Scan barcode
A review by jugglingpup
Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman
3.0
To see more reviews check out MI Book Reviews.
I came across this book on the website of one of the reading challenges I am doing this year. It is a wonderful challenge, I recommend it!
This book was one they recommended and it sounded like a book that would be perfect for me. I love dystopians. I remember taking Australian Studies in college and how awful my professor was (racist and homophobic). So I figured I would have some knowledge of what was going to happen since it sounded very much like what I remember of the history of Australia. This is all relevant, I swear.
The last line of the description says “This is not the Australia of our history”. On the back of the book it says “Do you recognize this story? Look again”. This is all well and good, but the story is literally a historical fiction for the first half of the book. The big twist makes is sci-fi, but it weakened the story for me. There was no need for the sci-fi twist. The atrocities were more painful and raw, more inhumane when humans were doing it. The parallels between history and this book were so on point that I would have preferred to just have this book be a historical fiction. It would have packed more of a punch that way. The way that the twist was written felt forced and it really made the story lack details for the first hundred pages. You can’t describe the settlers or what is really happening without giving it away, but not describing them was like having a flashing sign that this was the sci-fi twist.
The writing felt forced, flat, and unemotional. The characters didn’t really have any depth or emotions. Instead they were just surviving. That could have been amazing, but combined with the really weak twist it just dragged the book down further. I wanted to love this book and for the first hundred pages, I did. After that it just went further and further downhill. I was falling asleep in the book by the end.
Don’t get me wrong, this book has many beautiful passages and as a historical fiction would have been amazingly captivating. There was so much here that was great. There are just so many things that were good little details sprinkled in the story. There was the story about how the kangaroo saved one of the character’s lives. That was just a nice little detail that gave me hope that there would be more depth. Instead I was just left going “I don’t get it”. This story was powerful, until the twist.
So my recommendation is to read the first hundred pages. The first hundred pages were five stars. I loved the first hundred pages.
I came across this book on the website of one of the reading challenges I am doing this year. It is a wonderful challenge, I recommend it!
This book was one they recommended and it sounded like a book that would be perfect for me. I love dystopians. I remember taking Australian Studies in college and how awful my professor was (racist and homophobic). So I figured I would have some knowledge of what was going to happen since it sounded very much like what I remember of the history of Australia. This is all relevant, I swear.
The last line of the description says “This is not the Australia of our history”. On the back of the book it says “Do you recognize this story? Look again”. This is all well and good, but the story is literally a historical fiction for the first half of the book. The big twist makes is sci-fi, but it weakened the story for me. There was no need for the sci-fi twist. The atrocities were more painful and raw, more inhumane when humans were doing it. The parallels between history and this book were so on point that I would have preferred to just have this book be a historical fiction. It would have packed more of a punch that way. The way that the twist was written felt forced and it really made the story lack details for the first hundred pages. You can’t describe the settlers or what is really happening without giving it away, but not describing them was like having a flashing sign that this was the sci-fi twist.
The writing felt forced, flat, and unemotional. The characters didn’t really have any depth or emotions. Instead they were just surviving. That could have been amazing, but combined with the really weak twist it just dragged the book down further. I wanted to love this book and for the first hundred pages, I did. After that it just went further and further downhill. I was falling asleep in the book by the end.
Don’t get me wrong, this book has many beautiful passages and as a historical fiction would have been amazingly captivating. There was so much here that was great. There are just so many things that were good little details sprinkled in the story. There was the story about how the kangaroo saved one of the character’s lives. That was just a nice little detail that gave me hope that there would be more depth. Instead I was just left going “I don’t get it”. This story was powerful, until the twist.
So my recommendation is to read the first hundred pages. The first hundred pages were five stars. I loved the first hundred pages.