The main love story brought me to tears multiple times but also the feelings of finding a true friendship when you feel misunderstood was beautiful. Also heartbreaking was the main character feeling unloved by her parents because of their personalities and behaviours when really she was adored. What a devastating misconception!

I have previously read Burial Rites by Hannah Kent which I also loved and so am now committed to reading all her books. ( )

Hannah Kent is one of my favorites. Her writing style is so unique to me that I will miss reading it but have found nothing similar enough to turn to besides waiting for her next book or re-reading her previous ones. Some people might think of them as slower storytelling, but they are slow in a good way to me. They are slow in a way of taking in the details and making the mundane act seem like more. Of weaving magic into ordinary places and situations. If you like that style of narration, I think you will love Hannah Kent’s books.

This is another historical fiction from her but it is different than her previous two which relied more heavily on the historical aspect. This one brings in more of the fantastical, supernatural side and romance aspects while still being primarily based on a specific time period and Lutheran journey into South Australia.

I will say, Kent’s books are very bittersweet and melancholy in tone so be ready for that going into them, but they are also beautiful. This one is no exception, though it does change a bit in tone from the previous two books of hers. I would say that I enjoyed the first two, Burial Rites and The Good People a bit more than this one, but I think it may have more to do with the plot. The writing itself was as beautifully descriptive as always. All in all, it was a lovely read.



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This was a f2f bookclub read, which often take me a long way out of my comfort zone.

Full Review at: https://bookwyrm.social/book/435971/review#reviews ( )

Overall I found this book disappointing. We realise at the end of the first section, that we have an unreliable narrator. At this point, I felt somewhat disengaged with the characters. It was a device that didn't really work for me. I was interested in the historical event, though, of the settlement of a part of Adelaide by a Prussian Lutheran community, where like many settlers they attempt to recreate what they have left behind. Once again a gay writer has transposed her sexuality into historical times. This is by no means a judgement, merely an observation. ( )

I’ve read Hannah Kent’s two previous novels, Burial Rites (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2017/07/ristapar-and-burial-rites-by-hannah-kent.html) and The Good People (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2018/01/review-of-good-people-by-hannah-kent.html), and I loved them both. Like the first two, the third also portrays women on the fringe, but it is less impressive.

The novel begins in 1836 in a Prussian Old Lutheran community. Fourteen-year-old Hanne is the narrator. She’s a bit of a misfit with no real friends until she meets Thea, the daughter of a family that moves to the village. The two form a deep friendship that soon develops into love. Facing religious persecution, members of the community immigrate to southern Australia where they establish a new settlement.

Hanne describes herself as “nature’s child” who “loved to be outside, because that was where the world sang to me.” She has synesthesia so she hears the natural world as music. For instance, she listens to trees which sing to her and says, “the sound of snow falling was like chimes.” It is this synesthesia and her rather obsessive love for Thea that define her. She does not otherwise feel like a fully developed character.

I enjoyed the first part of the novel, but then there is an unexpected twist mid-way that upends the reader’s expectations. The event is foreshadowed as a “great cataclysm” and it is indeed that. Unfortunately, the supernatural turn of events just doesn’t work for me. And towards the end, a scene involving Hanne, Thea, and Hans is not only ridiculous but cringe-worthy. The use of the mystical Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is problematic because it was first published in 1849 although Thea’s mother has an old copy.

Many of the secondary characters tend to fall into categories like sympathetic, kindly outcasts (Hanne, Thea, Anna Maria), spiteful gossips (Magdalena and Christiana Radtke), and limited patriarchs (Pastor Flügel and Heinrich Nussbaum). And no one changes or experiences any personal growth. Everyone falls on the spectrum between religious and superstitious: “how easily superstition creeps into the smallest of gestures.”

The focus of the book is the relationship between Hanne and Thea. Hanne never doubts her love for Thea and her descriptions verge on the rhapsodic. After a while, her extravagant emotions seem excessive and become tedious. I would have liked more explanation of why the two love each other; much of their attraction seems to just be the result that both are outsiders.

The book skims over the racial issues once the persecuted Prussians become the colonizers in Australia. Hanne does comment that her people “disfigured the land back into Prussia” and she mentions seeing “ugly shepherds of smallpox and violence force an unnatural migration upon these people, away from the country they belonged to.” There are few encounters with the Aborigines, though one near the end is an ugly one. Hanne witnesses this confrontation but turns away and reacts with a thought: “Thea is not here.” I think Hannah Kent missed an opportunity to more fully address the hypocrisy of the persecuted becoming the persecutors.

For me, this book was a disappointment. I would have preferred a more straightforward historical novel without the supernatural and mystical elements. Focusing on a homosexual relationship among members of a rigid religious group is daring, but the obsessive nature of the love left me conflicted.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )