Janette Turner Hospital, Forecast: Turbulence (Fourth Estate 2011)
This collection of nine short stories and a memoir has been shortlisted for a number of awards and it may have won some. Sentence by sentence it’s very well written. It is populated by a range of eccentrics, outsiders and non-neurotypicals and should have been interesting. But as far as I was concerned it didn’t touch the sides. I didn’t believe a word of it, even the memoir, which I know is truthful. Newspaper reviewers seem to have loved it, though I’m not convinced they’ve all actually read it.
That is all.
Me fail? I fly! 
It won the QLA, Steele Rudd award for short stories.
LikeLike
Steele Rudd she definitely ain’t. I’m glad not everyone shares my meh-ness, though. I hate the idea of a book that has been so finely wrought going totally unloved into the world.
LikeLike
I’m so glad that you agree with my feelings about this book. I reviewed it for Australian Book Review, and found it flat and unconvincing, and so was bemused at her literary following, and at the favourable reviews in newspapers.
LikeLike
Thanks, Rhyll. I think this is the kind of book that some genre fans have in mind when they talk disparagingly about Lit Fic as a genre – it ticks all the boxes for literature, but it’s hard to see why it should be regarded as having more substance than, say, a book of excellent zombie stories.
LikeLike