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A review by butterontoomuchbread
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
4.0
This is not a happy story. If you want something happy and fluffy, with a tidy resolution and no heartache, this is not the book for you.
First: Technical and stylistic feedback.
If I had to write just aone two sentence review (I tried), it would be this: This is a story that stays with you days, maybe months, after you put it down. It's a story about a girl who is way too young for the life she's led, who suffers from night terrors, who's tried compartmentalizing her past and the pieces are beginning to bleed together.
I enjoyed this author's style, which was both disorientating and fascinating all at once. The best analogy I have for the treatment of the book's chronology is that it is a lot like Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." There are three, maybe four (unless I missed something as I flew through the book) different points in time which are being addressed in this work, and at first it is very jarring to be shifted between them.
The Aussie vocabulary was also a bit tricky for me, at first, and the author also uses the vocabulary of a shepherd very naturally and with little explanation other than context clues.
But the style lends itself very well to the telling of this story, and because of the way the story is told it becomes a lot easier to understand the trauma and heartache that the narrator is very cleverly avoiding.
Second: Plot.
The only reason I didn't give this one five stars is because the very end of the book didn't feel like a resolution. The catharsis I expected felt only half-present, at first (the more I reflect on the story, the more it feels like perhaps this is perfectly appropriate, and that stories like this aren't about catharsis, but are instead about being honest about yourself and the catharsis is what comes after you put the book down).
I found it interesting how each segment of Jake's life was more or less defined by her relationships to the men around her: Otto; Don and Lloyd; Greg and Clare; Denver and her father. None of the women can really be said to be on her side. Those two facets together could make this an excellent choice for a book club wanting to start a discussion about the feminist movement, and about young women trapped as sex workers, but that's definitely not everything that this book is about.
First: Technical and stylistic feedback.
If I had to write just a
I enjoyed this author's style, which was both disorientating and fascinating all at once. The best analogy I have for the treatment of the book's chronology is that it is a lot like Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." There are three, maybe four (unless I missed something as I flew through the book) different points in time which are being addressed in this work, and at first it is very jarring to be shifted between them.
The Aussie vocabulary was also a bit tricky for me, at first, and the author also uses the vocabulary of a shepherd very naturally and with little explanation other than context clues.
But the style lends itself very well to the telling of this story, and because of the way the story is told it becomes a lot easier to understand the trauma and heartache that the narrator is very cleverly avoiding.
Second: Plot.
The only reason I didn't give this one five stars is because the very end of the book didn't feel like a resolution. The catharsis I expected felt only half-present, at first (the more I reflect on the story, the more it feels like perhaps this is perfectly appropriate, and that stories like this aren't about catharsis, but are instead about being honest about yourself and the catharsis is what comes after you put the book down).
I found it interesting how each segment of Jake's life was more or less defined by her relationships to the men around her: Otto; Don and Lloyd; Greg and Clare; Denver and her father. None of the women can really be said to be on her side. Those two facets together could make this an excellent choice for a book club wanting to start a discussion about the feminist movement, and about young women trapped as sex workers, but that's definitely not everything that this book is about.