Bite-Sized Book Reviews: “The Exiles”

I’ll admit: when I received a review copy of Christina Baker Kline’s The Exiles, I braced for a depressing read. Exploring displacement in nineteenth-century colonial Australia, Exiles follows three women fighting to survive in unfamiliar worlds. Mathinna is a young aboriginal girl adopted by the white governor of Tasmania against her will. Naive young governess Evangeline is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by her employer, while Hazel, desperately impoverished and barely 16, is given seven years’ imprisonment for stealing a spoon. Both are sentenced to transport to Australia.

Hardly the makings of a comedy.

But Exiles is no mere tear-jerker. Yes, there are seriously sad moments–one night in particular, I cried through about thirty pages. And the novel is tremendously poignant–I ached for characters in unjust or impossible situations with no real hope of rescue.

Yet these sadder threads are entwined with cords of strength and resiliency, reinvention and triumph. This dichotomy of loss and victory, gritty danger and expansive opportunity seems to mirror colonial Australia itself–the harsh frontier life that destroys some is for others an opportunity to achieve freedom impossible in Britain.

A writing professor once told me that the mark of a truly well-written character is the reader’s willingness to follow them anywhere. (The sitcom Parks & Recreation models this perfectly. A show about city government in small-town Indiana shouldn’t be compelling, but Leslie and her crew make us care.) Kline accomplishes the same feat: bleak as it often was, I readily followed Mathinna, Evangeline, and Hazel through British prisons, convict nurseries, Australian orphanages, even a filthy slave ship repurposed as prisoner transport. Evangeline, woefully innocent but kind and intelligent, cultivates graceful strength through her life as a convict. Hazel, flinty and fearlessly self-reliant, leverages her skills as a midwife and herbalist to save herself and others. Mathinna is brave, gifted, and warm-hearted, fighting to navigate between her Aboriginal heritage and her adopted family’s wealthy, white household, where she is part foster child, part social experiment.

Bite-Sized Book Reviews: “The Things She’s Seen”

Given my tendency to write long, winding novels that later have to be hacked back like overgrown rosebushes, I’ve come to really respect those writers who’ve mastered the art of trim fiction.

The Things She’s Seen, the work of brother/sister duo Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, is a prime example. At just 193 pages–half of which are in verse, making them even less text-intensive–this young adult novel nevertheless tackles heavy themes with succinct, heart-pricking grace.

Set in small-town Australia, Things is told in two voices. 15-year-old Beth Teller, recently dead, has lingered as a ghost only her detective father can see. When he’s dispatched to investigate a suspicious death, she accompanies him, desperate to help him survive his grief. Isobel Catching, found wandering near the murder site, is the sole witness of the crime… but will only tell her story in poetic riddles.