On to Mt TBR.

This poignant story really hit the mark with me, read in one sitting.
Well worth reading but have the tissues ready towards the end.
Now on the look out for Caroline Overington's Ghost Child.

This one is westward bound...

To the finder of this book -
Please let me know it is in safe hands by journalling that you have caught it, you are under no obligation to read it and Bookcrossing is completely anonymous.

Thanks for the bonus books, marmee463 :-) They may be on my shelf for a little while, but they will get read . . .

The book begins with a prologue - a baby is taken from a hospital in the middle of the night. You don't know who the baby belongs to, or who takes it or why, just that it is taken.

The real story, when it begins, is written in letter form by Med Atley, an old Aussie bloke, to a judge presiding over a case to do with his grandchild. He begins with the family history, going all the way back to his own childhood, then detailing the lives of his children as they grew up, in particular the youngest, Donna-Faye (known as Fat). As he tells his story, there are brief glimpses into the tragedy that's coming, but for the most part it's told in a way to keep you guessing.

I didn't like this book. There's a lot of love out there for it, but it just didn't make it to me. I found the format as a letter to be too hard to believe (as if an old guy who's far more comfortable in the outdoors is going to sit down with his pencil and lined paper and crack out a 200 page letter, and as if a judge would have the time to read it even if he did) and I found that in keeping in character with the letter writer made it very much a "and then I said," "and then she did," sort of style that got clunky and irritating after a while. The book was also very scathing of Australia's child welfare system, which is totally fair enough, but it felt like the author had too much of an agenda and that too much of the content should have been written in another format (an article or an opinion piece or something), not as a novel. Those themes can definitely be tackled successfully in novels, but I found found it really grating in this one, to the point where it took away from the actual story line, which had a lot of potential.

I think the story itself was interesting enough, and I liked the way that the mystery unfolded, I just wish the style had been different.

Left on a bench outside the leisure centre and library. Enjoy!