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Days of Innocence and Wonder – Lucy Treloar

Days of Innocence and Wonder – Lucy Treloar

This was a Christmas present. I have read Ms Treloar’s previous works – Salt Creek and Wolfe Island, both of which i enjoyed. Very different to each other and this one is different again.

Here’s the blurb …

When someone is taken away, what is left behind?

All her life, Till has lived in the shadow of the abduction of a childhood friend and her tormented wondering about whether she could have stopped it.

When Till, now twenty-three, senses danger approaching again, she flees her past and the hovering presence of her fearful parents. In Wirowie, a town on its knees, she stops and slowly begins creating a new life and home. But there is something menacing here too. Till must decide whether she can finally face down, even pursue, the darkness – or whether she’ll flee once more and never stop running.

Both a reckoning with fear and loss, and a recognition of the power of belonging, Days of Innocence and Wonder is a richly textured, deeply felt new novel from one of Australia’s finest writers.

It is beautifully written, sometimes we read for a plot (a gripping story) and sometimes it’s to read lovely sentences and marvel at how someone has put the words together. For me this book was the latter, which is not to say that there is no plot – in fact it gets quite tense, but it is a joy to read such lovely, well-constructed sentences.

A review.

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Wolfe Island – Lucy Treloar

Wolfe Island – Lucy Treloar

For years Kitty Hawke has lived alone on Wolfe Island, witness to the island’s erosion and clinging to the ghosts of her past. Her work as a sculptor and her wolfdog Girl are enough. News of mainland turmoil is as distant as myth until refugees from that world arrive: her granddaughter Cat, and Luis and Alejandra, a brother and sister escaping persecution. When threats from the mainland draw closer, they are forced to flee for their lives. They travel north through winter, a journey during which Kitty must decide what she will do to protect the people she loves.

Part western, part lament for a disappearing world, Wolfe Island (set off the northeast coast of the US) is a transporting novel that explores connection and isolation and the ways lives and families shatter and are remade

I read Salt Creek (and presented it to my historical book club), but I think this one is better. It is thrilling (action-wise), but also has fabulous character development and settings. 4/5

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Salt Creek – Lucy Treloar

 

Salt Creek - Lucy Treloar

Salt Creek – Lucy Treloar

I can’t think of when I first heard of this novel – a review in The Australian perhaps? It has been short listed for the Miles Franklin award, so I might have read about it in that context.

Here is the blurb

Some things collapse slow, and cannot always be rebuilt, and even if a thing can be remade it will never be as it was.

Salt Creek, 1855, lies at the far reaches of the remote, beautiful and inhospitable coastal region, the Coorong, in the new province of South Australia. The area, just opened to graziers willing to chance their luck, becomes home to Stanton Finch and his large family, including fifteen-year-old Hester Finch.

Once wealthy political activists, the Finch family has fallen on hard times. Cut adrift from the polite society they were raised to be part of, Hester and her siblings make connections where they can: with the few travellers that pass along the nearby stock route – among them a young artist, Charles – and the Ngarrindjeri people they have dispossessed. Over the years that pass, an Aboriginal boy, Tully, at first a friend, becomes part of the family.

Stanton’s attempts to tame the harsh landscape bring ruin to the Ngarrindjeri people’s homes and livelihoods, and unleash a chain of events that will tear the family asunder. As Hester witnesses the destruction of the Ngarrindjeri’s subtle culture and the ideals that her family once held so close, she begins to wonder what civilization is. Was it for this life and this world that she was educated?

I have been suggesting this novel to a lot of people – I found it extremely interesting from a historical point. Despite being Australian (an educated in Australia), I know very little about interactions between indigeneous australians and early (mostly white) settlers. I found it fascinating particularly how the settlers usually bring disease and disaster with them (although they feel they are ‘civilising the natives’).

There is a menacing feel to this novel – we know something happens because Hester (who is narrating the story) is living in England. The family structure is destroyed and they scatter to various parts of the globe. The scenes set in the Coorong are the best – you can feel the isolation, the coldness and the threat of brutality as well as the beauty of an (originally) unspoiled landscape.

More reviews …

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/salt-creek-review-lucy-treloars-novel-on-a-colonial-family-struggle/news-story/576ba5a589f435cfa3fb3358e9cf8200

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/salt-creek-by-lucy-treloar-a-colonial-familys-fragility-and-fractures-20151030-gkmsbi.html

 

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