explodes with sirens wailing, ‘bodies mown down like weeds’  (277) and ‘flames gobbling like a mass of hungry tongues’ (273), the story’s denouement is subtle and fast and hardly a solid conclusion, but it works.

seventeen: August by Bernard Beckett

August by Bernard Beckett
Published by Text
Review published in Fiction Focus: New Titles for Teenagers 25 (2) 2011, pp. 52-53
and online at CMIS


I reviewed August for CMIS (review to come), and felt uncomfortable because I wrote a less than glowing review about a highly publicised new book. The author's last book had won awards!
I was underwhelmed by the story, and put off by the rehashing of (I thought) overused and boring stereotypes. Women as the spawn of the devil, that sort of thing...
And I found the characters one dimensional.
So, vindication arrived in the form of a review by Lachlan Jobbins in March's Bookseller and Publisher (p31).
Lachlan wrote that 'August has barely any plot and almost no characterisation... Its characters are little more than ciphers for ideas, or pawns to move the story along.... a contrived work of speculative fiction.' !!

I don't like every book I read, but reviewing it in a constructive way is a good challenge. But I'm more looking forward to the next book I'm reviewing, Meg Mundell's Black Glass. It's action packed and well written speculative fiction. August has always been a nowhere kind of month...


Dystopia. Age 15+. Set in a dystopian world, featuring religion, philosophy, bigotry, the idea of love, and an upturned car, August ends as it began with two strangers 'floating, tumbling together in a machine not made for tumbling, weightless and free.'
Tristan has crashed a stolen car. He and his passenger fall down the cliff. Many characters have died throughout literary history, but few have died leaving such little empathy in readers' hearts. Their fate is suspended in the last paragraph, but I found myself pleased to be free of them.

The cover blurb raises expectations of a dramatic play-like text: two injured protagonists trapped in an upturned car. The relationship dynamic could have been compelling.

The story unfolds in alternating chapters in third-person-limited point of view, covering both characters' stories. This restricted viewpoint limits the reader's ability to develop empathy because their viewpoint is not reflected by other characters. August has been described as complex, as its core philosophical discussion is about the nature of free will and this involves some surprising but foreshadowed twists.


Set in the City of God, with charismatic priests who have no compassion for outsiders, August may provoke discussion in Religion and History classes when studying the change place of women in society. Readers may also be alienated by tired stereotypes. Tristan's first encounter with a girl comes in a situation controlled by the rector. She is naked and he is forced to look. 


Even mothers were not permitted to visit. Augustine himself had taught that woman was temptation, the devil's lever.


From this point Tristan can think of no-one except the girl he will eventually come to know as Grace. She in turn imagines him as her angel. Grace's poverty forces her into prostitution, a situation in which the Church is complicit. Setup is vital, because Tristan could not have picked her up in a stolen car if she was not working on the streets.


Tristan and Grace do not quite intersect in each other's lives for some time, each elevating the other on a pedestal. 


'There was never a time I stopped loving you.' 
'Not me,' Grace countered. 'Your idea of me.'


The idea of each other is all they ever have, because once they finally meet, Tristan exercises his free will with little thought for Grace having the same rights.