The Idea of Perfection in Aussie Readers

Feb 17, 2017 Kathryn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: australian-authors, reading-list-2017, recommended-by-people-on-gr, fiction, 4-stars, kathryns-aty-2017

This book had lots of elements that I often don’t like, and yet…

It was quite slow-paced, but with a great turn of phrase. I have recently whinged about several books just being too slow for me while I’m impatiently waiting for something to happen, and this book should have made me feel like that. And yet…

I hate it when authors don’t indicate speech using quotation marks. Why do we have quotation marks if people aren’t going to use them? It wasn’t until page 62 I realised that there were no quota This book had lots of elements that I often don’t like, and yet…

It was quite slow-paced, but with a great turn of phrase. I have recently whinged about several books just being too slow for me while I’m impatiently waiting for something to happen, and this book should have made me feel like that. And yet…

I hate it when authors don’t indicate speech using quotation marks. Why do we have quotation marks if people aren’t going to use them? It wasn’t until page 62 I realised that there were no quotation marks for speech. Anywhere in the book. And yet…

I really enjoyed it. It certainly wasn’t a book that I could tear through - it needed a bit more time. The characters were well-drawn - from Douglas with his precise nature (perfect for an engineer) and poor relational skills to poor Felicity Porcelline with her superficiality and her OCD that meant everything needed to be just so but then caused her to struggle when things clashed - “Quilting had been good for quite a while… She sometimes regretted all the fabrics. She had them in clear plastic boxes… The plains had been graded in colour from ROY to BIV, and each box was labelled… There was a section for Checks and one for Spots, and another big one for Florals. There had been a bit of a problem, with fabrics that had both spots and checks, or florals that were also stripes. Would you call a checkerboard a Check or a Black-and-White? It had worried her until she had hit on another category: Overlaps.”

There were so many lovely passages of description - in the town, the bush, and the characters themselves. I could see a lot of the bad parts of myself in Harley and Douglas! Not so much Felicity, who I felt was rather pathetic and who made me impatient. The awkwardness of both Harley and Douglas around people - not meaning to say some things in certain situations, and yet those things are what come out of my mouth… Although, Harley is also a more generous-natured person than I can be at times!

I’ve enjoyed several of Kate Grenville’s works now, and am happy to see I still have a few more to go. ...more

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Oct 27, 2010 Tien rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: australian-author, australia, moving-mountains, fiction

From the premise, I expected the enjoy the book a lot more. And I think I might have except for 3 glaring annoyances:

1. Dialogues without quotation marks
description

2. The third POV who is rather like a Stepford wife with all the perfection she struggles to maintain especially with appearances. Her musings on wrinkles & how to prevent them were amusing to start with but worn my patience rather thin at the end. I took me a while after reading to understand the reason for this third POV who did barely had any ...more

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