'After my parents’ dinner parties, I’d pour dregs from wine bottles into saucers for the fairies – white wine for the good ones, red for the wicked. The red always disappeared faster, which I took as proof that naughty people have more fun. I didn’t really believe that fairies drank the wine but equally, I didn’t not believe either.
'As a parent, I am tuning back to that curious magic of childhood; the naive ambivalence that accepts the existence of tooth fairies and flying reindeer; the unadulterated wonder at new things; the unexpected grace of an ibis in flight; the dinosaur shriek of a sulphurcrested cockatoo; the shocking weirdness of a Gymea lily in bloom; the otherworldly-warble of currawongs as dusk settles in.
'Yet, as wonder flows back into my daily life, so too does the creeping realisation that we are living in a time of overlapping and escalating environmental crises. What stories will prepare my son for a future that frightens me? For me, there is no overarching narrative or truth, no heroic figure who will lead us to salvation from this mess we are in. Instead, sense is made from paying attention to the assemblages of people and other animals who we move among on a damaged planet. I read and write and draw to make sense of a world I no longer recognise.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice. ‘Sometimes when I’m talking to Dad, he’s not there. I look over and see that he’s gone.’ In keeping with the book’s broader interplay of humour and darker concerns, Sadokierski uses it as an excuse for a moment of black comedy. ‘When he’s like this, I could say anything,’ she continues. ‘Dad, I’m really struggling being a working parent. I’m drinking at breakfast.’ But, like the animal skull he later presents her, her father’s distraction prefigures the larger absence that will eventually overtake him, transforming the scene into a sort of memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of loss that shadows all life. And, no less importantly, it suggests a larger kind of extinction, one summoned up by the mute images of feathers and bones sketched alongside the words.' (Introduction)
'Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice. ‘Sometimes when I’m talking to Dad, he’s not there. I look over and see that he’s gone.’ In keeping with the book’s broader interplay of humour and darker concerns, Sadokierski uses it as an excuse for a moment of black comedy. ‘When he’s like this, I could say anything,’ she continues. ‘Dad, I’m really struggling being a working parent. I’m drinking at breakfast.’ But, like the animal skull he later presents her, her father’s distraction prefigures the larger absence that will eventually overtake him, transforming the scene into a sort of memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of loss that shadows all life. And, no less importantly, it suggests a larger kind of extinction, one summoned up by the mute images of feathers and bones sketched alongside the words.' (Introduction)
