A Loving, Faithful Animal

Gorgeous writing, utterly heartbreaking. The sentences gallop. They left me breathless. They left me so sad. There is a continuous sadness to the story, actually, almost unbearable, where each page is full of the pity of humanity. The story combines the very harsh with the very tender, the two of them balanced together exquisitely, and the two of them also in conflict with one another. Harsh and tender tough it out, sometimes in the same sentence.

The author never allows the sadness of events, the disappointments of her characters' lives, to slide into the cynical. She loves her characters deeply, and because of her love for them, their small tragic lives are imbued with dignity, with majesty.

This has all the makings of misery porn but the writing is so evocative and the characters so compelling, it transcends the genre. A beautifully told story of a hardscrabble family in Australia - domestic violence, poverty, PTSD told in six chapters, two by the youngest daughter and the other four by different family members.

A gorgeous gorgeous novel.

Brooding and lovely, every phrase a little act of perfection.