Sally906 reviews Farewell My Ovaries by Wendy Harmer and rates it a "C". She details why she dislikes the main character and then poses the question: why did she finish it? "The book is funny - and well written - and in many ways this character matched my initial feelings of confusion and search for meaning at what I thought was the end of my womanhood, instead of a new phase of being a woman."
Sue Bursztynski is very impressed with Margo Lanagan's short story collection, Red Spikes which she reviews n "January" magazine. "The author admits, in her afterword, that she was strongly influenced by others in the writing of her tales, and reading them, the influence is fairly clear. Which doesn't make them any less fascinating. There isn't a dud story in the collection, although I have my favorites...All in all, well worth buying, whether for yourself or the teenager in your life."
A few weeks old now, but worth mentioning anyway, is Jules's review of Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey on the "Seven Impossible Things before Breakfast" weblog: "I should say right off the bat here: Hartnett is one of my top-five favorite authors. And, once again, she didn't let me down with this middle-grade title, which is profound and graceful and intense all at once. Hartnett seems to be writing in the tradition of the classics of children's literature here (think turn-of-the-last century children's titles) --
persuasively and strikingly so."
