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A review by blairmahoney
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean by Payal Dhar, Anita Roy, Kirsty Murray
4.0
I was supplied a review copy of this book by Allen & Unwin. Thanks! Here is my review:
The marvellously titled Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, edited by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy, is an anthology of short stories and comics by Australian and Indian women writers. The stories could all qualify as ‘speculative fiction’ in some way and there is a strong feminist element to them. What is a little more unusual about the anthology is that there is a collaborative element to many (but not all) of the stories, with the Australian and Indian authors put in touch with each other to brainstorm their approach. This cross-cultural collaboration isn’t always evident in the works themselves, but it has generated some very interesting results. Sometimes the collaboration is explicit, with writer and artist combining for a comic, but more often it takes the place of an exchange of ideas that informs the individual works.
As with any anthology some works will resonate with the readers more than others and I certainly had my favourites. I was familiar with a number of the Australian contributors, such as Margo Lanagan, Isobelle Carmody, Justine Larbalestier and Nicki Greenberg, but all of the Indian authors were new to me, so there were some delightful discoveries as well as what felt like a return to familiar ground with some of the writers.
Nicki Greenberg’s “Backstage Pass” is like a bonus piece of material from her magnificent graphic novel adaptation of Hamlet, giving Ophelia a voice that largely gets silenced in Shakespeare’s play. Other highlights included the stories “What a Stone Can’t Feel” by Penni Russon and “Memory Lace” by Payal Dhar.
There are plenty of aspects for teachers to latch onto if this text were used in the secondary classroom and the cross-cultural nature of the anthology is perfect to engage with Australia’s place in Asia. It would work particularly well at Years 9 and 10.
The marvellously titled Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, edited by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar and Anita Roy, is an anthology of short stories and comics by Australian and Indian women writers. The stories could all qualify as ‘speculative fiction’ in some way and there is a strong feminist element to them. What is a little more unusual about the anthology is that there is a collaborative element to many (but not all) of the stories, with the Australian and Indian authors put in touch with each other to brainstorm their approach. This cross-cultural collaboration isn’t always evident in the works themselves, but it has generated some very interesting results. Sometimes the collaboration is explicit, with writer and artist combining for a comic, but more often it takes the place of an exchange of ideas that informs the individual works.
As with any anthology some works will resonate with the readers more than others and I certainly had my favourites. I was familiar with a number of the Australian contributors, such as Margo Lanagan, Isobelle Carmody, Justine Larbalestier and Nicki Greenberg, but all of the Indian authors were new to me, so there were some delightful discoveries as well as what felt like a return to familiar ground with some of the writers.
Nicki Greenberg’s “Backstage Pass” is like a bonus piece of material from her magnificent graphic novel adaptation of Hamlet, giving Ophelia a voice that largely gets silenced in Shakespeare’s play. Other highlights included the stories “What a Stone Can’t Feel” by Penni Russon and “Memory Lace” by Payal Dhar.
There are plenty of aspects for teachers to latch onto if this text were used in the secondary classroom and the cross-cultural nature of the anthology is perfect to engage with Australia’s place in Asia. It would work particularly well at Years 9 and 10.