In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers-a note that makes question her memories of their disappearance and her father's departure.
... reads like a fairy tale, one in which everything is slightly off-kilter ... Jennings’s sentences are startling, requiring one to look close, then step away; just as a Gaudí construction — the Sagrada Família, for example — demands one take in a small accretion of details to best appreciate the vast complexity. It can feel claustrophobic at times, but entering this world is worth the discomfort: Jennings has written an unforgettable tale, as beautiful as it is thorny.
The history of the three towns in Inglewell is so unsettling and strange that it can only be told as if it were a fantastical story. But those fairy tales also shift the narrative around Tina, Trish, and Gary. As they live through their own fairy tale, the myths and legends they grew up hearing take on new relevance ... isn’t just about three teens on a magical quest and the bone horses and bird boys they encounter along the way. It is a mythologizing of a painful reality ... Jennings has crafted a fairy tale with its bones in the Old World and its blood and viscera from Down Under ... magnificently written and feels like a folktale both old and new. Jennings’ use of language is as uncanny as it is gorgeous. It’s the kind of story where you can smell the macadam baking in the sun and hear the crackle of dry grass ... a nearly perfect novella. It sings with pain and roars with power. Although it is short, it is neither spare nor unfulfilled. Kathleen Jennings has a voice unlike any other, and I long for more.
