I did not expect to like this book. It's a 700 page "sweeping epic" [said with the requisite eye roll] promising small-r romance and more than you'd ever want to know about sheep farming in late 1800s New Zealand. In other words, over 700 reasons for me not to read this book. But I have a fascination with New Zealand (the impact of colonialism on native cultures, in particular) and I'm a sucker for any kind of Big Adventure. Strong female characters + Adventure = why not?!
The good: the novel starts strong, the characters are interesting and (for the most part) realistic, and the plot is compelling. While the writing is, at times, clunky and a bit overblown but this may be the fault of the translator. I was more than willing to overlook a few linguistic inconsistencies and head-scratchers because the meat of the story was strong.
The bad: they're in rural New Zealand in the 1880s on a sheep farm but never a single mention of the bug bites, the mud, the shit? For the sake of small-r romance (no one wants to get it on in a barn that is swarming with flies and smells like dung... not sexy), Lark unintentionally traipsed into the land of capital-R Romantic literature and this is where she lost me. Like bad Romantic literature, everything in this novel was too clean. The farms, the houses, the children, the story. Even the "war" between Maori and the colonists is a bloodless short-lived thing. Lark wraps everything up too neatly and it's all a bit too coincidental: the deaths, the marriages, the births, all of it.
All that said, I don't know if I'd be thrilled to spend another 700 pages in Lark's New Zealand but I could see myself trying out other of her work should translations become available.
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