I read this for the Ipswich Splinter Group bookgroup meeting next month.

It's not something I would ordinarily have picked up, but I quite enjoyed it. The lack of commas, grammar and general punctuation made it a bit hard to read sometimes, but didn't get in the way of the story as badly as, say, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.

You can get a better sypnosis from Wikipedia, but this is a fictionalised account ostensibly written by the hand of Ned Kelly, for the daughter he never got to meet. I wasn't expecting to discover that the bulk of the book covers his growing up, the early death of his father and the gory details of his terrible childhood, including many allegedly undeserved stints in jail, courtesy of perjuring witnesses. I happened to flick on to watching Eminem in the film 8 Mile whilst I was reading this, and drew surprising parallels with the early history of Ned Kelly - a boy trying to grow up straight, looking after his mother after his father has gone, and with siblings he adores. This story leads the protagonist to a darker ending, however.

I was struck by the humble origins of one of the most striking lines from the novel - when coming out shooting at the fiery conclusion, Ned shouts "I am the bloody monitor, my boys.". This is actually a reference to Ned's strong desire as a boy to be the Ink Monitor at school and how it took a long time before the teacher had been through almost every other white boy in class, before he finally ended up with the job. It is because of this position, where he is required to get to school earlier that he happens to be at the right place at the right time, to save another boy from drowning in a river. The pride of this achievement, according to the story, has a big effect on Kelly - he receives a sash from the boys family, which he treasures and, also manages to secure the release of his father from gaol. Given Ned contributed to his father's incarceration, this is significant - though their relationship is never really repaired, and his father dies shortly after.

Anyway, not a lot more to be said - the story is fairly gripping, though the focus on his devotion to his mother and his fictionalised girlfriend and child, combined with the lack of detail on his later, criminal life which he is described as being almost entirely tricked into, does imply the book should probably not be held up as a shining example of accuracy. Thankfully, the final scene is not over-played, often a problem with this kind of story, which was a refreshing change.

All in all, well worth reading!

The book's voice is for me its strongest feature but the story plods along. It does capture the feeling of the Ned Kelly myth pretty well. However, I wasn't quite in love enough with it to read every single word!

I did bother to read the ending though and - actually - it throws up some interesting questions about the "History's" providence because it is REALLY Ned Kelly's hand at work here?

But, in true Ipswich Splinter Group style, we weren't able to debate this question because only one person read it all on time. (See Samwise's book report.)

Above average book - below average performance by us.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

This book has been chosen for the amazing Suffolk BookCrossers' Coffee Crawl!

It will end up somewhere along the following route:

11am Caffe Nero
11.30am Basso
12.30pm Coffee Link, Neptune Quay
1.30pm Greyhound OBCZ

Picked this up at the Ipswich meet-up this morning.

I'm sure I had picked this book up several times at Cafe Nero before I finally took it home from the Coffee Link OBCZ. Strangely I didn't realise until after I had got it home that it was a work of fiction. As Samwise says, the lack of punctutation can be a bit of a challenge in places. For the most part it wasn't a problem though but perhaps that is down to 15 years as a primary school teacher!

Unlike others I didn't find the story plodding. I read it at a fair pace and enjoyed every word. I am intrigued by the question of how accurate the story is and would have liked to know more of Kelly's last years and months. Perhaps I will have to read a history book rather than this 'True History'.

Left upstairs on the windowsill with all the other bookcrossing books. Generally I prefer not to release books back to the same place where I found them. Unfortunately I haven't been releasing many books lately for various reasons and this has been sitting on my shelf for much longer than I had wanted.