Description
For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm and powerful presence fills her world. But in the aftermath of his sudden death, Orla, her mother and her sister are left in a no-man's land, a place where the rights and protections of the nuclear family suddenly and mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl and woman must be navigated alone.
Genres
Collection
Publication
Fremantle, WA : Fremantle Press, 2019.
Pages
309
User reviews
LibraryThing member oldblack
This was a random pick from the library shelf. I should have left it there. I since discovered that the author is also a poet and I usually don't like novels by poets - they tend to use words to create images without feeling the need to more fully describe a situation. They like leaving the
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imagination of the reader to do the work. And they're too experimental and creative for this unimaginative and conservative reader. That's not the only problem I had with this book. The story is mostly narrated by a young girl whose father dies early in the novel. I didn't find the point of view of the young girl to be particularly interesting or revealing. That's probably in part due to the fact that I'm an old man and I can't even remember what it was like to be 10 years old. And it's set in Perth (Australia) in the late 1960s - I feel no need to re-live that era. Didn't finish it but I gave it every chance and didn't give up till about half-way through. Show Less