AustLit

'Krissy Kneen’s grandmother, Lotty Kneen, once built papier mâché dinosaurs ‘that didn’t fit inside the house. They were built in sections that could be taken apart, crammed inside my mother’s VW van and driven one at a time to the Sydney Museum for its dinosaur displays’. While these were Lotty’s most famous works, she ‘was fonder of the fairytale characters they made for book week at the local library. She would look at different artists’ impressions of Snow White, the Little Match Girl, Sleeping Beauty, then translate these to her own versions’. However, the female characters ‘ended up looking more like younger versions of herself than like the illustrations in the original books.’ When Kneen, who inherited her Slovenian grandmother’s ‘small round face, big eyes and plump cheeks’, stepped into the loungeroom, ‘a dozen versions of myself used to stare back at me.’ Here is a metaphor for the difficulties Kneen faced in trying to locate her history in a family that offered her scant details. She looks for the truth but finds only constructions, and each time the tale is different. She is modelled and controlled by an artist who did not let her out of her sight.'  (Introduction)

'Lotty Kneen of Queensland – aka Dragica Marusic of Slovenia, the stern and silent maker of papier-mâché dinosaurs, dragons and elves, the grandmother who raised Brisbane-based author Krissy Kneen – was “the fiercely beating heart of the family”, someone who saw “any sign of love as a marker of weakness”.' (Introduction)

'The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen begins like a fable, the story of a poor family that wins the lotto and moves to a remote Queensland location to make fairy-tale characters for a tourist attraction called Dragonhall. There should be a happy ending, but there isn’t.' (Introduction)