Ben Rice

'Everybody has an imaginary friend of some kind, even if you don't think they have', 7 May 2014

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This review is from: Pobby and Dingan / Specks in the Sky (Paperback)
Two pleasant enough short stories of around 90 and 50 pages respectively.
Pobby & Dingan is set among the opal mines of Australia, where young Kellyanne Williamson escapes her - hinted at - unhappy life at school, to focus on her two eponymous imaginary friends. But when they fail to come home in the ute with Dad, Kellyanne takes sick. Narrated by her - at first scornful- older brother, Ashmol, we see the townsfolk rallying round to find them, and restore Kellyanne to health...

Specks in the Sky seemed to start off as a vastly more compelling tale, but all seemed to fall apart at the end (whereas the strongest part of Pobby & Dingan was the final page.) Here a lone mother and her two daughters, out on a run-down camel ranch in USA, look up one day to see fourteen parachutists, led by the Commander, landing in their backyard. But are these charming and helpful young men all they seem?...

Aimed at the teenage reader; perhaps they would have been better left as magazine stories (which is where they first appeared: in Granta and the New Yorker). But quite readable.… (meer)

Came across this book on a list, I think it was on Kirkus, detailing the small books one should not miss. I loved this little story, about a 8 yr. old girl who lives with her family in New South Wales, Australia. Her father was digging for opals and the little girl had two imaginary friends called Pobby and Dingan. Reminded me of the saying that if a tree falls and no one is near does it still make a sound. If not everyone can see the imaginary friends does this mean they do not exist? This is a story of a town that pulled together to help save a little girl. It is also about what being family means, not just someone saying brother or sister, but going above and beyond, even if it means suspending one's belief. As her brother says, "Because they are all just fruit loops who don't know what it is to believe in something which is hard to see, or to keep looking for something which is totally hard to find." Wonderful little story.… (meer)