Welcome to Litsy!

#CoverLove Brown
@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @Eggs

A shot of a free lecture I attended at the Sydney Writer‘s Festival on Friday by the tagged author. #whereisallissa hint I am wearing a pink coat. I headed off to op shop after this. That morning I‘d been to fascinating lectures on 🎣(so I could impress my nephew & dad with my knowledge), turning plays into books & how Australian author Kate Forsyth uses myths to create her novels. I learn so much at these festivals and love using my brain again.

despite having read quite a bit about residential schools, there were still a couple of surprising things (not good surprising). Of course, when he finished school, he had issues (the alcoholism), but it was good to see how he got himself better and is doing good to help others, as well. I thought this was really good.

There were a few aspects of the way this was written, terminology used by the characters that seemed odd for the time and the switching between perspectives, that sometimes distracted me from the experience of the story. However, the story itself of a woman raising her children on her own in the Australian bush and meeting an aboriginal man on the run was powerful. I was completely caught up in their stories and how those stories came together.

Just an amazing book. A story of love amid a sea of hate driven by small minded people. How hate of minorities continues to this day is a tragedy of the human race.

“If power is the ability of others to make you inhabit their story of you, this power can only be contained by the rigidity of ignorance and the inability to question and to learn.”

Important read.

What an amazing book. I haven‘t been as angry, ashamed, or cried as much reading a book as I have for a long time. A story of the cruelty and stupidity of society, both in the past and to this day, besides the strength and enduring love still given by those marginalized by it.

#52bookclub23 #setinaustralia #naturalitsy @AllDebooks

In Dark Emu we learn that pre colonial Australia was not populated by unsophisticated nomadic hunter gatherers, but by people who had established agriculture, lived in houses and villages, curated the landscape. Major crops included yams and grains. A people who lived for ~65,000 years with an attachment and respect for land and who did not rely on violence as an integral part of their society. We could all learn so much from First Nations people.

I maybe made a mistake in listening to the audio. Maria herself read it, but she has a very monotone voice. I thought that I was still able to focus in the first half or so of the book, but I did miss things as the book continued, and I suspect I missed more earlier in the book than I originally thought