AustLit

'Flyaway is a strange beast of a book. It’s a Gothic fairytale set ostensibly somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean, in a bush district, but Kathleen Jennings’ debut novel could really be located in just about any small Australian town, in any dusty outpost where memory “seeped and frayed … where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts”. Bettina Scott is the unreliable narrator at its core, a young woman who, unlike her mother, is graceless and unlovely; there are intimations that tempestuousness and insolence also reside closely beneath her surface.' (Introduction)

'At the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and men into beasts.' (Introduction)