The Beautiful Miscellaneous

There is so much to say about The Beautiful Miscellaneous yet I find myself struggling for words. I am no stranger to the work of Dominic Smith. Last year I read The Last Painting of Sara De Vos and absolutely loved it. The Beautiful Miscellaneous is not a new novel; it’s new to Australia, but it wa......more

I really, really liked this book to begin with, but it was kind of steadily downhill from the accident on (the turning point that takes place about a third of the way in). I actually wished I had stopped reading it, because the last third of the book was just disjointed and not nearly as well writte......more

"Later that night I drove home slowly in a light rain. The night felt cracked open, alive with possibility." One of many passages I underlined, I start with that because protagonist Nathan Nelson's experience in the car that night is just what this novel delivers to the reader. Aliveness with possib......more

This book has a really promising set-up: despite the teachings and urgings of his genius physicist father, 17-year-old Nathan has remained disappointingly average; then he survives a near-fatal car crash and in the process gets his brain rewired. The first hundred or so pages, the build-up to the ac......more

I enjoyed this book enormously. The characters were vivid and the relationship between the father and the son was compelling. Really, it was a terrific novel. . .and a sign of that was that the day I was going to finish it, I was torn: I didn't want to stop reading but I also didn't want it to end.......more