full review can be found here:

https://nordie.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/book-review-the-colour-by-rose-tremaine/

full review can be found here:

https://nordie.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/book-review-the-colour-by-rose-tremaine/

Loved this novel set in the gold rush days in New Zealand South Island. Themes of strong women settlers and the men who came to seek their fortune and carve out a new life. ( )

Newly married couple Harriet and Joseph Blackstone travel from England to New Zealand in the 1860s to start a new life. They are accompanied by Joseph’s widowed mother. They build a cottage and attempt to farm. They are inexperienced so they make mistakes and suffer the consequences. The harsh weather adds to their woes. When Joseph finds “the colour” in the river on his plot of land, gold fever takes over and changes everything.

Their marriage is troubled from the start for reasons that will eventually be revealed: “She thought that perhaps what she longed to hear was that almost every life was arranged like this, around a void where love should have been and was not, and that her predicament was therefore an ordinary one.”

This book is right up my alley. It is a sweeping adventure, filled with evocative details of the landscapes, natural disasters, and a rugged life. The characters are deeply developed, and even the animals are given a personality. The storyline explores themes such as greed, hubris, unhappiness, and yearning for a better life. It ultimately portrays love as more a powerful force than riches.

This book is beautifully and atmospherically written. It conjures a sense of time and place and reminds me of the type of writing we find in novels of the 19th century. All the senses come into play in the creation of these scenes. Tremain brings these characters to life. We understand their deepest desires, anxieties, strengths, flaws, and what drives their actions, even acts that are not particularly pleasant.

We get a glimpse of life in this historic time – farming and ranching life, neighbors, indigenous people, Chinese immigrants, travel by ship and over land. It is an absorbing story. The ending is satisfying. I just loved it and am adding it to my favorites.

“Most of what Man does, moment to moment, is for his imagined future, for the coming time, in which he will be happier than in time present.”
( )

Rose Tremain's novel "The Colour" is a work of historical fiction about the gold rush in New Zealand in the 1860's. Joseph Blackstone marries a woman he barely knows named Harriet and drags her and her mother off to New Zealand to start a new farming life -- but the discovery of "the colour" on their property leads him in a very different direction.

I actually enjoyed Harriet's story a lot and the gold rush portions of the novel. There is a subplot involving a neighboring child named Edwin Orchard and Maori woman named Pare that I didn't feel was well integrated into the book. I didn't enjoy that portion of the book as much. ( )