Emily Paull

Natasha Lester 9780733634659 Hachette Australia (I own a copy, courtesy the publisher) Image Source: author website We are extremely lucky in Western Australia to have a thriving literary community, and you would be hard pressed to find another writer in that community who is as generous with their time as Natasha Lester.  Not only is Natasha a writer, she is also a teacher, a mother, a blogger, and I'm sure she finds a few moments of her spare time in which to fight crime as well.  Natasha's first novel, What is Left Over After  was the recipient of the TAG Hungerford award administered by Fremantle Press for an unpublished manuscript.  She then went on to publish her second novel, If I Should Lose You  with Fremantle Press too. But for novel three, Natasha Lester chose a different direction for her fiction.  While both previous novels had been well received by critics and readers alike, and Natasha Lester had amassed a following of local writers...

Difficult Women Roxane Gay Corsair Publishing 2017 (I own a copy, courtesy Hachette Australia) This is not strictly a review of Roxane Gay's collection of short fiction, it's more of a collection of my thoughts.  Since I decided that I was going to put together my own collection of short stories, I've been increasingly fascinated by the ins and outs of single author collections.  What holds the pieces together?  How well does the author manage to differentiate the different voices in the stories?  How do you have a huge impact in a very short space? The premise of Difficult Women  really intrigued me, right from the blurb which reads: The women in these stories live lives of privilege and poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail.  A woman married to a twin pretends not to realise when her husband and his brother impersonate each other.  A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advan...

Image source: imdb.com One of the most hotly anticipated film releases for this year-- for me, anyway-- was the film adaptation of Jasper Jones by WA author, Craig Silvey .   Some of you may know that I wrote my Honours thesis on the novel, back in 2012, so I approached this film with a degree of trepidation.  Whenever a beloved book is adapted for the big screen, there is always the possibility that it will be a let down.  Reading is such a personal experience, whereby the novel gives you just enough information to allow you to imagine its world all on your own-- what the characters look like, what particular events might mean, and why certain things may have occurred.  When those books are adapted for the movies, sometimes what the director and the cast and the screenwriter choose to portray can be in direct contrast with your own thoughts.  And sometimes, that's just a plain disappointment.  Let me just preface this blog post by saying that I am not ...