'Strange what chooses to flourish here. Which plants. Which stories.
'Bettina Scott lives a tidy, quiet life in Runagate, tending to her delicate mother and their well-kept garden after her father and brothers disappear — until a note arrives that sends Bettina into the scrublands beyond, searching for answers about what really happened to this town, and to her family.
'For this is a land where superstitions hunt and folk tales dream — and power is there for the taking, for those willing to look.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Picador ed.)
'This article examines three fairy-tale texts that foreground women’s roles in Australia. We argue that although Kathleen Jennings’s Flyaway (2020) and Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) and her short story “All Kinds of Fur” (2021) are feminist insofar as they center women’s stories, they are limited by the extent to which they depict women working collaboratively. Although the fairy tale has the potential to disrupt patriarchal norms, these narratives offer constrained stories of women’s lives in which collaboration is possible but often fails to live up to its feminist potential to overturn conservative ideologies of femininity and power.' (Publication abstract)
'This is a haunting, brilliant novella combining fairy tale elements and Australian folklore.'
'At the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and men into beasts.' (Introduction)
'Flyaway is a strange beast of a book. It’s a Gothic fairytale set ostensibly somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean, in a bush district, but Kathleen Jennings’ debut novel could really be located in just about any small Australian town, in any dusty outpost where memory “seeped and frayed … where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts”. Bettina Scott is the unreliable narrator at its core, a young woman who, unlike her mother, is graceless and unlovely; there are intimations that tempestuousness and insolence also reside closely beneath her surface.' (Introduction)
'At the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and men into beasts.' (Introduction)
'This article examines three fairy-tale texts that foreground women’s roles in Australia. We argue that although Kathleen Jennings’s Flyaway (2020) and Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) and her short story “All Kinds of Fur” (2021) are feminist insofar as they center women’s stories, they are limited by the extent to which they depict women working collaboratively. Although the fairy tale has the potential to disrupt patriarchal norms, these narratives offer constrained stories of women’s lives in which collaboration is possible but often fails to live up to its feminist potential to overturn conservative ideologies of femininity and power.' (Publication abstract)
