Review: Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar

Twenty-three year old Till has lived in the darkest shadow of an event that she was powerless to stop--the abduction of her best friend when the two were just five years old. Understandably, the event and the attention she gained from being the child who saw it happen have left a scar. Now an adult, she finds herself on the run from her past. She arrives in an outback town, a long way from home, only to discover that danger lurks here too. This time around she needs to make a decision--to run or to face the danger head on.

When I was offered a copy of Days of Innocence and Wonder to review, I was immediately intrigued. After all, Lucy Treloar is an accomplished Australian writer of literary fiction, with two wonderful, award winning literary novels under her belt, Salt Creek and Wolfe Island. The plot of Days of Innocence and Wonder certainly sounded compelling. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this one as much as I hoped. I knew the plot was going to be dark and that parts would be confronting--I just did not realise how confronting. Of course, the subject matter--the dangers that girls and women face is extremely important and worthy of discussion--and it is something that is going to linger in my mind for a long time. Perhaps the importance of stories like this one is not so much whether one enjoyed it, but how it made them feel and how it contributes to a wider and more important discussion. Why do I find it so confrontational? Is it the violence? Or is it the fact that Till has spent her life blaming herself for an event that was in no way her fault?

As always, Treloar's prose is beautiful and there is a haunting quality to the narrative.

A deep and though provoking read.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan Australia for my ARC of Days of Innocence and Wonder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more