A lovely review of
Untangling spaghetti appeared in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald (August 8), written by Angie Schiavone who has previously said good things about my books (bless her!). My only quibble is I'd rather be thought of as a prince...
"The king of poetry for children is Steven Herrick. Having written several haunting verse novels, he has returned to his earlier work for children and Untangling spaghetti includes his favourites - poems previously published and often performed at school visits. It's fitting, then, that the collection has such a warm, nostalgic feel and it's not surprising that Herrick's two sons were his original inspiration. In the book's introduction, Herrick reminisces about how the boys would tell him stories of their days at school, which he'd then turn into poetry. Herrick's poems - and, indeed, this collection on the whole - are so well-balanced. On the one hand there's humour and light-heartedness; on the other there's depth and thoughtful care. Whether the subject matter is football, food, schoolteachers, love or loss, this vivid poetry shows that good things can come in small packages." Lovely!
And here's an equally positive review for the USA edition of Cold Skin that appeared in the September 2009 edition of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.
"Herrick has taken readers to small Australian towns before and introduced them to a variety of characters who live there, but never before has he crafted such a careful and balanced treatment of the complex motivations and deeply felt emotions as he has here. Set in a small coal-mining town in the late 1940s, this verse novel begins innocuously enough with a focus on a strong, soft-hearted boy named Eddie, who wants to leave school to work in the mine. His father, Albert, has returned from the war, disappointed by the fact that all he did was drive trucks yet also painfully aware of his cowardice. Other characters, whose individual voices are powerfully rendered in poems variously introspective, defensive, sweet, and wise, include Eddie’s dissatisfied brother; his smart, boldly sexy girlfriend; a pompous mayor; a sagacious, ethical newspaper editor; a lecherous and embittered teacher; a cautious, lonely policeman; and Colleen, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who longs for something more than her small town can offer. When Colleen disappears and is later found dead, Sergeant Grainger knows that he doesn’t have much time to find her killer before the men in the town take matters into their own hands, but he is careful to avoid making assumptions about men he has known most of his life. The resulting exploration of the multiple perspectives and emotional aftermath of a horrendous crime in a close-knit community is tightly focused and wisely realized, particularly in its attention to the traumatizing effects of war, the nature of accountability, and the complex relationships among men."
