Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

Back before Airmail had attracted publishing interest from Black Swan Press, Driftwood Manuscripts wrote a review*, in which they said really nice things. 

You should have seen my smile back then. I just re-read it, and I'm still grinning now. 

Here's an excerpt: 

“If the meaning of life is a giant game of marbles, and if our identities are composed of the stories we craft our memories into, then Airmail is of course, like all good metafictive tales, playing by the rules of the storytelling game it describes: shooting its character’s stories/marbles into the ring with the aim of demonstrating superior skill. Given this factor, and the tendencies to glibness of style that it so frequently results in, it is particularly refreshing to find that neither Anouk nor GL are ever reduced to mere stock pieces to be moved about in an intellectual exercise. Rather the author succeeds in developing this odd couple beyond mere types (the stranger; the old man) or figures in a game, so that they arouse our interest as persuasive, funny and touching individuals. Anouk’s accounts of both her past and present oscillate between passion and pathos and her distress in losing her marbles – and with them her identity – is palpable whilst at the same time, given its bizarre symbolic articulation, maintaining a certain comic edge. Most significantly, Mr GL’s renaissance is fleshed out in such a manner as to convey the slow radiation of warmth from within, as if he is gradually coming back to life.

“This is, undoubtedly a clever piece of writing – too clever no doubt for some, although others will enjoy decoding the clues and picking out the intertextual puns. Nevertheless, in its blend of the real and fantastic it is also powerfully resonant of complex emotional states – loneliness, delusion, anxiety, confusion, humour, numbness, excitement and tenderness. It is this combination of mind and heart that serves to make it so appealing.”

If you want to read the full review, download it here >>

*(You can't request a review from Driftwood. What I paid for was professional advice on how to get through some of the challenges I was facing in the manuscript, which I got. The review was an unpaid extra that they chose to send along with the advice, because they believed the book had some merit).