Michaela Kolofsky

Like he's got this machine just for making words and descriptive passages.

He also uses a lot of similes.

He's always, this is like that.

Loads of metaphor.

You know, this gives the writing a sort of magical realist quality.

I think people have said that about Boy Swallows Universe.

It's definitely here.

It's front-loading a lot of the ideas about how we should be seeing the landscape, how we should be seeing characters.

how we should interpret events.

It's very, well, look, sometimes it strays into being quite florid, I found.

Well, yeah, I mean, you couldn't get more far away from Hemingway or from John Steinbeck.

I mean, it's really like packing it in there.

And that too, also, I feel is how he creates his characters.

So Molly Hook is not just a little girl who's growing up in

darwin and is impoverished she's a grave digger being beaten her mother's been taken away from her she's experienced dreadful cruelty she doesn't have any shoes she's only got a friend who's a shovel so you know there's almost this sort of magnification that comes with the way that the characters are created and that's true of long coat bob they're larger than life definitely they're

Yeah, and intentionally so.

He's aiming for a different kind of truth.

He's not aiming for any form of naturalism.

He's aiming for a kind of emotional truth.

He wants you to really experience what it's like to be a child who's got nothing and is being harmed, but also has this powerful imagination that allows them to step out of that, which is quite possibly what many people who are in trauma do.