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Review: Julie Booker’s Up Up Up

This review of Julie Booker’s new short story collection, Up Up Up, appeared in the April issue of Q&Q.

Reviewer Kerry Clare writes:

King Tut’s tomb is a disappointment, says the narrator of Julie Booker’s story Death on the Nile, and it’s a sentiment that pretty much encapsulates one of the main themes of this debut collection. Booker’s characters travel to the corners of the earth in search of transformation, only to discover that wherever they go, they’re still hauling all their baggage.

These stories reveal the extraordinary as mundane, and the mundane as worthy of closer examination. Booker’s preoccupations include an awareness of inhabiting one’s body, a lack of awareness about how that body is seen by others, characters who are dying to get into the married world, and the married world as a pit. These amusingly quirky stories belie hidden depths and dangerous undercurrents.

Read the rest of the review.