A Room Made of Leaves

Product Information

Elizabeth, also unsurprisingly, seems to have been far more involved in successful sheep breeding than has been acknowledged in the traditional histories. Forced to travel with him to New South Wales, she arrives to find Sydney Town a brutal, dusty, hungry. In this book, the story is in 5 parts split into very short sections, like mini chapters and is a quick and easy read. The early years in Sydney, the lives of settlers, those there by choice and those not, and their relationships with the First Nation peoples, the living conditions, and the work of the astronomer and botanist, William Dawes, have already been covered in The Secret River and particularly in The Lieutenant.

It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and they way they can erase the truth. At the same time, she sees herself as more of a thief than her convict servant who was transported for stealing.This novel changes the way you think about the earliest days of the colonial experience in Australia: about the role of women, the fickleness of the official narrative, the power of conversation, and the possibility of love. Autorė rašo nepaprastai gražiai, melodingai ir įtraukiančiai, tačiau negaliu pasakyti, kad išjaučiau daugiau ką, nei tik pagrindinę veikėją – aišku, ji esminė, bet visgi – ne vienintelė, o ir autorė visai nesusikoncentruoja į tuos jos gyvenimo aspektus, kurie darė ją išskirtinę – verslininkės, fermerės, mokslininkės talentus. I felt as though I was living through her, I had traveled back in time to this unknown land and all of a sudden history was been stitched together in front of me. Twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth is hungry for life but, as the ward of a Devon clergyman, knows she has few prospects.

Elizabeth moves from England to Australia with her husband John, seeing Sydney as it was, John is to become a wool baron, sheep farming in New South Wales. It is a complicated balancing act, and feels somehow unresolved — even in a novel that embraces the idea that fiction’s job is to frame questions in new ways and invite engagement, not answer or settle them. I also found the way conversation was written with no punctuation marks and - he said, I said interspersed throughout jarred with me and prevented the story flowing as well as I'd have hoped. It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and they way they can erase the truth.Grenville fictionally reimagines Elizabeth's journey from growing up among provincial Cornish farmers to her challenging marriage to her indomitable husband John to settling in the relative wildness of the New South Wales colony.

Alone to navigate her own destiny Elizabeth's resilience and probably her farming upbringing won her the respect of those around her with her many improvements and success in farming. At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. This story is inspired by the real life of one woman’s trails and tribulations against the world, with the author taking material from newly-found letters and weaving a gorgeous tale of love, loss, hope, fear, and learning you can take charge of your future no matter who tells you otherwise!A theme it shares with A Room Made of Leaves is colonization and the exploitation of the indigenous people. Yes this is a novel with a quirky start but I suppose I wanted Elizabeth to shine and for me this did not happen.