Figgy O'Connell

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that.


I first heard about this book the day after it won the Miles Franklin award and, having never been pulled in by the blurb of any of the others, decided it was likely a book I would never read.

Then it came in to the store.

And I read the blurb, which left me... not intrigued exactly, but open to the idea of maybe one day reading the book.

Then I read the first paragraph, and bought it the very same day.

After the first paragraph, I found the writing style became very clunky, telly, and not enjoyable. I didn't care about the MC at all because I wasn't getting any FEELINGS from her. But something kept me reading, and after a while I realised that the writing had become invisible to me, and I was just enjoying the story without thinking about the mechanics. Mostly.

I did get caught up in the story, and I kept wanting to return to it, to find out how everything worked out. In the end I finished it faster than some bad books within the genres that I frequent, and I did stay up late in order to finish the last fifty pages.

But... I have a suspicion that the only reason the past scenes were told in a backwards chronological order was to give some mystery to the story. Otherwise it would just be the story of a girl from a bad... teenagehood who grows up and moves overseas to get away from the memories, but can never quite let go of them. And there's something killing her sheep. I don't have a big issue with the method used to keep me interested, because it did do its job, and I would have been much less interested in the story if it was in chronological order.

Which would have been a shame, because it does showcase some of the good outback people, and some of the really not good ones, and then some who aren't bad exactly, but possibly caught on the wrong track for their lives. I never ended up liking Jake, but I didn't once think about putting this book aside, which is unusual, especially as it was first person narrative.



A few things did bother me:

- The past scenes were told in present tense, and the present scenes told in past tense...

- Some of the Aussie slang was wrong. I could understand this to an extent if trying to Americanise the story for a wider audience (but if it's meant to be quite Aussie, what's the point of Americanising it? Did Crocodile Dundee Americanise things? No.
And, I know these can differ due to different regions, which is why I checked with my Aussie Slang Dictionary, just in case. (Specific examples include rubber for a condom, instead of, say dinger, franger, or raincoat; box-wine bladders instead of goon bags; and Freddie the Frog instead of Freddo Frog.)

- The situation with Otto. Ok, he wasn't a great person by any stretch, and he was coming up with ways to keep her there on his farm when she wanted to leave, and he treated her as his own personal play thing. I can understand her wanting to leave, but at one point she was actually thinking of killing him? It would have been good if we'd been shown more about why he deserved to die, rather than the scenes which showed him as being a possessive controlling bastard, who seemed to be deluded enough to think that she wanted to be there.

- Where was the ending? The book just STOPPED, without having resolved anything much at all.

- The in-between of Aus and England. She was in Australia and bad things happened so she had to leave, and then she's in England with a sheep farm. How'd she get there, and all the rest? Yes, she had some money to her name, but that doesn't magically make moving to another country easier.



In the end, I didn't love this book, and some parts really bothered me, but I'm glad I decided to read it, and may read other books by the author in the future. They probably won't jump to the top of my reading list like this one did, but you never know.

And now I have another Aussie(ish) book to add to my rapidly increasing Aussie shelf, which has always been fairly sparse...

...theoretically sparse. I have nowhere near enough space for all my books.