I really wanted to like this more than I did, I was really looking forward to getting lost in a dystopian read, as it’s been awhile, but I just found it very lacklustre.

The relationships were well done, especially between Mother and Son and that of the landscape, their home and community and while I loosely gauged how the world had come to its end, I needed more detail to fully comprehend.

I really did like Tims writing style, with no use of speech marks, it was just a long string of consciousness, which really drew you in and made it very easy and fast to read.

I believe this is quite different to Tim’s other books and while it didn’t quite hit the mark for me, the concept was there and I will be keeping an eye if for what he comes up with next.

Thanks NetGalley, Penguin Random House and Tim for this Digital Advanced Readers Copy, in exchange for an honest review.

Winton's powerful new novel is a cautionary tale. Set in a plausible world devastated by a man made climate catastrophe - humanity is clinging on to an existence eked out in the immense heat.

Juice is the story of an individual life told over the course of a night by a man trying to save his skin and that of a young girl in his care. Our narrator, a Scheherazade of the future, is scarred by a life of action, hardship and intense heat and as his tale unfolds this bleak future descends into further desolation.

There is more action and violence than Winton's readers will be used to and despite the depressing outlook he has evoked for humanity Juice is a compelling page-turner.

I was thrilled to receive a reading copy. Thanks to PRH and NetGalley for an advance copy to review.

Tim Winton is a huge advocate for what is happening to the world through climate change and the general disregard for how we treat our world. Juice is his take on a future where we basically have made the planet almost uninhabitable.
A man and a young girl are travelling across Australia. It is bleak and barren and unbearably hot. They come across an abandoned mine and feel this is a good place to set up camp. Someone else is living there and he takes the two hostage, locking them in the depths of the mine. As the hostage taker keeps guard, the man begins to tell his story, a story of despair as he and his mother had to try and live in this hostile environment, how they spent months living underground away from the heat above but still sweltering below.
It’s hard to say how long the world has been this way but for me I thought a century at least, our language has been replaced with new words for things which I sometimes couldn’t work out. It took me a long time to get into the story and I only persevered because it was Tim Winton. I did end up enjoying the story but do prefer his other works.

#Juice. #NetGalley

The opening of Tim Winton’s new novel Juice cannot help but put readers in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal work The Road. A man, possibly an ex-soldier, and a young girl travel in a vehicle across a blasted future landscape.
But it turns out that Juice is not that book. Well, not entirely. Before long the story becomes something else, more of a tale about how the world came to that point and a kind-of post-apocalyptic climate thriller. And, being Winton, there is also a coming-of-age story buried in there. But more than that, Juice seems to be a working-through of the anger that Winton feels (and has expressed elsewhere) about the state of the world and the possibilities for the future, and a wake-up call for his readers.
The main narrative really begins when the unnamed narrator and his charge are captured by a loner living in an old mine. It turns out the narrator and the man keeping them hostage (who he calls ‘the bowman’ due to his crossbow) both worked for something called the Service, and so the narrator tries to make a connection. And so begins a kind of 1001 Arabian Nights style narrative where the narrator tries to bring the bowman around by telling him his life story:
That story starts many years before when the narrator was a child, years after something called the Terror, in which the global order broke down. Winton, being Winton, cannot help including the coming-of-age story of the narrator as a young man who finally gets to go out on his own and finds himself learning the truth about his world and being recruited into a kind of global resistance.
This part of the narrative highlights the weakness of this book. For surely the bowman either is not interested in the man’s childhood or knows most of this if he was in the same organisation.
The narrator pledges himself to the cause when he discovers that the world is the way it is because people made it that way (apparently this knowledge had been lost) and that the descendants of those behind the state of the world are still alive. This is the guts of Juice: the double life that the narrator lives as he goes on missions to kill those responsible for the state of the world, spending his downtime back on the farm with his family. That story is the story Winton feels he needs to tell: that future generations will feel the need to take revenge against the descendants of fossil fuel oligarchs (who they dehumanise by calling ‘objects’) who have holed up in secret bunkers around the world.
There is a lot of action in Juice, or at least, descriptions of when action happens, which is a different thing. The narrator talks about his missions and the violence and carnage of them. But it always feels at a remove. This is absolutely a novel of telling rather than showing, deliberately so. But this remove drains what are supposed to be action scenes of some of their potency. They become interesting without being viscerally engaging, which is what they need. It is more like someone telling you about a video game that they watched over someone else’s shoulder.
There is plenty of disaster-infused post-climate-change fiction around already. The more recent spiritual successor of this type of cli-fi is known as solarpunk – a subgenre which more optimistically imagines a post-climate-change world in which humanity manages to move to a more sustainable footing. Rather than making people scared of the future, Winton might have been better off looking to this newer tradition for addressing climate in fiction. He has written this book to make people think about the trajectory that the world is on and about the interests that are driving us down that road, but not necessarily what they can do about it. Because it is likely that even Winton would agree that the response he imagines in Juice – to take violent revenge against those who are responsible for the state we are in – may be one that some readers might wish for but is not one they can really do anything with.

Tim Winton's latest novel was fantastic. As my first introduction to his works, I really enjoyed his vivid yet digestible prose. The short chapters and quick dialogue meant that I flew through the book in a couple of days. I appreciated the author's environmental messages that are spread throughout the novel, and whilst I found them quite powerful it never felt overbearing or preachy. The level of suspense maintained throughout the novel also meant that I was constantly drawn back to the novel and did not want to put it down.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is looking for their next dystopian read, loves Mad Max and other post-apocalyptic words, or is just looking for a great read with beautiful prose and superb characters. I will definitely be looking to read more by Tim Winton, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he puts out in the future.

Thanks for Penguin Random House Australia and Netgalley for providing this ARC.