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[[Category:General Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|General Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author= Zoe Duncan
|title= The Shifting Pools
|rating= 2.5
|genre= General Fiction
|summary= Perhaps the most overused phrase in fiction publishing is ''life-affirming'', closely followed by ''human condition''. The Shifting Pools takes this to a whole new level. Its blurb boasts that it is ''charged throughout with the beautiful urgency of life'', whatever that means. It isn't. And that's the problem. This isn't a bad book, but it sets itself up to fail. A cardinal rule of writing is ''focus on the small stuff''. If you set out to write a ''life affirming'' novel that answers all the ''big questions'', you'll struggle. And it is this trap that Zoe Duncan falls into. In her quest for profundity she loses her way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>INSERT ISBN-10</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Sarah Healy
|summary= If you find the techniques used by Rembrandt and Vermeer fascinating, ''The Last Painting of Sara de Vos'' provides a masterclass in how to work up a canvas in stages. Framing the novel as the story of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Dominic Smith vividly sketches out the main contours of his characters and the three time periods they inhabit before we are even one fifth of the way through. Sara is one of the few women artists of the period and her painting is of children skating on a frozen canal, her now dead daughter its central figure. The painting has been in Marty de Groot's family since before Isaac Newton was born and he is the patent lawyer from whom it is stolen in 1950s Manhattan. Ellie Shipley forged a copy of the painting in her postgraduate student years and in 2000 finds herself at the centre of a gathering storm which threatens to destroy her reputation as one of Sydney's foremost fine art academics. Satisfying though those first descriptions are, we then understand these are merely the author's equivalent of the delicate chalk lines used by painters of the Dutch Golden Age to mark out the composition which will follow.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>192526680X</amazonuk>
}}
