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Loading... The World without Usby Mireille Juchau
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Chosen for the cover. I found it difficult getting through this book. It was an interesting premise, but the lack of quotation marks and the changes between timelines and past/present tense made it confusing to follow. There also seemed to be quite a few events that repeated themselves. The characters were also confusing, as there was no real differentiation between them, they all had the same voice and personality. I struggled to the end but I wanted more from this story. An rather sad story. The main character, Evangeline, has been brought up in a commune in Nth NSW (sounds a bit like Nimbin). She knows nothing of the outside world and is exploited by the man running the commune. After being forced to have a child so that this man could profit she escapes with Stef, a German migrant and bee-keeper. Their is a lot of mystery in this book and much of it is not satisfactorily resolved. However, I did enjoy the book and love the descriptions of the countryside and life on the farm. no reviews | add a review
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It has been six months since Tess Müller stopped speaking. Her silence is baffling to her parents, her teachers and her younger sister, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning home wet, muddy and dishevelled. Their father, struggling with his own losses, tends to his apiary and tries to understand why his bees are disappearing. But after he discovers a car wreck and human remains on their farm, old secrets emerge to threaten the fragile family. One day Tess's teacher Jim encounters Evangeline by the wild Repentance River. Jim is in flight from his own troubles in Sydney, and Evangeline, raised in a mountain commune and bearing the scars of the fire that destroyed it, is a puzzle he longs to solve.As the rainforest trees are felled and the lakes fill with run-off from the expanding mines, Tess watches the landscape of her family undergo shifts of its own. A storm is coming and the Müllers are in its path. Sometimes we must confront what has been lost so that we can know the solace of being found. The World Without Us is a beautifully told story of secrets and survival, family and community, loss and renewal. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.4Literature English English fiction Post-Elizabethan 1625-1702LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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How each of them handles his loss is unique, but each of them does it somewhat by cutting off the world as much a possible. Tess stops talking, Jim runs to another life in the small town where he crosses path with the Mueller family, Stefan concentrates all his energy onto the bees he keeps, and Evangeline shuts out her family and pursues a less intimate (or ultimately more intimate) relationship with a stranger.
It is not the plot of this story that moves it forward, although there is a lot of hinting at a mysterious occurrence at the commune that was burned and from which Evangeline escaped, there is a body that needs to be explained and there are relationships that predate Evangeline's marriage that still impact her present. It is rather the inward turnings of these people that keep you involved and aching to understand. It is pathos but without melodrama, tragedy tinged with hope.
Juchau writes in a disjointed style, revealing only tidbits of information as she proceeds and making the reader decipher the clues to these people as if they were jigsaw puzzles that needed to be assembled to be understood. In the beginning this feels foreign and difficult, but as it proceeds it begins to feel right. It begins to feel as if this is a reflection of how we really get to know about people and how people really being to know about themselves. Which of us thinks in straight lines? Who doesn't seek the answer in some bad places before they light upon the truth, sometimes on their own doorstep?
My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing, Mireille Jachau and Goodreads for an opportunity to read and review this marvelous work in return for an honest review. I recommend it highly and will most happily read other works by Mireille Jachau...a very impressive author indeed. ( )