"Different Voices was just absolutely BRILLIANT! ...it was as if I had been locked to the book! I just couldn't seem to want to stop."

Kristy (John Curtin Senior High School)

One of the few books that really displays how fascinating this country is with its "different voices".

Melina Marchetta (author of Looking for Alibrandi)

REVIEWS

BOAT KIDS GIVEN AN AUSTRALIAN VOICE (extract) 

Kim is a feisty protagonist who does not sit back and accept what is being dished out. She is able to stand up for what she believes is the right thing to do even if, at times, it places her life in danger.
The novel is multi-layered. Kim's life in Australia and her memories of Vietnam are explored but there are also harrowing stories of survival; there is Lan, a family member thought to have died during the journey to Australia and there is Lien, who share part of Lan's journey.
Different Voices is about tolerance and assimilation. Without mentioning the word multiculturalism, Flynn has written one of the few books that really displays how fascinating this country is with its "different voices". If one was to question the reason why a writer would stray from his "own territory", I would direct them to Flynn's lovingly created characters.

Melina Marchetta,  Sydney Morning Herald 

MATESHIP MAKES A GALLOPING YARN 

At the risk of marginalising talent, Different Voices puts Albany-based author Warren Flynn up there with the best of the bold interpreters - Allan Baillie, Melina Marchetta, Nadia Wheatley, James Moloney, Gillian Rubenstein - who leap cultural divides to show older kids Australian society as it is. And is not.
   Different Voices is never one of those mean-spirited, paint-by-number jobs that have flourished in recent years and under the twin banners of multiculturalism and political correctness - insufferable safe titles that are curriculum contrived and clinically dead - with just the right dab of ethnicity to keep the list-tickers happy.
     Publishers pump them out with abandon. Schools buy them up in class sets. Kids smell a rat down the corridor.
     There is no rat here, only the conviction of a writer who, in his own words, wants the reader  "to enjoy the world in our own backyards, to celebrate the diversity."
     A Vietnamese "boat kid" who has survived perilous sea crossings to reach Australia, Kim's story is one of assimilation and endearment.
     It's the saddest, gutsiest story you'll read all year.
 Here is a rare and beautiful thing, tolerance and assimilation sans tokenism, teenage protagonists sans stereotyping, and a galloping good yarn to boot. This one soars.

Glyn Parry, author of LA Postcards, Scooterboy etc. The West Australian

AUTHOR'S BACKGROUND NOTES different voices

Even before Gaz had been accepted for publication, I felt compelled to write what is essentially Kim's story, in Different Voices.  There was so much more to tell, and I badly wanted Gary's friends to have a better idea of what it was like to be "Asian", to be a refugee, and to be Australian. So I more or less continued from where Gaz finished, but this time writing more from Kim's perspective.
   Since my parents-in-law were refugees, I had some idea of what that can mean, and kids I knew at a Perth high school had given me plenty of information from journals about their own experiences of escaping from Vietnam. I'd seen and heard some of the racism that kids like Kim have to face in school and elsewhere.
  The scariest thing was trying to get inside a fifteen year old girl's mind! And sad. Some days, I had to stop writing because I became so upset at relating the events of the Tran's experiences. Not that the whole thing is depressing. The refugees I've met have a determination which goes way beyond physical endurance. 'Courage' on the sporting field is bulldust compared to what most refugees have lived through. And so many of these people are amazingly positive. My life has been deeply enriched by meeting Italians, Poles, Latvians, Germans, and Vietnamese who have added so much to Australia.

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