Review: Good historical outline, weak plot, weaker proofreading
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 4, 2011
This book gives a good outline of parts of Australian history during the worldwide depression between World Wars 1 and 2, and personifies some of it in regrettably clichéd characters, many of whom attain short bursts of fictional life but nothing sustained by any one of them throughout the plot-outline/novel.  I think the author may have been trying to stuff too much into one book, especially with the excursions into Mussolini's Italy and into the Spanish Civil War.  And whoever did the proofreading seems to have stopped paying attention about 2/3 of the way through as the book moved ponderously toward its Happy Ending.I think the book is worth reading just because of the chilling parallels between some of what was happening in Australian politics and the business and investment economies then and in the United States today.  But I would not read it again nor search for anything else by this author.  It really deserves a 2-and-a-half star rating rather than the three.