The Reading Agency

Apr 29th, 2021

May 9th, 2019

Elemental by Amanda Curtin Ystradgynlais Book Club Jude Selden Maggie Tulloch writes her life story in a series of notebooks for her grand-daughter, before she dies. She charts her life growing up in the North-east of Scotland at the turn of the 20th century, to her time as a herring girl and then her emigration to Freemantle in Australia. We loved the quality of the writing and the imagery of the dramatic terrain, the harsh life and the poor prospects for women in the fishing village, how men dominated their wives and daughters and how much archaic superstition still dominated all their lives. We would highly recommend this book for its wonderful historical detail, the evocation of the bleakness of the life of a fishermans daughter and the atmospheric writing. It is a saga on an epic scale with fine attention to detail - a gripping and intimate account of one womans life and her struggle to be independent and to leave the grinding poverty and oppression of her childhood behind. She seemed however to be dogged by misfortune; wherever she goes, whatever she does is overshadowed by sorrow and death. Members found it engrossing, tremendous, evocative and informative. We liked the change of voice at the end to the grand-daughter, the vocabulary changed accordingly, but we missed the Scottish dialect words that peppered the account written by Meggie. The novel is full of well rounded and fascinating characters which add richness and depth to an engrossing story.
Sep 12th, 2015