Dirt Music

I picked this up at the library book sale and it's been sitting at the bottom of the pile-by-the-bed for at least two years, until my daughter shamed me into finally reading it. I'm sure neither the book itself nor Tim Winton need my approval (Dirt Music alone has won about a trillion awards), but it's true I did resist starting this one for a long, long time, and the resistance lasted till I got about halfway through, when I finally managed to surrender to the story. For a while I had to break the book up into fifty page chunks and force myself to keep reading one chunk at a time.

It's weird, I love the way that Tim Winton writes about country, and being in the bush, and by the sea -- but I feel so remote from his characters. I couldn't connect to Georgie or Lu or Jim until almost the very end of the book. Maybe they're just not my kind of people, I don't know; if I met them in real life I'd be scared of them. Maybe this is why I don't read much adult fiction? Maybe I felt resistant just because it had won so many awards? Also, I am not a music lover, so that wasn't a way in for me either.

But the descriptions are wonderful.

Note: I've just found this article which asks, why did Georgie sell the boat her father gave her, instead of setting off herself in search of the missing Lu? Hm. Good question!