This book sat for an age in the to-read pile, partly cause it’s adult chicklit and there was a mountain of more urgent YA to read, some of which was in genres that interest me more, but largely cause the cover is a lovely landscape photograph of an old sandstone house under a sunset sky – great as a watercolour but far too static to engage as a book cover. So, in Coronavirus isolation, lacking anything more compelling to read, I picked it up yesterday. By chapter five – characters and context established – I didn’t want to put it down.
Fleeing a negligence case at work and a husband who left her for the umpteenth Other Woman, Kate has ended up in her hometown, where for reasons that soon become clear, she is staying with the parents of her childhood friend, Megan. She soon finds work as a cook/housekeeper for an ornery retired farmer, Harry, whose sharp wit and ability to turn on the ‘old pensioner act’ remind me of any number of old bushmen I’ve known. The harsh tranquillity of her new home at Rosebud allows Kate to reflect on her abusive childhood, her loving father’s magnificent cabinetry and the best way to ‘tame’ young Maxie, a neglected child who Harry has taken under wing.
The author’s love of the wide, dry land is a palpable hymn to Aussie farmers everywhere. While the plot is nominally driven by nine-year-old Megan’s unsolved abduction, this is a character study – or perhaps more accurately, given the omniscient narrator’s habit of momentarily accessing other characters’ minds, a town story. The focus is on a tight-knit community of farming families – the ancient Stones, the ubiquitous Quicklys - with glimpses into government and policing, and the way a town can pull together after a tragedy. McGinnis doesn’t shy away at the darker aspects of mallee life – domestic violence, neglected children, working animals that are clearly not pets – but they are balanced by a slow-burn romance that reflects the beauty of this harsh unconquerable landscape.
This is a White town and McGinnis makes the only merest nod to invasion history, laid out subtly as a backdrop to the district’s farming history that Harry is writing – the vast farming properties are clearly built on slaughter and genocide. Traditional gender roles go unremarked, despite the inclusion of a gay character whose life is in any case allocated to the city where he lives, and Maxie’s Down’s Syndrome mum is almost entirely absent from the story. Usually these kinds of issues would have me crying tokenism, but here they pass as a keenly observed understanding of ‘how it was’ for Anglo Australians in a country town of a certain era (according to the novel’s timeline, the 1990s, but thrown back to the 50s and 70s). These are real people with real blindspots, portrayed by an author who has lived their experiences.
Mallee Sky is an easy read that flows very naturally once the initial backstories are over. Even the flashbacks are woven unobtrusively into her ‘here and now’, making it one of the best constructed novels I’ve read in a while. It may be an adult novel, but it’s perfectly placed in my girls-school library. Despite Kate’s age (29), it’s essentially a coming of age story that will be accessible to readers from 14 up. I group Mallee Sky with Jackie French’s Matilda Saga novels and especially recommend it to rural schools who are looking for books that reflect students’ own contexts. ( )

Disappointing, but perhaps I expected too much after reading a very favourable review. Not badly-written by any means, but predictable and lacking oomph. Cast of stock standard characters, none really likeable, and a thoroughly predictable plot thar really telegraphs its punches, such as they are. Even the beautiful Mallee country setting, which might have been a saving grace, rarely gets mentioned. Fans of family sagas set in bush towns might enjoy this, but the lack of heat generated by the characters or the plot is a major deterrent. ( )