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    Margaret Connolly has been a literary agent for more than twenty years, after giving up a career as a lawyer in the mid-1980s.

    She set up her own business in 1992, and since then has developed a client list which resembles a roll-call of Australia's finest novelists, poets, dramatists, non-fiction authors, film-makers, children's writers and illustrators.

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    Catherine Jinks: The Reformed Vampire Support Group gets starred review

    vampire-1Starred review in Publishers Weekly for The Reformed Vampire Support Group

    Catherine Jinks’s new young adult novel, The Reformed Vampire Support Group, is to be published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in April, and in the USA in May by Harcourt. Here’s a great first review from the US Publisher’s Weekly.

    The Reformed Vampire Support Group Catherine Jinks. Harcourt, $17 (368p)

    Jinks’s signature facility with plot and character development is intact as she turns to the topic of vampires — as fans can anticipate, hers are not the romantic superheroes of the Stephenie Meyers books.

    Hers are a ragtag bunch: anemic, whiny, unattractive, they feed on guinea pigs (because they’re small, “their drained cadavers can be concealed without much effort,” and they breed quickly), and they turn for support to an idealistic priest.

    Nina, the narrator, is in her 50s, but was “infected” at 15 and chafes at being treated like an adolescent; she writes a sensational vampire series with a seductive, powerful heroine totally unlike herself, giving Jinks opportunity for comic contrasts.

    Throwing in delicious details and aperçus, the author works her way from the murder of one of the vampires to suspense and adventure of the sinister yet daffy variety beloved by readers of Evil Genius.

    vampire-2The plot twists, more ornate than in previous works, ramp up the giddiness — and, perhaps, camouflage the corpses, blood and other byproducts of the genre. Ages 12–up. (April)

    The Reformed Vampire Support Group is also to be published by Quercus in the UK in May, and their cover, below left, shows a distinct and darker contrast.

    Topics: Catherine Jinks, Novels, Young Adult | No Comments »

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