SOURCE: “Fabulous Red Head,” The Nation, January 13-20, 1997, pp. 32-4.

In the following review, Amdahl offers a positive evaluation of Dear Future.

Fred D'Aguiar begins his second novel, Dear Future (the first, The Longest Memory, won the Whitbread and the Higham awards in England), with the bright violence and not-quite singsong meter of a fairy tale: “Red Head got his name and visionary capacity at age nine when he ran behind an uncle chopping wood and caught the back of the axe on his forehead. His uncle, Beanstalk, feeling the reverberations of a soft wood as it yielded to the blade he'd swung back, looked over his shoulder and saw his favourite nephew half-run, half-walk in a wobbly line, do an about-turn, then flop to the ground in a heap.” The next sentences are distinctly in the tall-tale mode, detailing Beanstalk's ability to walk upon and lasso alligators...