A review by beccagomezfarrell
Riverland by Fran Wilde

A hard read, emotionally, from a junior higher's perspective about having to keep her younger sister safe from the abuse, emotional and physical, of their parents. It's a fantasy in that the girls enter a dreamworld where all the balls they must keep up in the air to maintain a semblance of normalcy in reality are causing cracks and horrors in the river land dreamland that they must fix. But what I thought Wilde did best with this one is capture the fraught tension, the guilt, and the intense pressure that children put on themselves while living through trauma--the scenes in reality are the ones that held me captive. Recommended if you're in the right head space for that.