She'll Be Right

By Kevin Roberts

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 1896687989
• ISBN13: 9781896687988
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Pilot Hill Press
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.

Customer Reviews

She'll be Right

"She'll be Right" by Kevin Roberts is bloody brilliant. While it is memorable and vastly entertaining, this novel does require the reader to embrace and enjoy a non-linear style of story-telling where the narrative swirls among different times, people and places before its unifying conclusion - in the manner of a very ancient epic poem. (That style is now called, ironically, "post-modern") Highly recommended.

Thoughts on "She'll Be Right"

Larger than life Aussie characters romp through this engaging love story. The writer using humour and pathos in a parallel search for a young womans ancestry.

She'll Be Right is an excellent book!

The fist page is explosive. I love the energy of Kevin Roberts' style: "He put down his pen carefully. Silence. He looked at me. I knew what he was thinking. Unbelievable. Incredible. I could see it in his eyes. I left." The story itself alternates between the narrative and stories from manuscripts that contain possible clues about the narrator's missing wife, Imogen, and their unborn child. And then, there's the question of a rather involved will dependent on the adopted Imogen's ability to prove who her mother and father are. All the narrator and his wife have to do is read, read, read the manuscripts. That's what we must do too. The blast of content and hyperactive structure is a bit hard to grasp at first, but the chapters are mercifully short and key factors are repeated throughout the plot development. The short story manuscripts excerpts probably wouldn't stand on their own, but they add a poetic, dreamlike quality to the novel. The ongoing description in the long manuscript of a rag-tag bunch of Australians forming a hockey team with a female star player and later orchestrating a wedding is amusing. Kevin Roberts is a natural storyteller you might sit next to in a bar. As the night of drinking goes on his tales seem to make more and more sense. But the next morning you might wonder, What was that all about? It's hard not to love Imogen. She is a coked-up Holly Golightly for today's audiences. Because we care about her, we are pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery of her past. The Aussie lingo has a charm of its own and adds authenticity to the high-spirited "Fred's House" chapters. Sometimes the dialogue among multiple characters proves chaotic in a comic way, but it does contrast nicely with the rather introspective narrative and impressionistic short stories within that narrative. We are in the hands of an accomplished writer. The book gets better and better and the payoff, a tour de force that is emotionally moving and makes sense of everything that has gone before. Kevin Robins is a genius. Toward the finish one of the characters says, "What took you so long." At times I wondered that myself, but by the last page I knew the answer. Plus "She'll Be Right" is a real "loaded dog"--a hot dog with mustard and relish and onions and ketchup that will keep you spilling and slurping with enjoyment all along.