Our weekly reviews of the latest books from home and abroad.
In the case of Handle with Care (Allen & Unwin, $39.99, pbk), Picoult has chosen osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly known as brittle-bone disease.
That is the disability but not the story, which involves the controversial question of whether parents should opt for abortion if their fetus is diagnosed with a serious disability.
Charlotte O'Keefe, desperate for money to care for her disabled child, sues her obstetrician for wrongful birth, an American tort in which the doctor either fails to notice a deformity or neglects to tell the parents, thus denying them the opportunity for a termination.
In this case, the obstetrician is also Charlotte's best friend (this is America, remember) and the lawsuit has devastating moral and ethical effects far beyond the mundane issue of an insurance company paying a malpractice settlement. The book's title might also be considered good advice to readers.
-Geoffrey Vine
And why not? Silvey's first book, Rhubarb, ensured his cult status; not bad for a 22-year-old - the cult genre being damaged people trying to find hope in each other, which covers a lot of people.
This second offering takes readers to an outback mining settlement in the 1960s and tells a rite-of-passage story of the town's younger, school-age teens, as seen through the eyes of Charlie, a skinny kid who's dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by - you've guessed - Jasper Jones, a year older boy. What Jasper wants Jasper's muscles get, and that's an alibi.
Less clear is what Charlie's best friend, Jeffrey Lu, a Vietnamese boy who loves cricket and Doug Walters in particular, is doing taking up so much plot time.
Jeffrey's efforts to convince the town's cricket selectors he can bat sort of sidetracks the main issues: did Jasper do something awful to Laura Wishart, or is he telling Charlie the truth? And will Charlie get to make it with the beautiful Eliza?
Just a little too much happening, but that's small towns for you. Tension grows as the search for Laura widens, and Charlie copes with a mother who hates outback towns and takes her frustrations out on her only child as teacher dad looks on. Some rite of passage for poor Charlie!
- Ian Williams.
Having a family complicates life for CIA assassins, who are known by the title Olen Steinhauer gives his novel, The Tourist (HarperCollins, $34.99, pbk).
So, while Milo is a capable assassin and can even cope when the CIA equivalents of M and Miss Moneypenny turn out to be foreign spies, it means he has an Achilles heel.
Threatening to uncover traitors means threats in return to his family, which, not unnaturally, brings family discord.
Chuck in the revelation that Milo was the result of a liaison between a Russian spy, with whom he is still in regular contact, and a Baader-Meinhoff terrorist and you have all the ingredients for a complicated thriller plot in which a lot of blood is spilt.
- Geoffrey Vine.
Deep Water (Allen & Unwin, pbk) concerns a scheme to divert an ocean of fresh water, supposed to be in a deep basin under Sydney, for illicit purposes rather than for the public good. Who else but Cliff Hardy, Corris' private-eye creation, can put a stop to the wheeling and dealing in progress?
Naturally, there's a love interest - a nurse who helps him recover from a heart operation, and whose father, a scientist, disappeared after he was thought to have found a way to access the fresh water without undermining half of Sydney.
What begins as a reasonably easy-to-follow narrative (although none of the characters are developed beyond the cut-out stage) becomes almost incomprehensible as new characters are introduced and people from this or that company or police department converge for the shoot-out.
Said to be the favoured reading of Oz politicians as they trip around in business class, this Corris effort is up in the clouds as far as I'm concerned.
- Ian Williams
Colgan starts from the premise that everything is connected in one way or another, and then attempts 30 "rounds" or chapters to join the dots.
It's an amusing, if unoriginal, idea and his book is exactly the kind that helps pass the time on a journey or in a waiting room.
Pop groups of notable obscurity make an excessively numerous appearance, and some of his connections are far-fetched or simply leap too far, but Colgan's variation on the traditional index alone is worth the price of the book.
- Bryan James
