Dorrie (Tanya McCartney, HarperCollins)
Award-winning Tanya McCartney’s Dorrie is a personable, narrative-style biography of author Dorothy Wall and how she came to write the Blinky Bill stories. It’s filled with young Dorrie’s irrepressible energy and creativity as the world around her—somehow both colourful and muted—blooms and whirls chaotically in accompaniment to her joyful adventures in painting, sewing, metalwork (a surprise and indication of the breadth of her passions!) and, ultimately, writing. After moving from New Zealand to Australia, Dorrie continues all her creative pursuits, and the story reaches its climax in her meeting with a mischievous koala who becomes the inspiration for Blinky Bill. Possibly due to efforts to capture an artist’s enduringly youthful imagination, the timeline in Dorrie is slightly confusing, suggesting that Wall wrote the books as a child, which contradicts the factual postscript. Similarly, in trying to make her story more universal, Dorrie’s activities and outfits are oddly anachronistic in some instances. However this is only a small glitch, and this warm and affectionate portrait of the young Dorrie is an enjoyable read and features some gently playful language sometimes missing from biographical picture books.
Anica Boulanger-Mashberg is a freelance editor, writer, and reviewer, and has worked as a bookseller at The Hobart Bookshop for over 10 years. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.
