Review by Booklist Review
Donna has been missing for 19 years, but her mother, Mary, won't let anyone say she's dead. Instead, Mary keeps her tarot cards ready for consultations, refusing to believe her daughter, last seen at 16, is buried in a shallow bush grave. Meanwhile, another loss looms over her Aboriginal Australian family, as Mary's father-in-law lies near death in a hospital bed. That's what brings her other daughter, Kerry, roaring in on a Harley, fresh from a breakup with her girlfriend, who's been locked up for armed robbery. It's not long before Kerry is chasing a thieving mayor as her older brother leads the charge against a jail slated to be built on land sacred to their family. As they fight against the local establishment, and against a conniving real-estate agent in league with the mayor, all while Kerry works to get a career break in Sydney, a hard truth threatens to rip the family apart. In this vividly voiced novel, the ghosts of the past are never far away.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A daughter gets caught in her Aboriginal Australian family's complicated legacy in Indigenous Australian writer Lucashenko's darkly funny U.S. debut. With 33-year-old Kerry Salter's girlfriend in jail after a bipolar episode culminating in armed robbery, Kerry rides her motorcycle from Sydney to her small hometown of Durrongo, New South Wales, to visit her terminally ill grandfather. During a trip to a favorite swimming spot on her family's ancestral land, Kerry learns crooked local official Jim Buckley plans to sell the land, which is owned by the state, to build a prison. Her older brother, washed-up soccer star Ken, launches a crusade to fight the land sale to soothe his rage over his younger brother, whom they call Black Superman, for getting ahead with a fancy government job in Sydney. An unexpected sexual relationship with a white man Kerry went to school with leads her to discover that her sister, Donna, who was presumed dead after going missing nearly 20 years ago, is in fact alive, passing for white, and working with Buckley. Kerry cajoles Donna into attending their mother's birthday party, where Donna explodes with a secret that fractures the family just as their feud with Buckley reaches a fever pitch. With strong voices and kinetic prose, Lucashenko's engrossing narrative speaks to the ongoing traumas of indigenous life in Australia. This deserves to make a splash. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Guilty of "too much lip," headstrong Kerry Salter is veering close to prison but still distancing herself from her Bundjalung homeland in Australia--until her father falls ill. She heads home on a stolen Harley, meaning to stay a day, but soon she enters the fight against building a prison on her family's spiritual homeland. Plus, a handsome white man steps into the picture. A Miles Franklin Award winner from Aboriginal writer Lukashenko, of Goorie and European heritage; with a 40,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An award-winning Australian author explores family dysfunction and the legacy of colonial oppression in her American debut. When Kerry Salter returns to her hometown in New South Wales, the first conversation she has is with a trio of crows. The fact that they critique her command of the Bundjalung language is exasperating. The fact that, in Durrongo, even the birds are up in her business is a grating reminder of why she left in the first place. But her ex-girlfriend is in prison for robbery, and Kerry is hoping to avoid the same fate. Also, her grandfather is dying, so…home it is--at least for a bit. Lucashenko is an Indigenous Australian author, and her writing is suffused with language that will be unfamiliar to most American readers, which makes settling into the narrative a bit of a challenge. This is not a criticism. Indeed, while Lucashenko was almost certainly not writing with the aim of alienating an audience half a world away, there's something fitting in making interlopers feel a bit disoriented as they enter a world of generational trauma that is largely the result of colonialism. Readers willing to accept that they are outsiders in Durrongo will have the chance to explore a world that few of us know--and a landscape that is sacred to the people who live within it. Kerry left home to escape a family plagued by addiction and violence, but the place itself will always be her spiritual home. A developer's plan to transform the resting place of her ancestors recapitulates the long history of settler-colonials taking and transforming the land on which Indigenous people live. It also gives shape to this novel's plot as it gives Kerry a mission and her whole family a chance at a future that contains the best parts of the past. Original, honest, and surprisingly funny. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
