Thursday's Child

Hartnett, Sonya

ISBN 10: 1740946308 ISBN 13: 9781740946308

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1740946308
• ISBN 13: 9781740946308
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 1