Reader Review by Skip Schmidt
Jennie Linnane's delightful coming-of-age novel, Ironbark Hill, is a fine addition to the YA genre. Set in the Australian outback in the immediate postwar era, Ironbark Hill follows the life of Natalie Chapman, the dutiful, fiercely proud teenage protagonist whose struggle to both rise above and come to terms with her hardscrabble life lies at the heart of this novel. Protected by her loving mother, Irma, Natalie must deal with a tyrannical stepfather, Alex Townsend, while helping to care for her beloved brother, Joey, and two sisters, Shirley and Robyn. Linnane does a fine job of depicting the day to day, chore-filled life of her protagonist: "Whoever first proclaimed that wealth is an encumbrance to man had never scraped knuckles on a worn concrete wash-trough!"
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Told in flashback from the vantage point of her adulthood, the novel takes place against the backdrop of Natalie's 16th birthday.
The story is propelled by the conflict between Natalie and her abusive, drunken stepfather. Natalie's refusal to allow Alex to sell her beloved heifer acts as the catalyst for the violence that inexorably follows. We soon learn that Natalie's and Joey's biological father, Johnny Chapman, was a half-aboriginal laborer and Irma's first husband, killed in an accident years earlier. Linnane uses the ghost of Johnny to deftly explore racial themes in Australia in the immediate postwar era, with Alex giving crude voice to the darkest aspects
thereof. But such themes are subtextual here, almost a tangent to the main thread of the book. As a further example of the coming-of-age theme, we discover that Natalie is having an affaire de coeur with her employer, Mr. Glover, even as she is taken under the wing of his wife, Rosemary, who tutors Natalie in the art of landscape painting. Linnane chooses to introduce us to Rosemary long before we learn of Natalie's affair with Rosemary's husband, thereby generating a sense of Natalie's inner conflict over the affair for the reader. Yet it is the affair and its continuation that drive the momentum of the book, helping to propel the story to its inexorable and, for one character, at least, fatal climax. Linnane's style, while perhaps a bit flowery for some readers, is nevertheless engaging and highly readable. Her prose is liberally sprinkled with Australian regionalisms which may be unfamiliar to the non-Aussie, but in most cases their meanings can be easily gleaned contextually. Moreover, there were no detectable errors or typos in the e-book version reviewed here. Her characterizations are spot-on, however, and this reviewer gives this book 4 out of 4 stars for the authentic characters Linnane depicts in Ironbark Hill. From the Outback-rich lingo of Alex Townsend or Barney, the Glover's avuncular gardener, to the Irish patois of Mrs. O'Rourke, to the patrician, upper-crust tone of Mr. Glover, Linnane does a fine job of capturing the essence of each character in the book. It's this authenticity of voice which informs Linnane's prose throughout Ironbark Hill that gives the book it's verve and dash. For a sweetly engrossing, first-person POV of life in the Australian outback in the early 1950's, one need look no further than Jennie Linnane's Ironbark Hill.
The novel, “Shiloh” by Shelby Foote is a fictional recreation of the bloody battle. The story begins with the soldiers of the Confederate Army heading towards Pittsburg Landing. The men are marching in terrible conditions. It is pouring down rain and they are dragging their tired legs through the mud. The troops come to a halt so the commanders can talk to General Johnston. General Johnston says the only way they might have a chance is if they plan a surprise attack. As the sergeants hand the men their guns, they are told to check the powder in case it got wet in the rain. A group of soldiers test their guns out on a deer running close by. At the same time the shots were fired, the sun came out and the soldiers started to scream and cheer. These noises combined were more than enough to alert the Union soldiers of the Confederates advance. Palmer remembers what his life was like before going to war. He attended the Louisiana State Military Academy when the Confederacy seceded from the Union. One of his professors predicted the south did not have a chance of winning the war. That night Palmer dreams of holding Sherman at gunpoint making him admit that he was wrong. Prior to the battle, the commanders create a battle plan. Palmer is assigned a part in this process. When the plan fails, Palmer learns that planning a battle is more difficult than it seems because the commanders on the ground face challenges that do not exist on paper.
The poem I have chosen for the assignment is Maple Valley Library, 1967 by Rita Dove. After reading the poem I concluded that the speaker is Dove when she was fifteen years old sharing Dove’s perspective of being in the library and checking out books. Now looking at the poem, it has five or six wide stanzas and one or two skinny stanza each having a range of long to short lines except for the last two stanzas being short. The poem is long reaching the two pages mark with a rugged look. Then looking at the rhyming there appears to be none in the poem that I can
I am reading Rough Country by John Sandford and I am on page 396. This book is about Virgil Flowers a detective working a murder case in northern Minnesota . He has narrowed down his suspect list to two people and is starting to realize why the killer did what he did and how he did it. Virgil discovered that some people have been withholding information from him and it helps clear up who his number one suspect should be. In this paper I will be questioning and connecting.
In the book “The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents” by Jo Ann E. Argersinger. In a short summary this book talks about the tragic factory fire that took lives of 146 workers in New York City, March 25, 1911. The tragedy happened during the great uprising of a women revolution, of many young females going to work to support their families. During this period many women wanted to be treated and work like how men worked. Having equal rights at jobs that were a risk to them, nothing stopped the uprising, until the fire became a change. Both sympathy and rage among all sectors of the American public got up to fight for a change. Argersinger examines in the context, trajectory, and impact of this Progressive Era event. During the Progressive Era, many big changes were being
Historians have viewed the idea of white dominance as a key element to the legacy of slavery. Losing this dominance with the concept of emancipation was mind boggling. However, the admission of California into the Union required it to enter as a free state according to the Compromise of 1850. Losing white dominance in the newly acquired regions in the West frightened Southern slave holders. Leading to the long trek of individuals from both the North and the South to ensure their version of destiny in the West.
Storming Heaven is Denise Giardina’s second and award winning novel, published in 1987. The historical novel is a fiction-based recount of the bitter labor conflict that took place in southern West Virginia during the early 1920s, otherwise known as the West Virginia Coal Wars. The author tells the story of the real conflict faced by miners through the eyes of four main characters, each from different walks of life, with their own different point of view. The story told about the real life hardship faced by coal miners and the ensuing conflict is a subject narrowly covered by The American Journey. Although the story that is told through the main characters is fictionalized, it provides a historically accurate portrayal of the events that unfolded during the early 1920s. The book does a great job of covering not only how the coal miners cohesively withstood the hardship placed before them by the invasive coal companies, but also the tactics used by the coal companies to ensure their business interests took precedence over more humane living and working conditions.
involved troubling situations. Look at how she grew up. The book starts off during a time of Jim
Laura Wexler’s Fire In a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, is an spectacular book that depicts what, many refer to as the last mass lynching. The last mass lynching took place on July 25, 1946, located in Walton County, Georgia. On that day four black sharecroppers (Roger Malcom, Dorothy Malcom, George Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey) are brutally murdered by a group of white people. This book presents an epidemic, which has plagued this nation since it was established. Being African American, I know all too well the accounts presented in this book. One of the things I liked most about Fire in A Canebrake was that Wexler had different interpretations of the same events. One from a black point of view and the other from a white point of view. Unfortunately both led to no justice being served. Laura Wexler was
The Europeans changed the land of the home of the Indians, which they renamed New England. In Changes in the Land, Cronon explains all the different aspects in how the Europeans changed the land. Changing by the culture and organization of the Indians lives, the land itself, including the region’s plants and animals. Cronon states, “The shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes well known to historians in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations less well known to historians in the region’s plant and animal communities,” (Cronon, xv). New England went through human development, environmental and ecological change from the Europeans.
After reading the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, and watching an interview from Time Magazine on Paul Farmer, viewers will recognize common themes that Paul Farmer conveys throughout the book and interview. The themes embraced throughout are bringing health care to impoverished nations, spreading awareness of new diseases, and not giving up on the nations or patients.
Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow follows the life of Dorinda Oakley, a poor girl living in a desolate town in Virginia. At the beginning of Barren Ground, twenty-year old Dorinda Oakley lives with her family in the town of Broomsedge. She dreams of escaping her farm house for a life in New York when she meets the son of the village doctor, Jason Greylock, and almost instantly, she develops feelings for him. He becomes the “object of her passion” (Bunch). But when she loses him, her life is forever changed. In Ellen Glasgow’s novel Barren Ground, the main character Dorinda Oakley leaves her life of poverty in order to pursue her dream of happiness and in her journey experiences love, loss, and despair.
“The only real nation is humanity” (Farmer 123). This quote represents a huge message that is received in, Tracy Kidder’s, Mountains Beyond Mountains. This book argues that universal healthcare is a right and not a privilege. Kidder’s book also shows the audience that every individual, no matter what the circumstances, is entitled to receive quality health care. In the book Kidder represents, Paul Farmer, a man who spends his entire life determined to improve the health care of impoverished areas around the world, namely Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world. By doing this the audience learns of the horrible circumstances, and the lack of quality health care that nations like Haiti live with everyday, why every person has the right to healthcare no matter what, and how cost effectiveness should not determine whether or not these people get to live or die. Two texts that also argue this idea are Monte Leach’s “Ensuring Health Care as a Global Human Right,” and Darshak Sanghavi’s “Is it Cost Effective to Treat the World’s Poor.” Leach’s article is an interview with Benjamin Crème that illustrates why food, shelter, education, and healthcare are human rights that have to be available to everyone. He shares many of the same views on health care as Farmer, and the two also share similar solutions to this ongoing problem. Leach also talks about the rapidly growing aids epidemic, and how it must be stopped. Like farmer, he also argues that it is easier to prevent these diseases then to cure them. Furthermore, Sanghavi’s article represents many of the questions that people would ask about cost effectiveness. Yet similar to Farmer’s views, Sanghavi argues that letting the poor d...
Holly is given a journal in class one day, and when she is bored in the laundry room, she starts to write. When the abuse becomes too much to handle, she runs away, and succeeds. Holly has to learn to live off of nothing. She begins stealing food and necessities and does everything she can to stay away from social services. The brutality of this book makes it hard to read, but also intriguing. I couldn’t put it down.
First, Johnny and Dally both die tragically after making unwise decisions in their lives. Johnny died while rescuing children from a burning church and in the eyes of the rescued children’s parents was a hero. But reluctantly this was not the case. In fact, Johnny had just killed a rival member from the Soc’s in self-defense. After which Johnny tells Ponyboy “‘I killed him,’ he said slowly. ‘I killed that boy.’ As Bob, the handsome Soc was lying there in the moonlight a dark pool growing
Jack, thinking he might have been that very baby, retrieves the bag he was found in as an infant in which Ms. Prism identifies by some distinguishing marks to have been her own. Jack realized the woman that had been teaching his niece was his mother. But then Lady Bracknell explained that she was not, but Lady Bracknell’s poor sister Mrs. Moncrieff was. The irony continues to explain how Jack and Algernon were biological brothers. They were pretending to be earlier to play out their game of Bunburyism.