The Home Girls

De: Olga Masters

Narrado por: Natalie Bate

A collection of short stories, The Home Girls quickly established Olga Masters as one of the most powerful and original new Australian writers. Each story is a study of the manifestations of power within the family. Twenty incisive domestic dramas are played out on the stage of poverty-stricken small town rural life where no-one's secrets are safe.

©1982 The Estate of Olga Masters (P)1996 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Reseñas de la Crítica

"One of the best writers of fiction in Australia." ( The Bulletin)

"She had a wonderful, unsenitmental eye for the little ironies, tensions and even cruelty of households, and a beautifully spare, concise way of expressing them." ( The Sun Herald)

"Masters deftly captures the joys, sorrows and humor of family life. Each story is a mini-drama set in a poor, rural part of Australia. Life in this setting is quite bleak, with emotions running to the extreme and family members often having only each other to rely upon. Narrator Natalie Bate is a diverse and accomplished actress who entrancingly presents a prose with which most of us are less than familiar. Her presentation enhances this non-American and non-British English literature in a way that a visual reading could not." ( AudioFile Magazine)

Couldn't Finish This One

This collection of short stories by Australian Olga Masters left me very frustrated. I didn't care for the way many of them started by throwing the reader into the middle of the story, and I cared even less for the abrupt, unresolved endings (the stories just stopped, as if the writer had fallen asleep at her desk). Worse still was the overall tone and subject matter. Nearly every story involved child or wife beating, intended, I suppose, the show how tough life was for people trying to scrape a living in small towns and the outback. I just can't get into a father beating his son bloody at the dinner table while all his wife does is offer him brownies in an attempt to distract him, and one of the daughters keeps throwing out more suggestions for why her brother needs to be beaten to ramp up the violence. I got about 2/3 through this one and just couldn't take any more.