This rollicking, down-to-earth novel is Norman Lindsay's comedy of adolescence. In the autobiographical sequence of his novels, in which most of his best writing is to be found, it comes midway between Saturdee — that spirited study of boyhood with Professor R. G. Howarth has compared with the immortal Tom Sawyer — and Redheap, where some of the leading characters have struggled through to their twenties.
In Halfway to Anywhere, taking much the same group of boys as in Saturdee, now grown to hairy adolescence, Norman Lindsay puts them through all the agonies and ecstasies appropriate to their years: the first dreadful sampling of cooking sherry; the conflicts with intolerable elder brothers and sisters, not to mention mere parents; the building of the "pleasure-house" with the dilapidated sofa on which no girl ever sat; the first transports of love. Everybody who has ever been young will recognise the appalling truth of this picture; anybody who has grown up in an Australian country town, imprisoned for ever so it seems in a dust-heap from which stars and far distant girls glimmer like intimations of paradise, will relish it even more.