Numbers are the Devil's Work

Frisby's real gift here is Beverley Joy Petersen, née Kushert, lately Driver — a character built almost entirely out of her own relentless self-audit. The running gag of her scoring her own life ("Marks for marriage – perhaps one out of ten. Marks for motherhood – deserting your kids – zero") does double duty: it's funny, and it's a genuinely efficient way to compress a hard backstory of domestic violence, burnout and reinvention into a voice that never once asks for pity. By the time she's needling the Deputy Premier over cold coffee — dismantling his "weird, gay, burned-out nutcase" slur point by point, then undercutting her own righteousness with "Up yours – but why the hell did she feel the fucking need to explain herself!" — she reads as a whole, contradictory person rather than a mouthpiece for satire.

The secondary strength is how thoroughly the book has done its homework on place and mechanism. Queenstown's dogs (the Great Dane's "deep pools" of eyes, the disembowelled stuffed toys signalling the golden retriever's loneliness), the rain-soaked West Coast routine, and — crucially — the Hare-Clark countback quirk that turns a dead Premier into Beverley's ticket to Parliament, are handled with the specificity of someone who actually consulted the Tasmanian Electoral Commission, as the author's note claims. That two words — "Hare-Clark" — can land as a punchline and a plot engine simultaneously shows real command of the material's texture, even where the prose around it sprawls.