Rating: 
Summary: Author Assumptions
Review: This book is captivation personified once you get into this author's particular style. The flow of words is a little too "stream of consciousness" and the author assumes that the reader will have some knowledge of common australian slang. Still, an emotionally riveting plotline, very much a romantic drama.
Rating:
Summary: A Gem that Doesn't Hold the Light
Review: Tim Winton has an indisputable gift for language; seldom will you find more cleverly turned phrases or richer metaphors and similes, but "Dirt Music" is ultimately too opaque and self-indulgent. The language remains rich, but the story loses its way and the last 100 pages seem more the ramblings of a sunstruck psychedelic than an eloquent writer with a compelling story to tell. Most of the action takes place in the close-knit Western Australia fishing village of White Point, which is populated by characters who have a spiritual kinship to a dozen of Steinbeck's. Georgie Jutland, a well-traveled, well-worn forty-something ex-nurse from a dysfunctional family, is adrift in a brackish pool of indecision about her life and which man she wants to devote it to. Jim Buckridge, a stoic, widowed father of two young sons, stands tall and straight among them-a master fisherman and a strong, silent type who Georgie pities more than loves. Luther (Lu) Fox is a poacher of the first water whose crippled psyche draws Georgie like cat hair to a black sweater. But the Foxes are outcasts in this rough and tumble community while the Buckridges are its respected pillars. When the inevitable triangle forms, Lu is victimized in a particularly cruel way and Georgie is cast into a limbo darker than any she's ever known. Lu departs and Georgie's live-in relationship with Jim and his boys is flayed and filleted. Winton's long description of Lu's journey then not only leads the story off the beaten track, but off the track altogether. After forty or fifty pages of that, I no longer cared what happened to any of the characters.
Rating:
Summary: Dirt Music Man
Review: Tim Winton is an Aussie through and through. I wouldn't give Dirt Music the same amount of credit as Cloudstreet, however, they are both wonderful novels. I thought that Dirt Music started to drag a little towards the end and started to have a "Castaway" feel to it when Luther Fox is hiding in the Gulf/ stranded on the island. That bit could have been cut in half and still maintained the story line. But overall I was pleased with this read and always enjoy Tim Winton's poetic writing style: "She wondered what it might be like to live in his mind, in a world without forgiveness."
Rating: 
Summary: An earth moving story
Review: Tim Winton's books are not light and easy. His characters are the walking wounded, scarred marred and often barely surviving. He besets them with harsh tragedies, violent accidents, abandonment. Sometimes their situations are so dire that you might want to put the book aside and go into the fresh air just to know that life isn't as bleak and cruel as he paints it. When you return to the narrative, wary and battle weary the chinks of light begin to appear. Dirt Music reduced me to tears - Fox the sole survivor of a brutal family accident, an outcast of a harsh unforgiving Australian community finds love and redemption of a sort through Georgie, a woman who is as adrift as he. The novel is surprisingly suspenseful, so I won't write any more of the actual events, but God is it good! Tim Winton stands with Janette Turner Hospital as a major talent who has sprung from the arid ground of Australia.
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