From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A life quickly flames out in Flanagan's firebrand follow-up to 2002's acclaimed
Gould's Book of Fish. Gina Davies, a 26-year-old nightclub pole dancer (referred to throughout as "the Doll"), leads a provincial life in Sydney, Australia, spends $2,000 a month on clothes and is given to the occasional racist rant. But after a one-night stand with a man named Tariq, she turns on the TV and learns she's been pegged as the accomplice in an attempted terrorist attack on Sydney's Olympic stadium. She's instantly the most-wanted woman in Australia and the source of a raging tabloid media feeding frenzy led by sleazy TV journalist Richard Cody. The fast-paced narrative builds to a fittingly bloody crescendo, and Flanagan drops astutely cynical observations along the way (the Doll, for instance, "realized that her life was no longer what she made of it, but what others said it was"). A true page-turner as well as a timely, pithy critique of celebrity culture and the politics of fearmongering.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Gina Davies, or the Doll, is a pole-dancer in Sydney who meets a guy, sleeps with said guy, finds out the guy might be a terrorist, and then finds out that apparently she is also a terrorist. Merely being photographed with a man whose name is Tariq and who has dubious ties to a radical Islamic cleric serves to implicate the Doll in the court of public opinion, where outrage that a homegrown Australian woman could become such a nefarious killer sends the country into a tailspin of hysteria. Never mind that no one, most of all the counterterrorism officials hunting after the Doll, seems to want to know that, really, she is just a stripper. Although the lesson may be poignant, the story never quite becomes as thrilling as it intends, and Flanagan's opaque interiors and repetitive digressions fail to mask an awfully thin plot. What remains is a timely work of almost pathological anger directed at the stupidity and vileness of society driven to hysteria by a fearmongering media whose fanaticism is neck-and-neck with religious fundamentalism itself.
Ian ChipmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
