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Summary
Summary
Entwining a tale of missing children with the story of a lonely little boy, Sonya Hartnett captures the tenderness and dread of childhood in a work of exceptional storytelling.
The year is 1977, and Adrian is nine. He lives with his gran and his uncle Rory. His best friend is Clinton Tull. Adrian loves to draw, and he wants a dog. He's afraid of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. But as closely as he watches his suburban world, there is much he cannot understand. He does not, for instance, know why three neighborhood children might set out to buy ice cream one summer's day and never be seen again. . . .
In this suburb that is no longer safe and innocent, in a broken family of self-absorbed souls, Sonya Hartnett sets the story of a lone little boy - unwanted, unloved, and intensely curious - a story as achingly beautiful as it is shattering. As her quiet tale ominously unfolds, we are reminded of how fragile are the threads that hold us secure - and how brave, how precious, is the heart of each child who soldiers on.
Author Notes
Sonya Hartnett was born on March 23, 1968 in Victoria. She is an Australian author of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. She was thirteen years old when she wrote her first novel and fifteen when it was published for the adult market in Australia, Trouble All the Way. For years she has written about one novel annually. According to the National Library of Australia, "The novel for which Hartnett has achieved the most critical (and controversial) acclaim was Sleeping Dogs" (1995). "A book involving incest between brother and sister and often critiqued as 'without hope', Sleeping Dogs generated enormous discussion within Australia. For her book Thursday's Child, she won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.
Her titles include: The Boy and the Toy, Come Down, Cat!, Sadie and Ratz and The Children of the King. She will be attending the Sydney Writers Festival 2015. She made the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award with her title Golden Boys. This title also made the 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlist.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hartnett (Thursday's Child) again captures the ineffable fragility of childhood in this keenly observed tale set in 1977 in her native Australia. Adrian has one school friend and many secret fears, including tidal waves, sea monsters, quicksand and being abandoned ("Everybody leaves me. I'm not allowed to be anywhere," he laments). Taken away from his (apparently) mentally ill mother, and unwanted by his father, nine-year-old Adrian lives with his grandmother and traumatized, agoraphobic uncle. The boy becomes transfixed by the story of three siblings in a nearby suburb who went out for ice cream and disappeared; he wonders why ordinary children like himself might have been "worth taking or wanting, a desirable thing." As the title indirectly suggests, the author maintains an omniscient, bird's-eye perspective, taking in not only Adrian's experiences but the feelings of his grandmother and uncle, some information about the new family next door (it includes three children and a desperately ill mother) and news of the missing children. The measured distance Hartnett puts between readers and Adrian allows her to introduce a tragic climax that neither manipulates nor (likely) devastates the audience. Sophisticated readers will appreciate the work's acuity and poetic integrity. Ages 14-up. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School, High School) Australian novelist Hartnett's latest offering opens with a chilling itinerary of three missing siblings' last known whereabouts, pieced together from the accounts of eyewitnesses who saw them walking to the ice cream store and who later wish they'd paid more attention. The tangible absence of the missing children hovers forlornly behind the main story about a passive nine-year-old boy named Adrian. Hartnett excels at letting her characters' secret pain color everything they see and touch, and Adrian fairly oozes unhappiness, no matter how much he intends to remain docile and unnoticed. With his mother unfit and his father unwilling to care for him, he lives with his grandmother and uncle, neither of whom, for their own separate reasons, are nurturing types. Adrian's strategy for existence is to do what he's told and hope everyone overlooks him, but others in the book express their wretchedness more overtly. For instance, a child in Adrian's class known as Horsegirl, who lives at the nearby children's home, achieves ignominy by neighing, snorting, galloping, and generally acting so crazy that everyone's too afraid to mock her. (One of the novel's most moving and disturbing scenes involves an ignorant substitute teacher's attempt to ""tame"" Horsegirl, to break her spirit.) When three mysterious children move in across the street from Adrian, it's natural to wonder whether it's ""them,"" the missing ones; but it turns out theirs is a different tragedy. Hartnett does not comfort her readers with a happy, or even a hopeful, ending. On the contrary, the final scene is as excruciating in its way as the beginning; but it still shines, like all of Hartnett's prose, with a harsh but beckoning light. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 7^-12. "Everybody leaves me. I'm not allowed to be anywhere." Forcibly removed from his depressed mother and rejected by his father, nine-year-old Adrian is sent to live with his exhausted, intolerant grandmother, Beattie--or "granmonster," as Adrian secretly calls her. When his only friend at school rejects him, Adrian becomes even more achingly alone. Then three children move next door (just as three children disappear from another neighborhood), and Adrian forms a tenuous friendship with the mysterious oldest girl, Nicole. Hartnett lets readers wonder for a while whether Nicole is actually one of the missing children, one of the many elements of the story--among them, Adrian's wild, orphaned schoolmate Horsegirl--that seems somewhat forced. Hartnett's prose is beautiful, filled with piercing, original imagery that, like David Almond's, explores the savage, animal instincts in humans, especially children. The climax is shocking, and the telling, unusually honest and haunting, explores the many ways that children can be lost--quickly and dramatically, or through small, failed gestures of imperfect love. --Gillian Engberg
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6-9-Rarely is a sentence turned so well, a setting so remarkably established, and a plot so evenly polished as in this book. Immediately, in the preface, readers are confronted with a spellbinding scenario. Three children head down the footpath from their home in Australia to the ice-cream shop, and they are never seen again. In a neighboring town, nine-year-old Adrian is fearful of much, talented, perceptive, curious, a virtual outcast in his school, and an unhappy resident in his grandmother's home. He notices the three children who move into a house across the road and wonders if they could possibly be the missing trio. Adrian subsequently meets the oldest girl, Nicole, in the park one afternoon as she cares for a dying bird. His suspicions of her identity are further aroused by her sly answers to his inquiries. A psychic reports that the missing children are located near water, and Nicole and Adrian take it upon themselves to find them. Returning to the pool and sensing they must be near, Nicole ventures onto the pool cover and falls through the center. Gathering his newly discovered courage, Adrian attempts to rescue her but plunges to his death, as well. Tightly composed and ripe with symbolism, this complex book will offer opportunities for rich discussion.-Daniel L. Darigan, West Chester University, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Birds see what we cannot. We cannot see around corners; from where the birds are looking, there are no corners. Three children, two girls and their brother, set off one day to buy ice-cream, along a route with many corners. At intervals they are noticed, briefly, but as soon as they turn a corner they are lost to view until they come into the range of another observer. The last one sees them reach their destination and after that they are never seen again. Their disappearance infects the neigh bourhood and beyond, via television coverage. A possible suspect, a thin man, becomes the focus of fear. If he did it, whatever he did, he may do it again. For nine-year-old Adrian, the Thin Man is just one more thing to add to his existing fears - of quicksands, shopping malls, of being cast out from the remnants of his family to St Joseph's, a home for damaged children; one of these children, severely disturbed, is in his class at school. He lives with his grandmother, herself the parent of three damaged adults including Adrian's mother, and unquestioningly accepts the life that fate has doled him. He is quiet, biddable, seeing no further than his near horizons, without any anticipation of growing up, being free, being different. He does not understand that he is nourished without being nurtured, cared for but not cherished. Then another family moves in across the street, two sisters and a brother. Adrian strikes up an edgy friendship in spite of their unencouraging father, their dying mother. Notwithstanding their preoccupations, the fearful adults keep a close watch on their fearful children, but they cannot see around corners. The writing is spare, the images crystalline. "Monday waits like an axe": a dead bird's feet "are like mummified spiders". Nothing is extraneous. The apparently irrelevant account of a dead sea monster trawled up by fishermen at the beginning turns out to have a terrible prescience not made manifest until the end. Will the reader remember it, go back and look at it again? Which raises the question, who is supposed to be reading it? It is an analytical dissection of childhood but it is addressed to those far enough removed from childhood to be analytical themselves. Teen-agers are not children but they are closer to their child selves than to anything they will become. About three- quarters of the way through there is a curious passage of authorial intervention, almost didactic in tone: "A child often lacks the experience to see immediately what he's lost . . . school is a terrible place for a rejected child . . . children inhabit an animalistic world, and accept with grace its harsh rules." Do they? We don't write about adults like this - as though they were a separate species whose habitat and lifecycle had been catalogued by zoologists. It is this small voice, addressing fellow grown-ups over the heads of the little ones, cool, elevated, academic, that seems to distance itself from a younger reader. We hear a great deal about crossover books, fiction that although meant for children or teenagers is patronised by an adult clientele. This novel, remarkable though it is, seems to sit uneasily somewhere between the two. Walker, its publisher, specialises in children's books, but is aiming it at adults, as Hartnett's Australian publisher did. Let's hope that real readers, whatever their age, manage to find it. Jan Mark's Heathrow Nights is published by Hodder. To order What the Birds See for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-hartnett.1 For nine-year-old Adrian, the Thin Man is just one more thing to add to his existing fears - of quicksands, shopping malls, of being cast out from the remnants of his family to St Joseph's, a home for damaged children; one of these children, severely disturbed, is in his class at school. He lives with his grandmother, herself the parent of three damaged adults including Adrian's mother, and unquestioningly accepts the life that fate has doled him. He is quiet, biddable, seeing no further than his near horizons, without any anticipation of growing up, being free, being different. He does not understand that he is nourished without being nurtured, cared for but not cherished. Then another family moves in across the street, two sisters and a brother. Adrian strikes up an edgy friendship in spite of their unencouraging father, their dying mother. Notwithstanding their preoccupations, the fearful adults keep a close watch on their fearful children, but they cannot see around corners. - Jan Mark.
Kirkus Review
A bleakly haunting novel focuses its lens on a child struggling to survive in a family of emotional cripples. The tale opens with the disappearance of three siblings on their way to the ice cream shop, but this serves only to set up and frame the story of nine-year-old Adrian, as lost in his family as the three abducted children are in the world. His parents being unwilling and unable to care for him, he lives with his grandmother, a widow who is burdened with the certainty that she hasn't the energy or the desire to raise a boy, and his uncle, a once-vigorous man who has chosen to live in self-imposed exile from the world after causing the death of a friend in an automobile accident. Adrian goes joylessly from home to school, where he clings desperately to the society of the only boy who will acknowledge him and where he watches with horror the antics of the mad Horsegirl, a student from a nearby home for troubled children; he knows that he is only a hairsbreadth away from descending to her status in the schoolyard. When a peculiar family moves in across the street, he finds himself drawn to them, desperate for child society; the older girl is obsessed with the lost children, and Adrian finds himself sucked--disastrously--into her search for them. Hartnett (Thursday's Child, 2002, etc.) has a genius for voice, her third-person narrative sliding effortlessly from Adrian's point-of-view to his grandmother's and back, always tightly filtering the story through the experiences and perceptions of her focus. The precision of language and unsentimental look into children's capacity for cruelty and despair recall Cormier, as does the weaving in and out of the mystery of the lost children as counterpoint. There is no great cataclysmic ending, no blinding revelation here, however--just a series of small, child-sized cataclysms, ignored by those who should love Adrian and drowned out by media ravings over the lost children. Exquisite, wrenching, unforgettable. (Fiction. 12+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
