I had no idea Australia was so confusing....

In between my ongoing series projects (Laurie R. King's Russell/Holmes, Anne Perry's Charlotte & Thomas Pitt, and Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody), I took a time out for a selection from the Chicklit.com Book Club - Susan Elderkin's The Voices. I've generally had good success with their picks (particularly in non-fiction), and it's a way for me to explore authors I might have otherwise overlooked.

The Voices traces the life of Billy, a white Australian who becomes immersed in native aboriginal culture from childhood on. Told through several POVs and jumping back and forth in time, Elderkin.... loses me completely. Seriously - I have no idea what the hell this book is about. Most of the neural energy I expended on this took the form of, "Wait... now who's talking? Is this the present or a flashback? Spirit voices again? Oh Lord." I'm thinking that maybe Elderkin is like Faulkner in that she makes a whole lot more sense if you are drunk or not reading very carefully. I've seen other authors use the whole plotless-postmodernism thing to good effect (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, another Chicklit pick, comes to mind), but Elderkin just seems like she's lost control of her bicycle here. While I think her writing style has a lot of promise, as some of her turns of descriptive phrase are simply gorgeous, I think she needs something more in the way of plot to rein in her more mellifluous tendencies. The PW review dubbed it "erratic," which pretty much tells you all you need to know. Beautiful background is wonderful, but as a writer, you have to make it mean something for the reader to care.