Maya Linden

Maya Linden has lived and worked in the United States and in Australia as a writer, researcher, restaurant and bar critic, book reviewer, and teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She has recently completed a PhD on feminine masochism in women’s literature at the University of Adelaide, and her creative and critical writing has been published in many local and international journals, including Meanjin, Westerly, Life Writing and Australian Book Review, as well as several anthologies. Her website is www.mayalinden.com

Maya Linden reviews 'Drift' by Penni Russon

May 2007, no. 291 • 01 May 2007

Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Are You Seeing Me?' by Darren Groth and 'The Minnow' by Diana Sweeney

September 2014, no. 364 • 01 September 2014

At its greatest, literature offers us the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of someone else; at its most inviting, through a character whose experience could be our own; at its most powerful, through a view of existence that differs vastly, even frighteningly, from ours. The latter is explored in these two new works of Young Adult fiction that show us intensely ‘other’ ways of seei ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'The One and Only Jack Chant' by Rosie Borella and 'The Haunting of Lily Frost' by Nova Weetman

May 2014, no. 361 • 30 April 2014

In Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Margaret Atwood proposes that all writing ‘is motivated, deep down, by a fear of, and fascination with, mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead’. Certainly writers often use their craft both to preserve the memory of times, places, and people lost to them, and, consciously or u ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Zac & Mia' by A. J. Betts

November 2013, no. 356 • 31 October 2013

Authentically owning a character’s experience is one of the great challenges faced by fiction writers, especially when it is something as intensely felt as living with terminal illness. It is testimony to A.J. Betts’s talent that she does so in Zac & Mia without lapsing into melodrama, rather, maintaining a voice that is youthful, contemporary, emotional when it needs to be but never clich ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'The Whole of My World' by Nicole Hayes

September 2013, no. 354 • 28 August 2013

It’s the early 1980s in Melbourne. Shelley, aged fourteen, is obsessed with football. Discussions of the game are the one point of mutual interest that allows communication between Shelley and her father in the aftermath of the death of her mother. ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Alex as Well' by Alyssa Brugman

March 2013, no. 349 • 08 March 2013

Alyssa Brugman’s Alex as Well makes us question why we read. Is it something we do to escape reality, or are we drawn to other realms that may contain deeply unsettling experiences very different from our own? ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Creepy & Maud' by Dianne Touchell

October 2012, no. 345 • 25 September 2012

From the first sentence of Creepy & Maud, we know we are entering a volatile world. ‘My dad has trained our dog, Dobie Squires, to bite my mum,’ Creepy tells us. What follows is a vivid peek into suburban isolation and unease. Almost every character has an addiction or psychological disturbance, from alcoholism and untameable aggression to dyslexia and obsessive compulsions. This society i ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Sea Hearts' by Margo Lanagan

May 2012, no. 341 • 23 April 2012

Sea Hearts takes place in an intensely wrought setting, both unnerving and thrilling – in propinquity to our world, yet enchantingly different. We journey, with a series of intriguing characters, through brutal landscapes where the wind is ‘swiping like a cat’s paw at a mousehole’. ... (read more)

Maya Linden reviews 'Darkwater' by Georgia Blain and 'This Is Shyness' by Leanne Hall

April 2011, no. 330 • 26 March 2011

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervades these two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain (author of four novels, including Closed for Winter, 1998), and a début book, This is Shyness by Leanne Hall, trace the aftermath of events in which brightness gives way to ‘sudden black’ in the lives of teenage characters. ... (read more)