The Australia Stories: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: fabulous read
Review: I picked this up because a friend told me about it. Took me about two evenings to read. Fabulous story. Stunningly written. Seriously, each paragraph was dazzling. I'm only saddened because (at least on Amazon) this is the author's only work. Hopefully, there'll be more.

Rating:
Summary: (3.5)Family memories of a mysterious continent¿
Review: The mythology of Australia is central to this novel. Both Sam Browne's grandmother and mother have vanished into the wilds of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, his grandmother to myth and his mother in search of her own mother's memory. These disappearances (his mother's body is found, his grandmother's never found) have a profound influence on Sam as he remembers the year he spent with his mother in Australia before she was lost forever.

Pierce combines the unfathomable territory of memory with myth-saturated Australia, where the Aboriginal population has produced such ethereal tales from spectacular geography. Pierce also adds a strong feminist content to Sam's identification with his maternal relatives. His mother has had a positive effect on the young boy and the grandmother's journals offer him even more understanding of their unique bond with the land.

After returning to the United States, Sam finishes school, marries and divorces. Yet he remains fascinated by the stories of his mother and grandmother. Sam is able to recover most of his grandmother's original documents and spends his time pouring over their contents. His grandmother's voice speaks to him over the years, seducing him back into the land of myth that plays such an important role in his life. He cannot help but heed the siren call of his mother's native country.

In The Australia Stories, Todd James Pierce perfectly captures female sensitivities and the power of familial ties, reading Sam's mother's emotions with acuity in that short year spent with her in Katoomba, before returning to California. While the maturing Sam Browne feels Australia in the marrow of his bones, the lives of his mother and grandmother are ever more an intrinsic element of his spirit. He begins an intimate journey toward understanding the true nature of intergenerational connections, evolving one into another, spiraling through time. At peace with the past, finally, Sam steps easily into his future, where limitations are allowed no purchase, offering only promise and possibility. Luan Gaines/2003.

Rating:
Summary: In Search of Lost Time
Review: This five-star debut uber-novel, a sequence of short stories, takes the reader across oceans of time to Sydney and the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Pierce risks sentimentality on his poignant journey - and comes up with something like a prose poem I could not put away until I reached its last intense page. Other readers have praised the novel's plot and characters. I'd like to extol its powerful nostalgia, its longing for what Proust called les temps perdu. The Australia Stories creates an almost mythical aura about its setting and characters; it is exponentially more radiant than any travel guide. The wonder of the author of this book is that, rather than living like an aesthete in a cork-lined room, Pierce has performed an enormous service to all writers by maintaining a stellar Web site about literary agents. He is both at home in the fictive world he creates in The Australia Stories - and alive and well in his generosity and tirelessness as a member of the workaday literary community. Cozy up to Pierce's pocket-sized The Australia Stories and let it take you to a magical Down Under!