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Black Glass
Tally and Grace are teenage sisters living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one no-hope town to the next by their fugitive father. When an explosion rips their lives apart, they flee separately to the city. The girls had always imagined that beyond the remote regions lay another, brighter world: glamorous, promising, full of luck. But, as each soon discovers, if one arrives broke, homeless, and alone, the city is a dangerous place—a place where commerce and surveillance rule, and undocumented people like themselves are confined to life’s shady margins. Now Tally and Grace must struggle to find each other and survive.
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2011
4 people are currently reading
216 people want to read
About the author
Meg Mundell
10Ìýbooks37ÌýfollowersBorn in NZ and based in Melbourne, Meg writes short stories, novels, journalism and memoir. Her second novel, THE TRESPASSERS (UQP), will be out in August 2019. Her first novel was BLACK GLASS (Scribe, 2011), and her debut short story collection is called THINGS I DID FOR MONEY (Scribe, 2013).
In October 2019, Affirm Press will publish WE ARE HERE: STORIES OF HOME, PLACE & BELONGING, a collection of writings by people who have experienced homelessness. Meg is the book's editor and manager of the project it sprang from, WE ARE HERE: WRITING PLACE ().
Meg's writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories, Australian Book Review, The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Big Issue, Eureka Street and other publications.
These days she works as a Research Fellow in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, and reads every night in order to avoid going stark raving mad.
In October 2019, Affirm Press will publish WE ARE HERE: STORIES OF HOME, PLACE & BELONGING, a collection of writings by people who have experienced homelessness. Meg is the book's editor and manager of the project it sprang from, WE ARE HERE: WRITING PLACE ().
Meg's writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories, Australian Book Review, The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, Overland, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Big Issue, Eureka Street and other publications.
These days she works as a Research Fellow in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, and reads every night in order to avoid going stark raving mad.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
October 14, 2019
‘Right before bad stuff happens, there’s always a little warning, you just have to pay attention.�
Grace (aged 15) and Tally (aged 13) are sisters, living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one remote place to another by their father Max as he relocates his drug lab. But when the house blows up, with Max inside, the girls are separated. Grace thinks that Tally was inside so, thinking herself alone, she hitchhikes to the city. Travelling to the city was once a shared dream: the girls thought life would be better there. Tally travels to the city as well, in search of Grace. But the city is not the welcoming refuge the girls thought it would be.
In this near future dystopian world, one needs documentation to live in the city. Without documentation, Grace and Tally are restricted to a marginal and dangerous existence. Without documentation, they do not exist. Without documentation they are vulnerable. Everything has a price; everyone is under surveillance. Grace is focussed on survival, and finds some people willing to help her. Tally is trying to find Grace.
‘Being secret didn’t make a place safe.�
Behind the scenes in this city, a man known as Milk, can manipulate mood using light, scent and sound. Milk prefers to work behind black glass, to maintain his anonymity while working his magic to increase casino profits. Business and government are also interested in Milk’s skills: surveillance and manipulation are valuable tools. And there’s an investigative journalist named Damon who is after a big story.
So, where does it end? What kind of society have we entered, where a city is divided into zones, and undocumented people are ‘rounded up�? Will Tally and Grace ever find each other?
I found this novel unsettling. Some elements of this dystopian future are recognisable, other elements all too believable. The novel is narrated in a report format which heightens the effect of all-pervasive surveillance.
I finished the novel, and looked over my shoulder.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Grace (aged 15) and Tally (aged 13) are sisters, living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one remote place to another by their father Max as he relocates his drug lab. But when the house blows up, with Max inside, the girls are separated. Grace thinks that Tally was inside so, thinking herself alone, she hitchhikes to the city. Travelling to the city was once a shared dream: the girls thought life would be better there. Tally travels to the city as well, in search of Grace. But the city is not the welcoming refuge the girls thought it would be.
In this near future dystopian world, one needs documentation to live in the city. Without documentation, Grace and Tally are restricted to a marginal and dangerous existence. Without documentation, they do not exist. Without documentation they are vulnerable. Everything has a price; everyone is under surveillance. Grace is focussed on survival, and finds some people willing to help her. Tally is trying to find Grace.
‘Being secret didn’t make a place safe.�
Behind the scenes in this city, a man known as Milk, can manipulate mood using light, scent and sound. Milk prefers to work behind black glass, to maintain his anonymity while working his magic to increase casino profits. Business and government are also interested in Milk’s skills: surveillance and manipulation are valuable tools. And there’s an investigative journalist named Damon who is after a big story.
So, where does it end? What kind of society have we entered, where a city is divided into zones, and undocumented people are ‘rounded up�? Will Tally and Grace ever find each other?
I found this novel unsettling. Some elements of this dystopian future are recognisable, other elements all too believable. The novel is narrated in a report format which heightens the effect of all-pervasive surveillance.
I finished the novel, and looked over my shoulder.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
April 21, 2012
Black Glass by Meg Mundell definitely met the Australian Women Writers Challenge to read outside my comfort zone. Dystopian YA with no guarantee of a happy ending? To prove I’m no coward I cracked open the book (thanks to my local library for getting in a copy ) and started reading.
It was good. Vivid writing with sharp landscapes and characters. The jagged scene and point of view switches helped to build the mood of a disjointed world.
Black Glass is a dream of the future where the only salvation is in committing to a relationship. People survive within a society structured to destroy them.
Maybe it’s a theme for all dystopian novels (maybe you’ve gathered I don’t read them much), but I noticed the issue of morality � of creating and abiding by something � seemed fairly explicit.
It was the little points � like the difficulty of clean drinking water � that made Black Glass so compelling. This was an ordinary world with big and little dramas. The big ideas drove the story, but it’s the details that make you care.
The scary thing was how easy it is to see today’s Australia in Black Glass.
It was good. Vivid writing with sharp landscapes and characters. The jagged scene and point of view switches helped to build the mood of a disjointed world.
Black Glass is a dream of the future where the only salvation is in committing to a relationship. People survive within a society structured to destroy them.
Maybe it’s a theme for all dystopian novels (maybe you’ve gathered I don’t read them much), but I noticed the issue of morality � of creating and abiding by something � seemed fairly explicit.
It was the little points � like the difficulty of clean drinking water � that made Black Glass so compelling. This was an ordinary world with big and little dramas. The big ideas drove the story, but it’s the details that make you care.
The scary thing was how easy it is to see today’s Australia in Black Glass.
February 29, 2012
Meg Mundell’s debut novel Black Glass is the story of two sisters and their search for each other in a city of the not-too-distant future. The black glass of the title is the glass of surveillance. Those who inhabit the city’s various zones are not only watched but manipulated by technicians who subtly influence behaviour through the use of scents, sounds and lighting at a subliminal level. The text includes email exchanges, transcripts of conversations and internet search results, adding to the sense that in this brave new world nothing is private.
The novel is richly detailed, containing brief, beautiful descriptions and surprising metaphors. Mundell’s dialogue is one of the novel’s great strengths - witty, pacey and authentic, it positively crackles with energy and renders the characters perfectly.
A former journalist and government advisor, Mundell conveys a great deal of cynicism about the relationship between the media and the government. At one point, one of the characters reflects on how the media relies on “an endless supply of human folly and greed, criminality, bad luck and exploitation.� And this is exactly what Mundell serves up in her exciting debut: a blackly funny, sinister and gritty exploration of marginalisation.
The novel is richly detailed, containing brief, beautiful descriptions and surprising metaphors. Mundell’s dialogue is one of the novel’s great strengths - witty, pacey and authentic, it positively crackles with energy and renders the characters perfectly.
A former journalist and government advisor, Mundell conveys a great deal of cynicism about the relationship between the media and the government. At one point, one of the characters reflects on how the media relies on “an endless supply of human folly and greed, criminality, bad luck and exploitation.� And this is exactly what Mundell serves up in her exciting debut: a blackly funny, sinister and gritty exploration of marginalisation.
December 22, 2020
(3.5 stars)
“All towns have hidden places where private plans are made—gaps under bridges, an overgrown roadside, the sunny fire-escape of an abandoned building.� Tally and Grace live on the move with a paranoid tweaker Dad, in a grim, near-future Melbourne where surveillance is on the rise, and the difference between rich and poor—the documented and the undocumented—grows ever wider. Separated by an explosion that one assumes results from a failed cook-up, the sisters head to the big smoke and work out how to survive without papers. They quickly realise that danger at the margins comes in many disguises: “The guy was hard to decipher, but the puppy lent him a benign air.�
Meg Mundell’s narrative is constructed from a series of different reports from a variety of characters. It’s disjointed and some characters are annoying, though it comes together better in the second half of the book. Perhaps the most interesting secondary character is Milk. He’s got a talent called tuning, where he uses light, sound and smell to create moods in public spaces: “Tuning is poetry as much as science, always an uncertain art. People might share common traits, but their experiences can’t be laid out on some tidy graph. The questions never stop: what emotion does a certain shade of lilac evoke? What texture most invites touch? How exactly, from base note to after-scent, does downtown Washington smell after rain?� Milk’s skills are in high demand, at concerts where crowds get rowdy, and at protests that might get out of hand for a government bent on watching the citizens in its care: “We thought the word foresight or protection would work better than surveillance. In fact, we don’t want the word surveillance used at all. It’s becoming very outdated.�
Perhaps the best bit of Mundell’s writing are her descriptions of aromas, which makes Black Glass a bit like a contemporary version of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: “There’s boy in there too, bit sweaty¬—but the girl’s stronger. And definitely some Beach in the core not. Sand, ozone, seaspray, negative ions. Waves—bit of a crash, but not too rough. Dry notes too: little flash of rock dust, like ignition. Rocks banged together, almost sparks.� I also liked the little hints of an Australian sensibility, particularly as so much dystopian fiction is set offshore: “He’d forgotten about the bushfires for a moment there; these days woodsmoke held bad memories for a large percentage of the population.� Would have given it a better score if I hadn't hated the abrupt ending so much I felt ripped off.
“All towns have hidden places where private plans are made—gaps under bridges, an overgrown roadside, the sunny fire-escape of an abandoned building.� Tally and Grace live on the move with a paranoid tweaker Dad, in a grim, near-future Melbourne where surveillance is on the rise, and the difference between rich and poor—the documented and the undocumented—grows ever wider. Separated by an explosion that one assumes results from a failed cook-up, the sisters head to the big smoke and work out how to survive without papers. They quickly realise that danger at the margins comes in many disguises: “The guy was hard to decipher, but the puppy lent him a benign air.�
Meg Mundell’s narrative is constructed from a series of different reports from a variety of characters. It’s disjointed and some characters are annoying, though it comes together better in the second half of the book. Perhaps the most interesting secondary character is Milk. He’s got a talent called tuning, where he uses light, sound and smell to create moods in public spaces: “Tuning is poetry as much as science, always an uncertain art. People might share common traits, but their experiences can’t be laid out on some tidy graph. The questions never stop: what emotion does a certain shade of lilac evoke? What texture most invites touch? How exactly, from base note to after-scent, does downtown Washington smell after rain?� Milk’s skills are in high demand, at concerts where crowds get rowdy, and at protests that might get out of hand for a government bent on watching the citizens in its care: “We thought the word foresight or protection would work better than surveillance. In fact, we don’t want the word surveillance used at all. It’s becoming very outdated.�
Perhaps the best bit of Mundell’s writing are her descriptions of aromas, which makes Black Glass a bit like a contemporary version of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: “There’s boy in there too, bit sweaty¬—but the girl’s stronger. And definitely some Beach in the core not. Sand, ozone, seaspray, negative ions. Waves—bit of a crash, but not too rough. Dry notes too: little flash of rock dust, like ignition. Rocks banged together, almost sparks.� I also liked the little hints of an Australian sensibility, particularly as so much dystopian fiction is set offshore: “He’d forgotten about the bushfires for a moment there; these days woodsmoke held bad memories for a large percentage of the population.� Would have given it a better score if I hadn't hated the abrupt ending so much I felt ripped off.
March 23, 2013
This review forms part of my contribution to theÌý. All my 2013 AWWC reviews can be foundÌý.
by has been on my reading list for a while. When I was looking through my Kindle to find which book to read next, I picked it more because I've had it for a long time than because it leapt out at me.
And I loved it.
So why did it take so long for me to pick up the book? I try to avoid reading detailed reviews of books on my to-be-read list (for fear of spoilers) but I do often glance over high level descriptions to get a feel for whether I'm going to like a book. And I realised that I had internalised two main facts aboutÌý through this vague process of osmosis.
1. The book was really good (like, award nomination good).
2. It was a story of two teenage girls trying to find each other in a dystopian Melbourne.
From this (admittedlyÌývery small) evidence base, I had put together an image of a technically very good book, a "worthy" novel, that would make me a better person to read, but that I might not actually enjoy. And those kinds of books tend to stay on my to-be-read pile for a long time.
I shouldn't have hesitated. The bookÌýisÌýtechnically very good and does have interesting things to say, but it is also hugely entertaining.
So, in the interests of providing an alternative view of the book, let me describe it this way. If you like William Gibson (especially the Blue Ant series) and love speculative fiction set in an Australian context, you're going to likeÌý.
The structure of the novel seemingly chaotic on the surface, with a conventionally constructed main narrative thread told from the point of view of the two separated sisters (Tally and Grace) interwoven with minor threads told from the point of view of Milk (a man pioneering the art of influencing the mood of a group of people through light, sound and smell) and Damon (a freelance journalist in a world where you're only as good as your last story). To top it off, small vignettes from a variety of minor or one-off characters, performed in unusual modes (e.g. one sided conversations, surveillance tapes, news snippets etc) illustrate aspects of this future dystopia. It comes together in a chaotic blend, exactly the kind of smart writing that rewards a small investment in adjusting to an unusual narrative style.
Mundell covers some big themes, including the unhealthy manipulation of the citizenry by the media, the dumbing down of journalism, increasing stratification of society into haves and have-nots, government control, familial relationships and survival on the streets when you have no resources to draw on. In some of the scenes that depicted the freelance journalist pitching stories to editors, I detected the scent of personal experience in the journalist's frustration with people who want "grit" but not "substance" - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Mundell herself has some experience in the journalism space.
The main characters are all richly drawn, with distinctive voices (both in terms of dialog and general tone). Mundell invests a lot of energy in creating characters that are both mostly sympathetic (despite their flaws) and compelling. This depth pervades even the more minor character, some of the tragedy that surrounds the character of Blue, for instance, has a strong impact even though the worst of it happens off stage.
The style is reminiscent of Gibson's work, obviously set in the future, but not the unrecognisable future. Interesting asides on technology, and the different styles of narrative, complete the affect.
This is a strongly character driven piece, sometimes at the expense of the plot. This does result in the pace sometimes dragging a little but this is a minor quibble.
All in all I foundÌý a thoroughly engaging read. Highly recommended.
I also reviewed this book on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.Ìý.
by has been on my reading list for a while. When I was looking through my Kindle to find which book to read next, I picked it more because I've had it for a long time than because it leapt out at me.
And I loved it.
So why did it take so long for me to pick up the book? I try to avoid reading detailed reviews of books on my to-be-read list (for fear of spoilers) but I do often glance over high level descriptions to get a feel for whether I'm going to like a book. And I realised that I had internalised two main facts aboutÌý through this vague process of osmosis.
1. The book was really good (like, award nomination good).
2. It was a story of two teenage girls trying to find each other in a dystopian Melbourne.
From this (admittedlyÌývery small) evidence base, I had put together an image of a technically very good book, a "worthy" novel, that would make me a better person to read, but that I might not actually enjoy. And those kinds of books tend to stay on my to-be-read pile for a long time.
I shouldn't have hesitated. The bookÌýisÌýtechnically very good and does have interesting things to say, but it is also hugely entertaining.
So, in the interests of providing an alternative view of the book, let me describe it this way. If you like William Gibson (especially the Blue Ant series) and love speculative fiction set in an Australian context, you're going to likeÌý.
The structure of the novel seemingly chaotic on the surface, with a conventionally constructed main narrative thread told from the point of view of the two separated sisters (Tally and Grace) interwoven with minor threads told from the point of view of Milk (a man pioneering the art of influencing the mood of a group of people through light, sound and smell) and Damon (a freelance journalist in a world where you're only as good as your last story). To top it off, small vignettes from a variety of minor or one-off characters, performed in unusual modes (e.g. one sided conversations, surveillance tapes, news snippets etc) illustrate aspects of this future dystopia. It comes together in a chaotic blend, exactly the kind of smart writing that rewards a small investment in adjusting to an unusual narrative style.
Mundell covers some big themes, including the unhealthy manipulation of the citizenry by the media, the dumbing down of journalism, increasing stratification of society into haves and have-nots, government control, familial relationships and survival on the streets when you have no resources to draw on. In some of the scenes that depicted the freelance journalist pitching stories to editors, I detected the scent of personal experience in the journalist's frustration with people who want "grit" but not "substance" - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Mundell herself has some experience in the journalism space.
The main characters are all richly drawn, with distinctive voices (both in terms of dialog and general tone). Mundell invests a lot of energy in creating characters that are both mostly sympathetic (despite their flaws) and compelling. This depth pervades even the more minor character, some of the tragedy that surrounds the character of Blue, for instance, has a strong impact even though the worst of it happens off stage.
The style is reminiscent of Gibson's work, obviously set in the future, but not the unrecognisable future. Interesting asides on technology, and the different styles of narrative, complete the affect.
This is a strongly character driven piece, sometimes at the expense of the plot. This does result in the pace sometimes dragging a little but this is a minor quibble.
All in all I foundÌý a thoroughly engaging read. Highly recommended.
I also reviewed this book on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.Ìý.
February 3, 2016
This is a dystopian novel set in Melbourne. There are so many dystopian stories set in the States or in totally invented worlds, so it was really nice to read something Aussie, that included great descriptions of the drought-infested north of Victoria, as well as the 'casino district' on the Yarra in the city, and the devastation of the Docklands precinct which (unsurprisingly, perhaps) becomes abandoned and derelict.
The main protagonists are two sisters, Tally and Grace, who get separated at the beginning at novel after their father dies, and each make their way to Melbourne in search of the other. Tally ends up a street kid who does odd jobs for a local racketeer, Grace ends up an actress in magic show in the shabbier part of town. In this way the story isn't a 'girl saves the world' narrative like many other popular dystopian novels featuring female protagonists: it's more intimate, more ordinary. Which I liked. It was just two girls trying to make it in a tough world and maybe find each other if they manage to survive.
The narrative splits between a bunch of other characters too, the most interesting being Milk, a dude whose job it is to manipulate crowds by altering the sensory environment. That is, he works at large scale events (such a rock concerts, night clubs, sports events, casinos) and affects the lights, scents, temperature, music, and general feeling of the room to get people to do whatever the venue owner wants, whether it’s spend more money, not get involved in fights, make better business deals, etc. Milk is likeable even though his job is ethically questionable, which is why I found his story line interesting. Mundell does a great job of detailing all the different scents and moods etc that Milk effects, which makes his role and function as a symbol of the surveillance state really compelling.
I think the book would have been stronger had all the different themes been woven together more clearly and effectively. There were so many competing ideas, but many of them didn't seem to be elaborated within the story enough to actually become meaningful. For example, the idea of surveillance was flagged early on as a theme - there are frequent mention of security cameras; the book cover has a camera on it, etc. But we're never really told what the government is trying to monitor; there's some suggestion through another set of characters that it's the establishment's attempt to rid the city of 'undocs' (those with no identification papers), but there's not enough momentum in those sections of text to ever really make the government feel particularly sinister. It was as though the 'government' was meant to be a threatening presence hovering over the specifics of the storyline, but it was so absent that I wasn't really convinced. Even had it been there, it barely intersected with the storylines of Tally and Grace. So it was hard to feel invested in the theme of surveillance. Milk's character was great but again, he wasn't intertwined enough with the theme for me to really see the connection. So by the end of the novel when references to 'ID-Net' start being made (I think it's supposed be a global surveillance initiative though it's never really specified) I didn't really buy it - not because the idea of global surveillance isn't interesting but because it was under-elaborated and so felt insignificant and a bit tacked on.
In fact several of the world-building elements seemed there for the sake of it - for example there's a weird sexualised blood-letting racket going on (which is a super interesting and creepy idea, by the way) but I never really got how it actually linked it with the surveillance and undoc stuff.
The impression I got is that the novel was a little undercooked in terms of character development and some of the overarching ideas. At the level of sentence, the writing is lovely - tight, evocative, a good balance of action and description (Mundell's other work is also great like this). But on the whole I felt as though I wasn't investing in everything that much - I think a longer novel might have been better as there would have been space to detail all the connections and really create the sinister mood I feel the book was aiming for. All that said, I liked the novel - especially if you're a Melbournian I think you'll appreciate it.
from juliatulloh.com
The main protagonists are two sisters, Tally and Grace, who get separated at the beginning at novel after their father dies, and each make their way to Melbourne in search of the other. Tally ends up a street kid who does odd jobs for a local racketeer, Grace ends up an actress in magic show in the shabbier part of town. In this way the story isn't a 'girl saves the world' narrative like many other popular dystopian novels featuring female protagonists: it's more intimate, more ordinary. Which I liked. It was just two girls trying to make it in a tough world and maybe find each other if they manage to survive.
The narrative splits between a bunch of other characters too, the most interesting being Milk, a dude whose job it is to manipulate crowds by altering the sensory environment. That is, he works at large scale events (such a rock concerts, night clubs, sports events, casinos) and affects the lights, scents, temperature, music, and general feeling of the room to get people to do whatever the venue owner wants, whether it’s spend more money, not get involved in fights, make better business deals, etc. Milk is likeable even though his job is ethically questionable, which is why I found his story line interesting. Mundell does a great job of detailing all the different scents and moods etc that Milk effects, which makes his role and function as a symbol of the surveillance state really compelling.
I think the book would have been stronger had all the different themes been woven together more clearly and effectively. There were so many competing ideas, but many of them didn't seem to be elaborated within the story enough to actually become meaningful. For example, the idea of surveillance was flagged early on as a theme - there are frequent mention of security cameras; the book cover has a camera on it, etc. But we're never really told what the government is trying to monitor; there's some suggestion through another set of characters that it's the establishment's attempt to rid the city of 'undocs' (those with no identification papers), but there's not enough momentum in those sections of text to ever really make the government feel particularly sinister. It was as though the 'government' was meant to be a threatening presence hovering over the specifics of the storyline, but it was so absent that I wasn't really convinced. Even had it been there, it barely intersected with the storylines of Tally and Grace. So it was hard to feel invested in the theme of surveillance. Milk's character was great but again, he wasn't intertwined enough with the theme for me to really see the connection. So by the end of the novel when references to 'ID-Net' start being made (I think it's supposed be a global surveillance initiative though it's never really specified) I didn't really buy it - not because the idea of global surveillance isn't interesting but because it was under-elaborated and so felt insignificant and a bit tacked on.
In fact several of the world-building elements seemed there for the sake of it - for example there's a weird sexualised blood-letting racket going on (which is a super interesting and creepy idea, by the way) but I never really got how it actually linked it with the surveillance and undoc stuff.
The impression I got is that the novel was a little undercooked in terms of character development and some of the overarching ideas. At the level of sentence, the writing is lovely - tight, evocative, a good balance of action and description (Mundell's other work is also great like this). But on the whole I felt as though I wasn't investing in everything that much - I think a longer novel might have been better as there would have been space to detail all the connections and really create the sinister mood I feel the book was aiming for. All that said, I liked the novel - especially if you're a Melbournian I think you'll appreciate it.
from juliatulloh.com
August 17, 2019
Black Glass is speculative fiction, a genre I don't usually read, but I found it interesting. It's a futuristic world, but convincingly so, because many of its elements exist already in less extreme form.
Two adolescent sisters, Tally and Grace, are separated by the force of an explosion which kills their father. (Yes, he's fooling around with drug manufacture). Their reunion is problematical because they are 'undocs', that is, they have no ID. They can expect no assistance of any kind because they are excluded from the gated city along with all the other undesirables: refugees, the homeless, the marginalised. The girls therefore have to draw on all their own resources because they have no money, no work, no home and no network to help them find each other again. (They are also excluded from social networking because they can't access the internet and their one mobile phone gets lost).
This society of the marginalised allows Mundell to create a rich cast of eccentric characters, all of whom have mastered the art of survival in an unforgiving environment, recognizably a Melbourne of the future. At the same time we see the ways in which the favoured members of this society are manipulated by commerce and government to entrench advantage. The most convincing example of this is the mood engineer, Milk, ('tall and pale') who manipulates the ambience of a (very recognisable) casino with scent and music so that the gamblers will feel optimistic and waste more money. As it happens, I know something about government regulation to control how this is already done in casinos and pokie venues, so it's not a far-fetched scenario at all. Neither is pervasive city surveillance nor outbreaks of civic disturbance such as we have seen in Paris and elsewhere.
Mundell has a background in journalism, and she takes the opportunity to critique journotainment with its focus on the sordid aspects of society. 'You like the underbelly stuff, don't you?' asks Luella of Damon, to which he replies 'Don’t You? Keeps life interesting'. (p79) Well, I don't share that fascination, and I think it's a pity that what used to be merely a tabloid preoccupation has now spread to our ABC and what used to be our quality press. The risk that Mundell takes in Black Glass is that it shares that preoccupation with the 'underbelly', but this book is well-written enough to transcend it.
Narrated by multiple characters in report format, the strands of the story are separated into brief segments with Big-Brotherish headings...
To read the rest of my review please visit
Two adolescent sisters, Tally and Grace, are separated by the force of an explosion which kills their father. (Yes, he's fooling around with drug manufacture). Their reunion is problematical because they are 'undocs', that is, they have no ID. They can expect no assistance of any kind because they are excluded from the gated city along with all the other undesirables: refugees, the homeless, the marginalised. The girls therefore have to draw on all their own resources because they have no money, no work, no home and no network to help them find each other again. (They are also excluded from social networking because they can't access the internet and their one mobile phone gets lost).
This society of the marginalised allows Mundell to create a rich cast of eccentric characters, all of whom have mastered the art of survival in an unforgiving environment, recognizably a Melbourne of the future. At the same time we see the ways in which the favoured members of this society are manipulated by commerce and government to entrench advantage. The most convincing example of this is the mood engineer, Milk, ('tall and pale') who manipulates the ambience of a (very recognisable) casino with scent and music so that the gamblers will feel optimistic and waste more money. As it happens, I know something about government regulation to control how this is already done in casinos and pokie venues, so it's not a far-fetched scenario at all. Neither is pervasive city surveillance nor outbreaks of civic disturbance such as we have seen in Paris and elsewhere.
Mundell has a background in journalism, and she takes the opportunity to critique journotainment with its focus on the sordid aspects of society. 'You like the underbelly stuff, don't you?' asks Luella of Damon, to which he replies 'Don’t You? Keeps life interesting'. (p79) Well, I don't share that fascination, and I think it's a pity that what used to be merely a tabloid preoccupation has now spread to our ABC and what used to be our quality press. The risk that Mundell takes in Black Glass is that it shares that preoccupation with the 'underbelly', but this book is well-written enough to transcend it.
Narrated by multiple characters in report format, the strands of the story are separated into brief segments with Big-Brotherish headings...
To read the rest of my review please visit
November 8, 2023
Adolescent sisters Tally and Grace are separated when an explosion destroys their home in the Regions. Both make their way to the city; both work fiercely to survive while searching for the other.
In a slightly futuristic, but still recognisable, Melbourne, the girls are ‘undocs� � citizens without official documentation or government sanction. They dwell on the fringes of society, prey to scammers and the unscrupulous. In the midst of this uncertain and predatory world, Tally and Grace also find friendship, loyalty and kindness.
Grace, the elder sister and an aspiring actress, stumbles into work with Merlin and his smart-mouthed ventriloquist dummy. Disguising her naturally red hair with a black wig, and adopting the stage name Violet, gives Grace a sense of freedom, but the disguise also makes it harder for Tally to find her. Tally throws her lot in with Blue, an Indigenous undoc aiming to return to his family in Central Australia. Blue teaches Tally how to find food and shelter in the seedy Docklands area of the Southern Interzone. His oversight keeps Tally buoyant in her search for Grace.
Threaded through this story of the sisters are Bloodhound TV journalist Damon Spark, who is fed insider information from a ‘state liaison officer� for his gritty crime segments, and Milk, an atmosphere enhancer who changes people’s perception of their environment by injecting aromas into the air. Smell-induced mood changes are used to influence the behaviour of casino patrons, concert goers, anti-government protesters and homeward-bound office workers.
Author Meg Mundell uses short, punchy sections to unfold her narrative. Each section has a heading that alerts readers to locations and characters. For example: ‘DISUSED RAIL TUNNEL: LINKS DOCKLANDS AND CARNIE DISTRICT, THE QUARTER: TALLY│BLUE│DIGGY│MISCELLANEOUS UNVERIFIED PERSONS� and ‘REMEDY, PRIVATE CLUB, COMMERCE ZONE: MILK│MADAME KRANE, MANAGER│PATRONS�. This choppy technique can make it difficult to untangle the storyline, but it means the novel can be read in short, discrete bursts.
Tally, Grace and their companions live on the margins of society. They struggle to survive from day to day; they are despised or ignored by those who live, in affluence and safety, beyond the Interzones. Comparisons could easily be drawn with ethnic, religious or economic minority groups in today’s society or � more compellingly � with refugees seeking a foothold in mainstream Australia.
My copy of this book was provided by the Western Australian journal Fiction Focus: New Books for Teenagers. A version of my review was published in Fiction Focus 25(2) 2011.
In a slightly futuristic, but still recognisable, Melbourne, the girls are ‘undocs� � citizens without official documentation or government sanction. They dwell on the fringes of society, prey to scammers and the unscrupulous. In the midst of this uncertain and predatory world, Tally and Grace also find friendship, loyalty and kindness.
Grace, the elder sister and an aspiring actress, stumbles into work with Merlin and his smart-mouthed ventriloquist dummy. Disguising her naturally red hair with a black wig, and adopting the stage name Violet, gives Grace a sense of freedom, but the disguise also makes it harder for Tally to find her. Tally throws her lot in with Blue, an Indigenous undoc aiming to return to his family in Central Australia. Blue teaches Tally how to find food and shelter in the seedy Docklands area of the Southern Interzone. His oversight keeps Tally buoyant in her search for Grace.
Threaded through this story of the sisters are Bloodhound TV journalist Damon Spark, who is fed insider information from a ‘state liaison officer� for his gritty crime segments, and Milk, an atmosphere enhancer who changes people’s perception of their environment by injecting aromas into the air. Smell-induced mood changes are used to influence the behaviour of casino patrons, concert goers, anti-government protesters and homeward-bound office workers.
Author Meg Mundell uses short, punchy sections to unfold her narrative. Each section has a heading that alerts readers to locations and characters. For example: ‘DISUSED RAIL TUNNEL: LINKS DOCKLANDS AND CARNIE DISTRICT, THE QUARTER: TALLY│BLUE│DIGGY│MISCELLANEOUS UNVERIFIED PERSONS� and ‘REMEDY, PRIVATE CLUB, COMMERCE ZONE: MILK│MADAME KRANE, MANAGER│PATRONS�. This choppy technique can make it difficult to untangle the storyline, but it means the novel can be read in short, discrete bursts.
Tally, Grace and their companions live on the margins of society. They struggle to survive from day to day; they are despised or ignored by those who live, in affluence and safety, beyond the Interzones. Comparisons could easily be drawn with ethnic, religious or economic minority groups in today’s society or � more compellingly � with refugees seeking a foothold in mainstream Australia.
My copy of this book was provided by the Western Australian journal Fiction Focus: New Books for Teenagers. A version of my review was published in Fiction Focus 25(2) 2011.
March 6, 2021
Full of sympathetic, fully realized characters, all of whom differ from each other but are wholly believable; a complex, intertwined plot that, in a way reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway, brings them almost into contact, but not; clear, clever, language-loving prose, never purple or overdone but constantly surprising in its keenly observed touches of everyday life; a Panopticon point of view, expressed by the tags that start each chapter and allow Mundell to play with different voices and modes; all set in a dreary future Melbourne, a city firmly divided by class, wealth, and geography, in an Australia where people outside certain enclaves have been reduced to "undocs" (undocumented) and must scramble to survive and avoid drawing unwanted attention. "Don't look the cops in the eyes," Blue, an Indigenous undoc, tells his young, naive friend Tally. It's good advice.
"Black Glass" starts when two sisters, Grace and Tally, 15 and 13, are orphaned when their father dies in a massive explosion in his meth lab. They had been just about to run off from somewhere up north to Melbourne; Grace caged Tally into returning to the house to grab her forgotten cigs, and thinks she's been killed in the explosion. She's not, but now separated, the girls migrate independently to the big city.
There they join the undoc underground. Grace gets a job as a magician's assistant; Tally scrounges with her luckily found friend Blue. But the plot expands to bring in low-level fixers and crooks; a dude called "Milk" who uses scents, sounds, and colors to "tune" the emotional state of crowds; the government, intent on a WTO-like meeting and planning new, broader, and more repressive control measures on the citizenry; and an Antifa-like resistance determined to disrupt the meeting and stop the state's plans -- all bound together by contacts with a semi-freelance TV reporter, who's tracking stories in which all these people figure in smaller or greater ways.
Swirling around all the action and embedded in the lives of the characters are complicated questions about friendship, morality, what we owe one another as human beings, and the hopelessness life can deliver as well as the refusal to accept it. There is a great deal of human and humane depth in "Black Glass," and no easy answers.
To say more would be to betray the denoument and deny readers the pleasures of working their way through this intricate but carefully structured novel. The hype on the back cover, which proclaims Mundell "an exceptional new talent," is for once not hyperbole.
"Black Glass" starts when two sisters, Grace and Tally, 15 and 13, are orphaned when their father dies in a massive explosion in his meth lab. They had been just about to run off from somewhere up north to Melbourne; Grace caged Tally into returning to the house to grab her forgotten cigs, and thinks she's been killed in the explosion. She's not, but now separated, the girls migrate independently to the big city.
There they join the undoc underground. Grace gets a job as a magician's assistant; Tally scrounges with her luckily found friend Blue. But the plot expands to bring in low-level fixers and crooks; a dude called "Milk" who uses scents, sounds, and colors to "tune" the emotional state of crowds; the government, intent on a WTO-like meeting and planning new, broader, and more repressive control measures on the citizenry; and an Antifa-like resistance determined to disrupt the meeting and stop the state's plans -- all bound together by contacts with a semi-freelance TV reporter, who's tracking stories in which all these people figure in smaller or greater ways.
Swirling around all the action and embedded in the lives of the characters are complicated questions about friendship, morality, what we owe one another as human beings, and the hopelessness life can deliver as well as the refusal to accept it. There is a great deal of human and humane depth in "Black Glass," and no easy answers.
To say more would be to betray the denoument and deny readers the pleasures of working their way through this intricate but carefully structured novel. The hype on the back cover, which proclaims Mundell "an exceptional new talent," is for once not hyperbole.
September 5, 2019
What a surprising little book! I ended up reading this book in two halves with a big break in the middle but I'm so pleased I went back to it.
I really enjoyed the narrative structure once I got the hang of it. The characters were superbly crafted and it was a real page turner at the end.
I particularly appreciated the way the politics were handled. As someone who has spent many hours marching on the streets of Melbourne including some big summit protests I've seen how often protesters concerns get dismissed. The personal and political were covered with grace and authenticity.
A fabulous first novel that inspired me to get back into mine.
Congratulations Meg.
I really enjoyed the narrative structure once I got the hang of it. The characters were superbly crafted and it was a real page turner at the end.
I particularly appreciated the way the politics were handled. As someone who has spent many hours marching on the streets of Melbourne including some big summit protests I've seen how often protesters concerns get dismissed. The personal and political were covered with grace and authenticity.
A fabulous first novel that inspired me to get back into mine.
Congratulations Meg.
August 21, 2023
A great near future dystopian Melbourne - well imagined and (sadly) believable. Maybe dragged a little in the mid section, but overall well paced and gripping plot. Well drawn characters and dialogue.
June 30, 2024
Reviewed for M/C Reviews: Words, 2011
If fiction reveals our cultural journeys, speculative fiction confronts us with dystopian visions of where we could be heading. Debut Australian novelist Meg Mundell shines with her layering of Big Brotherly surveillance and alienated citizenry over the culturally-rich first-world city of Melbourne.
Tally and Grace are sisters seduced by the mythology of the big city. After years of being continuously covertly relocated across the Regions, the sisters are plunged into homelessness when their father’s meth lab explodes. This first explosion rips the sisters� world apart. Physically apart at the time, they escape separately to the city, each believing the other dead, but holding on to the hope that has long sustained them.
Black glass is a barrier, a means for one group to spy on another. It is the concealed surveillance cameras, the one-way glass at the casino and the health club, the reflective glass of the tall inner-city buildings. It is a thematic device used to effect in Black Glass. The story is fragmented, like broken glass, in its narrative viewpoint shifts, its fragile relationships, and its subversive government-monitoring style headings.
Mundell’s rich use of fragmentation in scene, dialogue and form evokes strong feelings of paranoia and emptiness. Characters are inter-related, but must chart their courses alone. The sisters� separate entries to the city are documented, ironically as they are ‘undocs�; unverified and unregistered citizens. They spend the majority of the story apart, but are determined to find one another again. The odds, in this disturbing quest novel, are against them.
Decadent, dirty and dangerous, Melbourne emerges as a shady character in a future-shocked world. It’s all ‘thick coils of heat� and ‘filthy cracks�. Its ‘tea-brown� (47) river is choked with plastic, its fountains dry. Streetkids live in her tunnels, and everyone is drawn to the spectacle that is the carnival.
Tally meets Blue, an indigenous undoc in the south interzone, and he teaches her the streets. They get involved in a little illegal marketing which ensures Tally gets around town to look for her sister.
Grace doesn’t make it easy for her. She believes Tally dead and any thought of her gets pushed deep down. In her blind quest to make it as an actress, mirrored in today’s desperation for fifteen minutes of reality fame, Grace is targeted by low-rent sex workers in record time and is surrounded by deviancy her whole time in the city. She changes her name and her appearance and fools herself well. While Tally is flashing her one digital image of Grace around, Grace is becoming someone else.
Someone else being creative with the truth is Damon Spark, hack journalist, purveyor of journotainment. He’s there, being subversive and morally indignant in turn, at the climax; the undoc uprising that’s coming as the police cleanse the streets to create an illusion for visiting dignitaries. Sadly Damon’s protestations are more for his perceived integrity than for the fate of the city’s underclass.
The most original character is Milk, a moodie. His migrant father had a lawyer son and a dentist son, and... Milk who spends his waking hours manipulating the mood of the room on a much higher level than a DJ at a nightclub. He is a magician who can control and alter moods with colours, lights, sounds, and edge-of-awareness scents. His work is observed by government operatives who hire him under the pretence of spring-cleaning the city, injecting harmony and goodwill. He is deceived by the perceived respect, he’s a ‘government consultant� (215), and ignores the sinister intent in which ‘the public just needs a nudge in the right direction� (213).
‘There are those who make a positive contribution to the city, and those who do the opposite. They’re just a drain on resources and they don’t portray the place in the best light (213).�
Cue the destruction and fallout of character lines intertwining as undocs and sympathisers protest at the security summit. As the city explodes with sirens wailing, ‘bodies mown down like weeds� (277) and ‘flames gobbling like a mass of hungry tongues� (273), the story’s denouement is subtle and fast and hardly a solid conclusion, but it works.
If fiction reveals our cultural journeys, speculative fiction confronts us with dystopian visions of where we could be heading. Debut Australian novelist Meg Mundell shines with her layering of Big Brotherly surveillance and alienated citizenry over the culturally-rich first-world city of Melbourne.
Tally and Grace are sisters seduced by the mythology of the big city. After years of being continuously covertly relocated across the Regions, the sisters are plunged into homelessness when their father’s meth lab explodes. This first explosion rips the sisters� world apart. Physically apart at the time, they escape separately to the city, each believing the other dead, but holding on to the hope that has long sustained them.
Black glass is a barrier, a means for one group to spy on another. It is the concealed surveillance cameras, the one-way glass at the casino and the health club, the reflective glass of the tall inner-city buildings. It is a thematic device used to effect in Black Glass. The story is fragmented, like broken glass, in its narrative viewpoint shifts, its fragile relationships, and its subversive government-monitoring style headings.
Mundell’s rich use of fragmentation in scene, dialogue and form evokes strong feelings of paranoia and emptiness. Characters are inter-related, but must chart their courses alone. The sisters� separate entries to the city are documented, ironically as they are ‘undocs�; unverified and unregistered citizens. They spend the majority of the story apart, but are determined to find one another again. The odds, in this disturbing quest novel, are against them.
Decadent, dirty and dangerous, Melbourne emerges as a shady character in a future-shocked world. It’s all ‘thick coils of heat� and ‘filthy cracks�. Its ‘tea-brown� (47) river is choked with plastic, its fountains dry. Streetkids live in her tunnels, and everyone is drawn to the spectacle that is the carnival.
Tally meets Blue, an indigenous undoc in the south interzone, and he teaches her the streets. They get involved in a little illegal marketing which ensures Tally gets around town to look for her sister.
Grace doesn’t make it easy for her. She believes Tally dead and any thought of her gets pushed deep down. In her blind quest to make it as an actress, mirrored in today’s desperation for fifteen minutes of reality fame, Grace is targeted by low-rent sex workers in record time and is surrounded by deviancy her whole time in the city. She changes her name and her appearance and fools herself well. While Tally is flashing her one digital image of Grace around, Grace is becoming someone else.
Someone else being creative with the truth is Damon Spark, hack journalist, purveyor of journotainment. He’s there, being subversive and morally indignant in turn, at the climax; the undoc uprising that’s coming as the police cleanse the streets to create an illusion for visiting dignitaries. Sadly Damon’s protestations are more for his perceived integrity than for the fate of the city’s underclass.
The most original character is Milk, a moodie. His migrant father had a lawyer son and a dentist son, and... Milk who spends his waking hours manipulating the mood of the room on a much higher level than a DJ at a nightclub. He is a magician who can control and alter moods with colours, lights, sounds, and edge-of-awareness scents. His work is observed by government operatives who hire him under the pretence of spring-cleaning the city, injecting harmony and goodwill. He is deceived by the perceived respect, he’s a ‘government consultant� (215), and ignores the sinister intent in which ‘the public just needs a nudge in the right direction� (213).
‘There are those who make a positive contribution to the city, and those who do the opposite. They’re just a drain on resources and they don’t portray the place in the best light (213).�
Cue the destruction and fallout of character lines intertwining as undocs and sympathisers protest at the security summit. As the city explodes with sirens wailing, ‘bodies mown down like weeds� (277) and ‘flames gobbling like a mass of hungry tongues� (273), the story’s denouement is subtle and fast and hardly a solid conclusion, but it works.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2012
Black Glass, debut novel by Meg Mundell, caught my eye because it was shortlisted for Aurealis Awards in both the SF and YA categories. (And being written by a woman, hence counting towards my SF Aussie Women Writers Challenge also helped.)
The narrative style and presentation of the story and characters is exactly the sort I usually dislike. The scenes, as well as presenting the two most central characters in a reasonably conventional narrative, alternate scenic mood scenes (sometimes with a temporary character as a focus), often (always?) in present tense, and dialogue without any framing.
I’ve stopped reading books written like this in the past because they annoyed me. But you know what? Mundell pulls it off really well. I was captivated from the start, never bored and the ending packed an unexpected punch.
The setting is Melbourne, a depressing near future. A dystopia but a plausible one, scarily close to our world now. Just a little bit more technology, regulation and surveillance than today. Unlike certain other YA dystopias I could mention like The Hunger Games, Uglies or Divergent, there is no bizarre disconnect between our world and the world of Black Glass. (Infinitely so when you compare with Divergent � good book, but I found the back story mind-bogglingly implausible. You’re unsatisfied with the world so you sort yourselves into factions resembling Hogwarts houses? REALLY?) Also, it’s set in Australia, so it gets bonus setting points for not being doomed-US.
The most science fictiony element, and my second favourite part of the world building (my favourite being that it was set in Melbourne and I enjoy visiting home vicariously), was the side story of Milk the mood engineer. He uses scents and subtle changes in lighting to evoke moods and emotions in whoever is in range of his devices. His mission is to artistically make the spaces he works with more harmonious and the people in them happier. I thought it was a fascinating concept and explored with surprising depth in the relatively short novel.
The central-most characters, Tally 13 and Grace 16, are sisters who, up until the first chapter or so, have spent their lives following their deadbeat father around small Australian towns, often leaving town at a moment’s notice. The story starts when an accident kills their father and separates the sisters. They had been planning to run away to the city (Melbourne) “soon� but now they are forced to make their way there separately.
We follow the girls, the city and a few miscellaneous characters, sometimes obliquely, as they make ends meet, get by and wonder where their lives are going. By the time I was reading the climax, I was sceptical of a satisfactory ending but by golly, I was not disappointed. On the other hand, without spoilers, I can understand other people not feeling the same way.
I’m not sure I’d call Black Glass YA. The other characters are mostly adults and a lot of the concepts explored are things you don’t necessarily want kids to have to worry about. Of course, the reality is that many kids today do worry about similar things to Tally and Grace. I wouldn’t stop a twelve year old from reading it, but I would also encourage them to wait a few years. I could see it as the sort of book that might be studied in year 11 or 12, though.
In any case, it’s an excellent piece of writing. I highly recommend Back Glass to not only science fiction fans but everyone. Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, science fictional element in Black Glass is so minor you’ll barely notice.
4.5 / 5 stars
The narrative style and presentation of the story and characters is exactly the sort I usually dislike. The scenes, as well as presenting the two most central characters in a reasonably conventional narrative, alternate scenic mood scenes (sometimes with a temporary character as a focus), often (always?) in present tense, and dialogue without any framing.
I’ve stopped reading books written like this in the past because they annoyed me. But you know what? Mundell pulls it off really well. I was captivated from the start, never bored and the ending packed an unexpected punch.
The setting is Melbourne, a depressing near future. A dystopia but a plausible one, scarily close to our world now. Just a little bit more technology, regulation and surveillance than today. Unlike certain other YA dystopias I could mention like The Hunger Games, Uglies or Divergent, there is no bizarre disconnect between our world and the world of Black Glass. (Infinitely so when you compare with Divergent � good book, but I found the back story mind-bogglingly implausible. You’re unsatisfied with the world so you sort yourselves into factions resembling Hogwarts houses? REALLY?) Also, it’s set in Australia, so it gets bonus setting points for not being doomed-US.
The most science fictiony element, and my second favourite part of the world building (my favourite being that it was set in Melbourne and I enjoy visiting home vicariously), was the side story of Milk the mood engineer. He uses scents and subtle changes in lighting to evoke moods and emotions in whoever is in range of his devices. His mission is to artistically make the spaces he works with more harmonious and the people in them happier. I thought it was a fascinating concept and explored with surprising depth in the relatively short novel.
The central-most characters, Tally 13 and Grace 16, are sisters who, up until the first chapter or so, have spent their lives following their deadbeat father around small Australian towns, often leaving town at a moment’s notice. The story starts when an accident kills their father and separates the sisters. They had been planning to run away to the city (Melbourne) “soon� but now they are forced to make their way there separately.
We follow the girls, the city and a few miscellaneous characters, sometimes obliquely, as they make ends meet, get by and wonder where their lives are going. By the time I was reading the climax, I was sceptical of a satisfactory ending but by golly, I was not disappointed. On the other hand, without spoilers, I can understand other people not feeling the same way.
I’m not sure I’d call Black Glass YA. The other characters are mostly adults and a lot of the concepts explored are things you don’t necessarily want kids to have to worry about. Of course, the reality is that many kids today do worry about similar things to Tally and Grace. I wouldn’t stop a twelve year old from reading it, but I would also encourage them to wait a few years. I could see it as the sort of book that might be studied in year 11 or 12, though.
In any case, it’s an excellent piece of writing. I highly recommend Back Glass to not only science fiction fans but everyone. Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, science fictional element in Black Glass is so minor you’ll barely notice.
4.5 / 5 stars
May 14, 2012
Black Glass doesn't feel hackneyed, like so much near future work. The story isn't slave to the setting, with events and characters inserted solely to help illuminate a particular place or time. Instead, the story is a symptom of the setting, an organic and believable turn of events that couldn't have happened anywhere else but in Meg Mundell's future-dystopian Melbourne. This is spec-fic as it used to be, where a single fantastic idea or moment can launch a series of stories instead of worn-out tropes being shoehorned into a setting.
Black Glass begins with an explosion. Tally and Grace, two girls living in the forgotten towns beyond the Melbourne border, are suddenly orphaned when their father's meth lab explodes. Seperated by circumstance, each sister heads into the labyrinth of Melbourne in search of food, their futures, and each other.
But there are other players at work in the big city. Milk is a moodie, a man paid to manipulate the emotions of clients in casinos and concerts using elaborate combinations of light, sound and smell. He's working his way up the ladder, finding ways to play on memories and primal urges using cocktails of gunpowder and pheremones. Meanwhile, Damon is a TV journalist pumping out schlock on a weekly basis for his fickle corporate overlords. He's got dreams of uncovering real stories, performing life-changing investigative journalism, and he's inching closer and closer to stumbling over something big...
Don't be fooled, this isn't a traditional thriller. All these intertwining storylines don't build up to an M-Night-Shamawow twist. Rather, each character serves to take us on a tour of a very plausible future-Melbourne, a city really only one or two steps removed from the Melbourne of 2011. The CBD is a palace of industry and commerce, where undocumented citizens (Undocs) are immediately detained and deported if caught on the streets. Meanwhile, a thriving underground community of homeless and Undoc citizens has sprung up in the gaps, performing minor corporate espionage for an hourly wage. Our protagonists exist on the periphery, even when they think they've somehow jumped the gaps and reached the top. There's always a boot pressing them back down, and their view of this dystopian Melbourne is firmly coloured by the tread-marks etched into their foreheads.
The viewpoint in Black Glass is limited omniscient, leaping between diary entries, overheard conversations, interview transcripts and on-the-ground action. In the hands of a less talented author this would all get too confusing, but with each voice so distinctive and unique, and each each prefaced by a quick location:date:character tag (furthering the feeling that we're leafing through some official collection of surveillance tapes), nothing ever gets too hard to follow.
This is necessary, because Black Glass moves fast. Honestly, there isn't a wasted word in the book - everything is pared back, honed to a fine point. The language is precise and evocative but never flowery or drawn out. As much as I'm trying to avoid comparisons to Gibson, Meg's prose has that same keen edge, the same leanness and brutality. Her grasp of setting and tangibility is enviable - everywhere she takes her characters is solid enough to grab with both hands. The stink of Melbournes gutters and the kaleidoscope sounds of its back-alley casinos linger for a long time after the book is finished.
I powered through Black Glass in two days, which is testament to how tightly it gripped me. I hope to see more of Meg Mundell's work very, very soon.
Black Glass begins with an explosion. Tally and Grace, two girls living in the forgotten towns beyond the Melbourne border, are suddenly orphaned when their father's meth lab explodes. Seperated by circumstance, each sister heads into the labyrinth of Melbourne in search of food, their futures, and each other.
But there are other players at work in the big city. Milk is a moodie, a man paid to manipulate the emotions of clients in casinos and concerts using elaborate combinations of light, sound and smell. He's working his way up the ladder, finding ways to play on memories and primal urges using cocktails of gunpowder and pheremones. Meanwhile, Damon is a TV journalist pumping out schlock on a weekly basis for his fickle corporate overlords. He's got dreams of uncovering real stories, performing life-changing investigative journalism, and he's inching closer and closer to stumbling over something big...
Don't be fooled, this isn't a traditional thriller. All these intertwining storylines don't build up to an M-Night-Shamawow twist. Rather, each character serves to take us on a tour of a very plausible future-Melbourne, a city really only one or two steps removed from the Melbourne of 2011. The CBD is a palace of industry and commerce, where undocumented citizens (Undocs) are immediately detained and deported if caught on the streets. Meanwhile, a thriving underground community of homeless and Undoc citizens has sprung up in the gaps, performing minor corporate espionage for an hourly wage. Our protagonists exist on the periphery, even when they think they've somehow jumped the gaps and reached the top. There's always a boot pressing them back down, and their view of this dystopian Melbourne is firmly coloured by the tread-marks etched into their foreheads.
The viewpoint in Black Glass is limited omniscient, leaping between diary entries, overheard conversations, interview transcripts and on-the-ground action. In the hands of a less talented author this would all get too confusing, but with each voice so distinctive and unique, and each each prefaced by a quick location:date:character tag (furthering the feeling that we're leafing through some official collection of surveillance tapes), nothing ever gets too hard to follow.
This is necessary, because Black Glass moves fast. Honestly, there isn't a wasted word in the book - everything is pared back, honed to a fine point. The language is precise and evocative but never flowery or drawn out. As much as I'm trying to avoid comparisons to Gibson, Meg's prose has that same keen edge, the same leanness and brutality. Her grasp of setting and tangibility is enviable - everywhere she takes her characters is solid enough to grab with both hands. The stink of Melbournes gutters and the kaleidoscope sounds of its back-alley casinos linger for a long time after the book is finished.
I powered through Black Glass in two days, which is testament to how tightly it gripped me. I hope to see more of Meg Mundell's work very, very soon.
May 11, 2012
Tally (aged 13) and Grace (aged 15) are sisters who are dragged around rural areas by their father Max, who keeps relocating his drug lab until he blows the roof off the house with himself inside. Grace thinks Tally was inside, so she is now alone. Grace follows their dream of going to the city, hitchhiking to get there. Once there, she finds some sympathetic people who help her until she lands a job. Tally hitchhikes to the city too, searching for Grace. Unfortunately, with the loss of the mobile phone, and no friends or family to fall back on, Tally and Grace live separate lives; Grace with her guilt and grief, Tally with her fruitless search while
she is assimilated into the homeless community, such as it is. Documentation is essential for true assimilation into the city, and without this documentation homeless kids like Tally and Grace are at risk of predators posing traditional and non-traditional threats to their well-being.
Milk is a manipulator, working behind the scenes using light, scent and sounds to alter moods. Milk prefers to work behind black glass, in anonymity, while he increases casino profits from
gambling. This career grows as business and government begin to utilise Milk’s skills. Other characters are key to the story, both by participating in events and revealing the nature of the society, but I don’t want to reveal too much here.
The name of the city is never mentioned in Black Glass, to create a sense of ‘everycity� just as Willie Loman was ‘everyman�. Mundell uses Melbourne as her backdrop, because she is writing what she knows to give a sense of place. This has enabled her to launch from the present into the future, building a realistic city of the future.
At first I focused more on the style of writing, looking for clues to explain the structure of headings with scene location and characters. Questions arose for me: is Black Glass supposed to
be a government or media record after the fact? Is this about survelliance? What is going on here? So in the beginning I focused more on the style than the content, but it wasn’t long before I began to focus more on the characters as their stories unfolded. After this beginning, I found myself hooked; Tally and Grace were vulnerable and skirting the edge of disaster, Milk comes
across like your (kind of) average nerd working at his job (but with consequences), Damon and Luella’s interactions had sinister outworkings� This was a novel where there were few
actual villains and yet the impact of characters� actions could be profound. Current issues (like the trains and attitudes to race) were incorporated well, as was the concept of a global ID net. Plot twists surprise the reader as momentum gathers to the climatic ending. If you enjoy serious SF, especially dystopian novels, then Black Glass is a highly recommended read.
Don’t forget to read Dark Matter’s interview of Meg Mundell in issue 3
she is assimilated into the homeless community, such as it is. Documentation is essential for true assimilation into the city, and without this documentation homeless kids like Tally and Grace are at risk of predators posing traditional and non-traditional threats to their well-being.
Milk is a manipulator, working behind the scenes using light, scent and sounds to alter moods. Milk prefers to work behind black glass, in anonymity, while he increases casino profits from
gambling. This career grows as business and government begin to utilise Milk’s skills. Other characters are key to the story, both by participating in events and revealing the nature of the society, but I don’t want to reveal too much here.
The name of the city is never mentioned in Black Glass, to create a sense of ‘everycity� just as Willie Loman was ‘everyman�. Mundell uses Melbourne as her backdrop, because she is writing what she knows to give a sense of place. This has enabled her to launch from the present into the future, building a realistic city of the future.
At first I focused more on the style of writing, looking for clues to explain the structure of headings with scene location and characters. Questions arose for me: is Black Glass supposed to
be a government or media record after the fact? Is this about survelliance? What is going on here? So in the beginning I focused more on the style than the content, but it wasn’t long before I began to focus more on the characters as their stories unfolded. After this beginning, I found myself hooked; Tally and Grace were vulnerable and skirting the edge of disaster, Milk comes
across like your (kind of) average nerd working at his job (but with consequences), Damon and Luella’s interactions had sinister outworkings� This was a novel where there were few
actual villains and yet the impact of characters� actions could be profound. Current issues (like the trains and attitudes to race) were incorporated well, as was the concept of a global ID net. Plot twists surprise the reader as momentum gathers to the climatic ending. If you enjoy serious SF, especially dystopian novels, then Black Glass is a highly recommended read.
Don’t forget to read Dark Matter’s interview of Meg Mundell in issue 3
April 28, 2011
Meg Mundell’s debut novel, Black Glass, is set in a dystopian near-future Melbourne. A friend recently asked me why so many books set in the future were dystopian. Thinking about it, I think that very few books (historical, present or future) are ever set in a Utopia. If everything is happy and perfect, there isn’t a lot of dramatic potential. A spanner has to be thrown in the works to get a story going.
Black Glass has multiple spanners and multiple works, but the two key ones are the lives of Tally and Grace, sisters who are separated at the beginning of the book by a violent explosion. As the book flashes towards an ending that is also violently explosive, it’s anybody’s guess whether the sisters will find each other again.
The story is told in fragments, echoing numerous images of shattered glass, from the sisters� world suddenly blown apart to the abandoned glass factory that Tally later makes her home. Some fragments follow Tally’s story, others follow Grace, while yet others follow journalist Damon, the artist Milk or others who will eventually converge in the final pages.
The technique has a very cinematic quality, and sometimes has a very strobe-like sense of disorientation. It suits the world that Melbourne has become very well—a disjointed patchwork of zones inhabited by strict policing, manipulative power brokers, the correctly documented and the ‘undocs�, the definite ‘have nots�. And although it’s not an immediately recognisable Melbourne, I did enjoy the passing references to places I knew and places I could imagine.
Tally and Grace, and most of the people they meet, are undocs, scraping a living on the streets and avoiding both police round-ups and the nastier elements in their precarious world. Each sister falls in with a different circle of folks living on the edge, which gives Mundell ample room to explore issues of identity and control. Everyone we meet, whether undoc or legit, has competing interests, potential dangers and a need to hide part or all of themselves in order to survive.
Mundell’s style flows easily. The deceptively simple approach seems to gloss many things over, except that enough clues have been given that we know what is really going on without things having to be spelled out. These story shards seem slight at times, but they are sharp.
Dark but never hopeless, Black Glass is a fast-paced, intriguing piece of speculative fiction.
Buy Black Glass from Readings as a paperback () or as an e-book from Booki.sh ()
Black Glass has multiple spanners and multiple works, but the two key ones are the lives of Tally and Grace, sisters who are separated at the beginning of the book by a violent explosion. As the book flashes towards an ending that is also violently explosive, it’s anybody’s guess whether the sisters will find each other again.
The story is told in fragments, echoing numerous images of shattered glass, from the sisters� world suddenly blown apart to the abandoned glass factory that Tally later makes her home. Some fragments follow Tally’s story, others follow Grace, while yet others follow journalist Damon, the artist Milk or others who will eventually converge in the final pages.
The technique has a very cinematic quality, and sometimes has a very strobe-like sense of disorientation. It suits the world that Melbourne has become very well—a disjointed patchwork of zones inhabited by strict policing, manipulative power brokers, the correctly documented and the ‘undocs�, the definite ‘have nots�. And although it’s not an immediately recognisable Melbourne, I did enjoy the passing references to places I knew and places I could imagine.
Tally and Grace, and most of the people they meet, are undocs, scraping a living on the streets and avoiding both police round-ups and the nastier elements in their precarious world. Each sister falls in with a different circle of folks living on the edge, which gives Mundell ample room to explore issues of identity and control. Everyone we meet, whether undoc or legit, has competing interests, potential dangers and a need to hide part or all of themselves in order to survive.
Mundell’s style flows easily. The deceptively simple approach seems to gloss many things over, except that enough clues have been given that we know what is really going on without things having to be spelled out. These story shards seem slight at times, but they are sharp.
Dark but never hopeless, Black Glass is a fast-paced, intriguing piece of speculative fiction.
Buy Black Glass from Readings as a paperback () or as an e-book from Booki.sh ()
September 12, 2012
Set in a near future, is about two teenaged sisters who get separated after the death of their father, and are thrown on their own resources in a strange and sometimes violent city.
While it’s the girls� story the reader comes to care about, there are a number of secondary characters who appear intermittently throughout the novel, including a 'mood enhancer', Milk, whose job it is to micro-manage the populace through the manipulation of scent, and an investigative journalist. The journalist is trying to get the next big scoop in a city which has slid beyond the 'haves' and the 'have nots' into the 'docced' and 'undocs' - those with and without identifying papers.
In a society where surveillance and control are everything, and the undocumented are prey to all sorts of - fascinating - dangers, the two sisters, due to their lack of papers, are pushed to the edge of survival. While I love a good conspiracy story, the conspiracies in Black Glass � and there are more than one - don't pay off in the way of a traditional thriller. They are evoked, rather than explored.
Mundell opts for an experimental structure which, for the lazy reader, isn't straightforward to follow - mostly because the episodic, report-like format makes it a task to get to know and care for the main characters. The girls aren't traditional 'heroic' protagonists, either, as, for much of the novel, they lack a sense of agency, of being in control of their own lives. They have almost no resources at their disposal beyond what comes their way by chance, so it's hit or miss whether they'll be able to find one another. With the possibility of a happy ending unlikely, Mundell creates and sustains an alarming sense that these two could be victims in the making.
Had the novel started closer to the events dramatized toward the end, this story could have been truly disturbing and gripping, instead of simply fascinating - but perhaps less true to the possible future society that Mundell has carefully imagined. As it now stands, Black Glass would make a compelling movie.
February 20, 2017
Just could not get into this at all - abandoned very early.
January 10, 2014
There's something about the familiarity of Australian fiction I think I find unappealing. With few exceptions, I realized recently I'd avoided the work of local talent. After telling a friend I'd like to acquaint myself better with Australian writers, and knowing I have a predilection for dark and quirky, she suggested Black Glass
Perhaps it's the lack of familiarity I liked so much. The thin veil of dystopian disquiet she's dropped over Melbourne, that while still familiar, is definitely not the Melbourne I know.
I don't give books much of a chance to pique my interest, but Black Glass had me intrigued from the first page. Coincidentally, I began reading it on a flight to New Zealand (Mundell's home country) and finished it before my plane landed back in Melbourne. It was an incredibly rare moment of wishing a flight lasted longer, just so I could keep reading.
I love a novel with a lattice-work of story lines. Aside from the two main protagonists, there's a veritable mini-choir of characters who lend their voices to the sci-fi drama. While so many different points of view could potentially have been confusing, this was not the case, and is what initially drew me in. It's original and intricate. I relished each character's tangent equally. Often when there are simultaneous story lines, some tend to be tedious and you find yourself flicking ahead to the characters that keep you turning the pages, but even the secondary characters had me hooked.
So now I find myself already having recommended this book to others. The only disappointment is that upon further investigation, learning that Mundell hasn't written another novel yet.
Perhaps it's the lack of familiarity I liked so much. The thin veil of dystopian disquiet she's dropped over Melbourne, that while still familiar, is definitely not the Melbourne I know.
I don't give books much of a chance to pique my interest, but Black Glass had me intrigued from the first page. Coincidentally, I began reading it on a flight to New Zealand (Mundell's home country) and finished it before my plane landed back in Melbourne. It was an incredibly rare moment of wishing a flight lasted longer, just so I could keep reading.
I love a novel with a lattice-work of story lines. Aside from the two main protagonists, there's a veritable mini-choir of characters who lend their voices to the sci-fi drama. While so many different points of view could potentially have been confusing, this was not the case, and is what initially drew me in. It's original and intricate. I relished each character's tangent equally. Often when there are simultaneous story lines, some tend to be tedious and you find yourself flicking ahead to the characters that keep you turning the pages, but even the secondary characters had me hooked.
So now I find myself already having recommended this book to others. The only disappointment is that upon further investigation, learning that Mundell hasn't written another novel yet.
June 30, 2013
This is a beautifully written novel and for the most part I enjoyed reading it. Black Glass is set in a future Melbourne and it mainly concerns the exploits of two sisters - Tally and Grace. The sisters independently end up in the city after their father is killed in an explosion. The dystopian aspect is a little weak, I'd have to say. There's talk of Subzones and Interzones but really this seemed like a contemporary setting for the most part. Perhaps this is the intention. Two other major characters, Milk and Damon, round out the quartet of viewpoint characters. The main plot concerns Tally and Grace looking for each other in the big city, but here I became frustrated in the middle third as the plot resolutely refused to move forward. What we have instead are some beautifully written descriptive pages as well as some decent characterisation, but VERY little in the way of overall plot. It seems to me that Mundell's talents would serve her better in a literary novel rather than a genre one. In some ways this reminded me of Paulo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, except that in the latter novel the futuristic elements are better defined and the plot rips along. Black Glass isn't that kind of novel - really it's a slow moving literary novel that happens to be set in a mildly dystopian future.
March 29, 2011
(Copy of novel was received as part of First Reads.)
When I read books set in my hometown of Melbourne, I often turn into a rubbernecker. 'Ooh, William St', 'Oh, I used to live near St. Georges Road', 'Ha! I've eaten there too!'. I guess this sort of recognition adds to the intimacy of the novel. This was the main reason I decided to read this book.
This novel is set very loosely in Melbourne in some unknown future where the city is divided into Zones and illegals are known as Undocs. There are mentions of various landmarks (including the now defunct Observation Wheel) and popular culture figures. I did find this setting quite bleak but quite convincing.
There are four narratives and Milk, the 'mood tuner', was by far the most interesting character. I think the style of the novel suited the Milk character as a solitary figure working in back rooms and unleashing his potions onto unsuspecting crowds. The story of the sisters seemed to lack empathy as we never get any insights into the girls' lives before the explosion that separates them. The Damon character was very dull.
In the end, the narratives came together quite suddenly and unconvincingly.
When I read books set in my hometown of Melbourne, I often turn into a rubbernecker. 'Ooh, William St', 'Oh, I used to live near St. Georges Road', 'Ha! I've eaten there too!'. I guess this sort of recognition adds to the intimacy of the novel. This was the main reason I decided to read this book.
This novel is set very loosely in Melbourne in some unknown future where the city is divided into Zones and illegals are known as Undocs. There are mentions of various landmarks (including the now defunct Observation Wheel) and popular culture figures. I did find this setting quite bleak but quite convincing.
There are four narratives and Milk, the 'mood tuner', was by far the most interesting character. I think the style of the novel suited the Milk character as a solitary figure working in back rooms and unleashing his potions onto unsuspecting crowds. The story of the sisters seemed to lack empathy as we never get any insights into the girls' lives before the explosion that separates them. The Damon character was very dull.
In the end, the narratives came together quite suddenly and unconvincingly.
March 21, 2011
Liked this, but not all of it, if that makes sense. Sisters Tally and Grace are separated when their father's meth lab explodes, killing him and destroying their rental house. Believing Tally is dead, Grace heads for the city as does Tally, hoping to find her sister.
It's the girls' story that kept me going. The other narratives from journalist Damon and moodie Milk's viewpoints didn't interest me so much (a moodie, by the way, uses sight, sound and odours to control the masses). While Black Glass is set in the not too distant future, in a city (Melbourne) under constant surveilance where undocs - undocumented people - hide in the cracks, the story of two sisters finding each other and trying to survive in a world that doesn't value them could be just as easily set 200 years ago - and, of course, it has.
There's no doubt Mundell is a talented writer; her dialogue and characterisation are top notch. I'm sure she'll go far. Despite her skill, however, Black Glass isn't a book I'd put on my favourites shelf.
It's the girls' story that kept me going. The other narratives from journalist Damon and moodie Milk's viewpoints didn't interest me so much (a moodie, by the way, uses sight, sound and odours to control the masses). While Black Glass is set in the not too distant future, in a city (Melbourne) under constant surveilance where undocs - undocumented people - hide in the cracks, the story of two sisters finding each other and trying to survive in a world that doesn't value them could be just as easily set 200 years ago - and, of course, it has.
There's no doubt Mundell is a talented writer; her dialogue and characterisation are top notch. I'm sure she'll go far. Despite her skill, however, Black Glass isn't a book I'd put on my favourites shelf.
December 28, 2011
Set in a not too distant future Melbourne and from the
perspective of two sisters Tally and Grace. Both are on the run after their
father is suddenly killed at the start of the novel. The city is a dark and
dangerous place and where citizens are divided into two groups , those with
identification papers and those on the fringes of society classed as
'undocs' which highlights the marginalisation and it is easy to liken this
to our present refugee situation . The two girls are separated and unsure of
each other's fate. Survival is a struggle one as a magicians assistant and
the other resorting to petty crime. There is also another interesting
character named 'Moodie' who by altering the environment with scent, music
and lighting is paid by government agencies to influence people's
behaviour. The novel has a big brother feel with each chapter divided by
report headings with details on the monitoring by these government agencies.
The author uses these themes to subtlety comment and exaggerate current issues of our present day.
perspective of two sisters Tally and Grace. Both are on the run after their
father is suddenly killed at the start of the novel. The city is a dark and
dangerous place and where citizens are divided into two groups , those with
identification papers and those on the fringes of society classed as
'undocs' which highlights the marginalisation and it is easy to liken this
to our present refugee situation . The two girls are separated and unsure of
each other's fate. Survival is a struggle one as a magicians assistant and
the other resorting to petty crime. There is also another interesting
character named 'Moodie' who by altering the environment with scent, music
and lighting is paid by government agencies to influence people's
behaviour. The novel has a big brother feel with each chapter divided by
report headings with details on the monitoring by these government agencies.
The author uses these themes to subtlety comment and exaggerate current issues of our present day.
August 15, 2016
Meg Mundell is a skilled and highly original narrator. This dystopian novel about civil unrest in the slight future (I expect) in Melbourne is scaringly realistic. I love her natural style and the use of a series of diary-like entries from each character. She has read the books about how to write active fiction and develop the characters through their dialogue and their actions. The plot is driven by two sisters who are separated by a dramatic turn of events in their family situation. The author tackles homelessness, corporate manipulation and survival in a crazy and dangerous world where the poor (undocs) literally live in a sea of broken glass and dreams, surviving as best they can. Dumpster diving at its best, and the harsh reality that the only person we can rely on is ourselves. If this is her first book, I can't wait for the second, and I can feel a sequel in the air.
May 6, 2015
The story at the core of the novel is that of two sisters, together one moment and then separated by one badly timed incident. They both head to the city searching each other out while also having to struggle with surviving as "undocs" in a bleak, dystopian Melbourne, seemingly some time in the future.
The novel also touches on media habits of the time as well as issues of data control which may or may not be where the title comes from. Perhaps it is also related to the fact that Tally can't find her sister Grace because of the disguises she wears (black wig and pseudonym) even though she comes close. Whatever the connections are for the title, I enjoyed reading this unusual and well written work of a talented local author. I definitely hope to read more of Mundell in the future.
The novel also touches on media habits of the time as well as issues of data control which may or may not be where the title comes from. Perhaps it is also related to the fact that Tally can't find her sister Grace because of the disguises she wears (black wig and pseudonym) even though she comes close. Whatever the connections are for the title, I enjoyed reading this unusual and well written work of a talented local author. I definitely hope to read more of Mundell in the future.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 16, 2012
this has some pretty scary, even ghoulish science fiction elements. but the biggest problems facing the protagonists -- finding a job and a place to sleep while confined to the informal economy due to their undocumented status -- are pretty mundane and widely present in our own time. I liked that, it felt really...restrained? realistic? a lot of dystopic works edge into hyperbolic allegory and blunt the sense that a real possible future is represented; this kept it pretty subtle, and thereby attained a sense of relevance and timeliness.
February 8, 2014
This book just didn't deliver for me. Given the multiple points of view I was excited to see the stories weave together seamlessly - unfortunately I don't think it did that very well. Character development was lacking and the one meaningful relationship (Tally and Grace) in the book wasn't explored nearly enough. Even though the sisters were apart for the majority of the book, a flashback or two could've saved the portrayal of their relationship. Milk and Damon's plots were left hanging which was a bit disappointing. Overall I was left very underwhelmed.
April 18, 2013
Ugh. I was so excited to read this book and was expecting great things, but it was just bad. As well as boring and uninteresting. I couldn't even finish it, got to about chapter 5 and just put it aside, I have made the decision to write it off my list as I honestly can't be bothered going back to read more.
Plus what capped it is my pet hate in YA novels of having teenaged characters smoking as some sort of plot device. It drives me crazy.
I might read the whole thing one day when my to-read pile (and kindle downloads) have dwindled to nil, but that is not happening any time soon.
Plus what capped it is my pet hate in YA novels of having teenaged characters smoking as some sort of plot device. It drives me crazy.
I might read the whole thing one day when my to-read pile (and kindle downloads) have dwindled to nil, but that is not happening any time soon.
May 31, 2011
I have to say at first it was a little hard to really get into the book because of the way it was set out like some sort of file but the more I progressed the more I got used to it and became quite engrossed in Tally and Grace's story. I generally love Dystopian books and this wasn't far from the mark, perhaps even better because of the complete plausibility of it, it felt like it is a very possible future for us. Great novel!
July 7, 2011
Set in a near-future, this debut novel follows the sisters Tally and Grace, who are separated by an accident and from then on have to survive by themselves in the mainly hostile, overly regulated - and alarmingly recognisable - city that Melbourne has become.
Various interesting, often shady characters are introduced as the dialogue-heavy story unfolds, but just as in real life, a few loose ends remain.
A fast-paced, well written read.
Various interesting, often shady characters are introduced as the dialogue-heavy story unfolds, but just as in real life, a few loose ends remain.
A fast-paced, well written read.
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