Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Picnic at Hanging Rock

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Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

6 reviews

rosemaryandrue's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

On St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, three Australian schoolgirls and their teacher vanish while on a school outing at Hanging Rock. Though they have disappeared from view like a rock dropped into water, the consequences of what happened will ripple outward until they touch the stories of even those who had been on the periphery of their lives.

I’ve had my eye on the book for a few months now, so when I opened my Cannonball Book Exchange package from ElCiccio to find she’d send me a copy, I was super excited. And quite without meaning to I picked the perfect time to read it.

I took my copy on holiday to Fort Lauderdale, where I started reading it on a blustery afternoon at the beach and finished it after a leisurely few hours strolling around the Bonnet House Museum, an idyllic time capsule of a house that was built and occupied by the same family for the past hundred years, with the last resident turning it over to the state of Florida as a museum when she passed away at the age of 109. It was an apt place for Picnic at Hanging Rock, a book which among other things deals with the peculiarities of time.

This is a short but deliciously written book, and I savored every chapter I read. Though the central mystery of the disappearances is not solved, it doesn’t really matter because the story is more about the people who are left behind. Lindsay plays with reality and time with gleeful abandon – I understand now why so many doubts have swirled around about if the story was based in fact or not. I came away from the end of the book with sense of sadness and dread, but fascination too at the tricks that ‘destiny’ can play. Perhaps I have discovered a new favorite book.

I did, of course, read the famous Chapter Eighteen, which was cut off the original manuscript before publication. It contains the solution to the fate of the girls (well, as much as the reader can know, anyway), and the parting imagery I was left with thoroughly creeped me out. It’s a mark of how perfect Picnic at Hanging Rock is that I concluded I hadn’t really missed its absence.

Content Warnings

tacochelle's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

3 girls and a teacher from an Australian private academy disappear after climbing up to the titular Hanging Rock during their school picnic. No bodies are ever found, and the event haunts everyone remotely connected to it, some more tragically than others. There's a hint of something supernatural about the whole thing, but it's never confirmed. While the truth of the mystery was published decades later, I don't thinks it's needed. It'd less about the mystery and more about how their absence affects their world. A little slow, but really interesting, and weird enough to be right up my alley.

Content Warnings