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Dissection (Jacinta Halloran, Scribe, $27.95 tpb, ISBN 9781921372124, July) ** 1/2

Dissection is a skillfully written piece of work that charts the despair of a woman, a doctor, who begins to question her ability to function both professionally and personally. Dr Anna McBride has a malpractice suit hanging over her head and a husband who is clearly having an affair with a younger woman. Anna begins to question and dissect herself in the desperation of failing to do what is expected of her both as a doctor and as a wife and mother. Halloran carefully layers Anna’s anguish regarding all aspects of her life and crafts some beautifully written studies. However, Anna’s desperation is so overwhelming that eventually her meditations become ponderous and exhausting. As Anna clinically defines her failures, one after the other, the reader becomes aware that the novel is ultimately bleak and it requires a certain stoicism to simply keep reading. The story unremittingly contemplates Anna’s inability to trust herself to be what she is supposed to be, and as such becomes brooding and uninteresting as there are only so many ways to read about her insecurity before becoming disinterested in both her and her plight. This novel may be best recommended to those who read literary fiction and may find the novel stylistically sophisticated.

Nadine Whitney is an ex-bookseller and currently a teacher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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