I reviewed Sonja Dechian’s An Astronaut’s Life for The Australian, which you can read here. It was an interesting book to review, because I found as I started reading that I was somehow failing Dechian’s stories. Her stories don’t follow the traditional short story structure and because of this, it took some time for me to adjust to her style, to work out how to ‘read’ her stories. But a few stories in, I started to get the rhythm and her own unique logic started to make sense to me. Ultimately, the book is a fine achievement for a writer who has discovered her own way of telling and who creates these strange and captivating fictional worlds as a way of illuminating some important aspect of our own.
Gretchen Shirm 