Thursday's Child - Hardcover

Hartnett, Sonya

3.79

1,375 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0763616206 ISBN 13: 9780763616205

Publisher: Candlewick, 2002

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A stunningly original voice in young adult fiction

Harper Flute believes that her younger brother Tin, with his uncanny ability to dig, was born to burrow. While their family struggles to survive in a desolate landscape during the Great Depression, the silent and elusive little Tin - "born on a Thursday and so fated to his wanderings" - begins to escape underground, tunneling beneath their tiny shanty. As time passes and fate deals the family an especially cruel hand, Harper’s parents withdraw emotionally, and her siblings bravely try to fill the void, while Tin becomes a wild thing, leaving them further and further behind.

With exquisite prose, richly drawn characters, and a touch of magical realism, Sonya Hartnett tells a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story through the clear eyes of an observant child. It’s a loving and unsentimental portrait of family loyalty in the face of poverty and eartbreak, entwined with a surreal vision of the enigmatic Tin - disappearing into a mysterious labyrinth that reaches unimaginably far, yet remains hauntingly near.

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Review:

Australian author Sonya Hartnett's Thursday's Child is a mysteriously hypnotic literary novel reminiscent of David Almond's dark and dreamy books. The Flute family of seven--including the lively, likeable 7-year-old girl narrator Harper--lives in an abandoned prospector's shack in rural Australia during the Great Depression on land that is "particularly exhausted or maybe simply sullen." With the trials of being undernourished, inadequately clothed, and without real prospects (not to mention a relentlessly crying new baby, a mean midwife, and two parents who seem incapable of improving the situation), there's plenty of reason for the Flute children to want to escape.

Younger brother Tin escapes his family--and his very humanity--into the earth. He is Thursday's child, "and so fated to his wanderings," which happen to be in an elaborate burrow system under the family's house from which he eventually doesn't return: "He was born to the task like a hare or one of those blind hairless moles that comes into the world itching to get its claws into the safety of the ground." The family's problems transcend the oddity of Tin's seemingly impossible existence, and so he is left, pale and wild, to his underground world.

Harper takes it all in, recounting stories of her family's heartbreak in colorful first-person narrative--whether it's about her Da's drinking and dreams, a baby tumbling into a well, or the horrors that befall her older sister at the hands of the sinister neighbor. Harper's cheerful-as-possible, child's-eye perspective and her slow demystification of the world around her form the heart of the story. Hartnett is a masterful writer and storyteller; this is a suspenseful, curiously optimistic, altogether riveting novel you'll want to read more than once. (Ages 15 and older) --Karin Snelson

About the Author:

Sonya Hartnett is the author of several acclaimed novels - the first written when she was just thirteen - and the recipient of many prestigious awards in her native Australia. She says Tin and his tunneling had their origin in ants: "I was living at the time in two rooms, just going back and forth, back and forth as I watched an entire summer of ants excavating under my house. One day it occurred to me that they probably had a huge palace under there. And that’s when I started to think about ways of taking your existence into your own hands - of how, if the space around you was not big enough, you might just dig out some more." This is Sonya Hartnett’s first book with Candlewick Press.

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