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Karen Brooks

Snow Wings by Jutta Goetze & The Rat and The Raven by Kerry Greenwood

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November 2005, no. 276
Karen Brooks reviews ‘Snow Wings’ by Jutta Goetze, ‘The Rat and The Raven’ by Kerry Greenwood, and ‘Dogboy’ by Victor Kelleher

‘Time will tell’ is an old adage that, in a peculiar way, links and separates these three different tales. While Victor Kelleher’s moving and poetic Dogboy lures readers into the harsh ‘Dry’ of a time that never was and never will be, Jutta Goetze’s story plunges into snow-bound Bavaria, in a time both familiar and strange to contemporary audiences. Kerry Greenwood, on the other hand, situates her futuristic sci-fi in a place and era at once known and yet irrevocably altered; creating an anachronistic story that is both challenging and exciting. All of these writers rely on temporality to both weave and anchor their stories with differing results.

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Wonderworlds

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September 2003, no. 254

Here we have five seemingly disparate books linked by genre: fantasy. Yet even fantasy, an often devalued term used to categorise a range of speculative and other fictions, doesn’t quite describe these entertaining and evocative texts. Rather, the common thread running through these stories and uniting them in a continuous and universal yarn is that which weaves its way through many tales: the hero’s journey.

Whether drawing inspiration from epic and mythological pasts or contemporary issues around young people’s search for identity within and against mainstream forms, each story seeks to capture the reality of the timeless and often heroic search for the self using a fantastical backdrop.

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