This first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography takes her from infancy to setting out to teacher training college.
Born in 1924 in New Zealand, the author came from a relatively poor railway family; yet one which valued study and literature, with a mother who wrote poems, and a father who generally encouraged his children's efforts.
And so the author pursued her high school career, her reading, and early attempts at getting her poems published in children's magazines. And yet while she and her sisters embark on stories and verse, their home life is traumatic at times with the death of one sister and the poorly understood epilepsy of her brother.
I thought Janet Frame's portrayal of childhood was very evocative as she describes the excitement of the adolescent discovering the possibilities of the world around them. ( )

Janet Frame had written at least ten novels and a series of poetry over the course of her career before it seemed the natural next step to tell her autobiography. Her life story gave perspective to the fiction she had been writing for so many years. Why else does one assume his or her life story would be interesting to someone else, a complete stranger, if only to explain their actions or, in Frame's case, her craft? To the Is-Land starts when Frame is a very young child in Dunedin, New Zealand. She recounts the trials and tribulations of growing up poor and longing to fit in. She found solace in writing and at the the end of To the Is-Land a poet starts to emerge. ( )

The author's life as a young child, daughter of a poor railway man, up to the time she leaves home to enter university. ( )

This is the first volume in Janet Frame's autobiography. In language startling for its freshness and clarity, she tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to write poetry. Amongst superb evocations of New Zealand landscape and the sharp recall of childhood perceptions, we learn of the tragic death by drowning of her sister Myrtle, her brother's epilepsy - and begin to feel the dark undercurrents that were to suck her under in the years before she found herself as a writer.

Schwartz, Sara