I picked this book up at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe as an employee recommendation. It is young adult fiction, but I am reminded how much I liked the onslaught of young adult fiction that I had to read in that ASU course taught by Dr. Ken Donelson. The memory is dim, but the Chocolate War by Robert Cormier seems like a representative example. Dr. KD was competent and cool.
So, this book was good. Set in Sydney, it has several quirks in vocabulary and local flavor that will keep you on your toes. It features 4 characters at the core that don’t seem to have a lot going for them. One of them gets “selected” to address some unaddressed issues in the neighborhood. It is not predictable, and even if I wasn’t pulled along every step of the way, there was a payoff for me towards the end. Worthwhile.

Peter Mulvey’s cd is a variable mix, like a Joe Niekro knuckleball fluttering up to the plate. The most memorable song for me is the one that is most sparse, Thorn. It is just a few words, a simple poem really, overlaid with a longing melody. A woman in some corner of cyberspace wrote that she wanted to learn the song to sing to her spouse on their wedding day. Nice Nice.