Emily O'Grady

Plot summary: Ten-year-old Cub lives with her parents, older brother Cassie, and twin brother Wally on a lonely property bordering an abandoned cattle farm and knackery. Their lives are shadowed by the infamous actions of her Granddad Les in his yellow weatherboard house, just over the fence.

Although Les died twelve years ago, his notoriety has grown in Cub’s lifetime and the local community have ostracised the whole family.

When Cub’s estranged aunt Helena and cousin Tilly move next door into the yellow house, the secrets the family want to keep buried begin to bubble to the surface. And having been kept in the dark about her grandfather’s crimes, Cub is now forced to come to terms with her family’s murky history.

The Yellow House is a powerful novel about loyalty and betrayal; about the legacies of violence and the possibilities of redemption.… (more)

I can totally understand why The Yellow House by Australian author Emily O'Grady won The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award this year. Just, wow!

The Yellow House is narrated by ten year old Cub and we soon get to know her twin brother Wally, older brother Cassie and her Mum and Dad through her eyes. Cub's late Grandfather Les is known to have committed terrible crimes in the past and their family is still carrying the scars generations later.

Superbly written, the setting, characters and dialogue are uniquely Australian in a refreshing and down to earth style I haven't seen before. Here's an example from page 12:

"Her hair was almost the colour of Cheezels, ..."

And an earlier example from page 11:

"She held on to Mum's elbow, which I knew would embarrass Mum because her elbows were dry as scones."

The novel is incredibly evocative of growing up in rural Australia, complete with swimming in the dam, buying lollies from the local shop and riding bikes to school.

The Yellow House is an exploration of family dynamics, loyalty and secrets through the eyes of the youngest child. It's also a novel about community grudges and whether evil can be inherited or not.

Although the novel has a resolution of sorts, I was left with at least 20 questions at the end and wanting to know more. The novel is narrated by Cub so I guess we're left with what she has managed to figure out, leaving many aspects of the relationships between the characters and several events unanswered. I'm still thinking about it days after finishing it.

Highly recommended!

* Copy courtesy of Allen & Unwin *… (more)

I am mystified by the preoccupation with crime that fills TV screens and bookshelves around the country. We live in one of the safest countries in the world and yet if popular taste is anything to go by, we like to frighten ourselves with bogeymen, the nastier the better. Which is why this year’s winner of the Vogel will probably do well once word gets out about it.
But although it’s a tale of rural crime, with tropes that are familiar even to people like me who don’t usually read crime of any variety, it is Vogel-worthy. O’Grady writes beautifully, with striking visual imagery and her ‘sins of the father’ theme is interesting to consider. (Especially to those of us who’ve read Zola and his Rougon-Macquart series based on his theories about inherited behaviours).
The book is narrated by one of my least favourite kinds of narrators, a child of ten. Yes, this means that the reader shares the same limited viewpoint as the narrator, absolving the author from having to withhold aspects of the storyline in a more sophisticated way. However in this case, there’s a point to it, because Cub (Coralie) is the grandchild of a mass-murderer, whose technique was vaguely reminiscent of the Snowtown murders in SA and the ones in the Balanglo Forest in NSW. The discovery of his victims after his death has traumatised the next generation, with Cub’s parents and older sibling failing miserably to keep the story secret from the younger children. Why anyone would think this possible in a country town where the entire family is shunned, I do not know. But it does raise an interesting question: any of us would, of course, say that children are not accountable for the sins of their parents, but when is the right time to explain a grisly crime to them? And if you are too poor to move away and make a fresh start, is there any possibility of redemption in an unforgiving town? To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/06/04/the-yellow-house-by-emily-ogrady-2018-vogel-...… (more)