Twelve year old Jim lives with his parents and brother in Rose Bay, a Sydney suburb where life should be lived at a smoothly predictable pace. But life is never so tidy, and the disruptions that Jim observes and attempts to understand will be widely recognisable....Matinee is a novel about isolation told in a communal fashion, engaging readers in enlarging circles as they follow Jim from school to home to neighborhood, exploring the bizarre incompetence of adult relationships and creating-en route-tender and unexpected insights into the peculiarities of ' family life'. (Publisher's blurb).