Genre: Historical/Romance
Description:
In 1878 Louisa travels to Seychelles to live with her brother. She
finds it difficult to get used to life on the islands in general and on her
brother’s plantation in particular. The climate, culture and amenities are very
different from what she’s used to. This is a land where the memory of slavery
is still recent and colonialism still present. Relationships between the old
French families, the ex-slave population and the English incomers are complex.
The veneer of civilisation is sometimes very thin.
Author:
Kim Balette is an Australian writer living and teaching in
Seychelles. Her love of travel and History led her to research the colonial
past of Seychelles and the result is this, her debut novel.
Appraisal:
The book follows Louisa
through her first eight months on Seychelles, as she tries to acclimatise to
the climate and the people. Quite often the reader is shown Louisa through the
eyes of others.
The Seychellois setting is unusual and a big part of the book’s
appeal. (Certainly it was a major reason this reader chose the book.) Balette
draws delightful descriptive pictures of the islands, as here: ‘… the seaweed
patches made pictures in the water. Louisa wondered if one could read the
future from these swirls as gypsies did from tealeaves (sic) in a cup.’
Three languages are in use on the islands: French (Seychelles had been
a French colony for a time in the eighteenth century), English and Creole which
the former slaves developed from French. A smattering of these three languages
adds savour to the book.
As well as talking about the land, Balette also describes meticulously
how people lived there at this time. Descriptions of making soap, salting fish
and meat, harvesting pods from the vanilla orchid, pruning breadfruit trees and
many other quotidian occupations also add interest.
Various small mysteries are set running; there is romance; there are
suspicious deaths; there is sickness; there are financial worries; and there
are several sexual episodes which are described elegantly but graphically. But at
bottom this is a book about people getting along with each other, or (in
several cases) not.
For this reader, the descriptions of place and the daily doings of the
inhabitants (delightful as they were in themselves) began, after a while, to
get in the way of the story. Or perhaps the problem was that there wasn’t
really enough story to prevent the pace of the book from flagging.
Several salient pieces of information that the reader could have done with
early on were withheld until it was too late for them to matter much. In the
absence of authorial clarity, you can make up your own mind as to what the
hints dropped may mean. The major romance followed that pattern where each party misunderstands the other for lengthy
periods of time and much unnecessary angst results. You may be a fan of this
approach: it is certainly a tried and tested romantic formula.
At the end this reader considered the experience and could only
conclude that it had all been something of a storm in a rather beautiful
teacup.
FYI:
Some ‘literary’ but fairly explicit sexual content.
Format/Typo
Issues:
Some typographical and some syntactical errors. One persistent tendency
was to insert commas where they simply got in the way of understanding the
sentence, another was a vagueness with pronouns which on occasion made it
impossible to work out who was doing what to whom.
The ebook file we received had an issue with type that was gray rather
than black. Not great for the eyes. We checked the look-inside and downloaded a
sample from Amazon to see if this was still an issue. It wasn’t, however it has
been replaced with issues in the text justification.
Rating: ***
Three Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Approximate
word count: 80-85,000 words
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