- Acclaimed Miles Franklin award-winning author, Sofie Laguna, has gifted us another sensitive, insightful and beautifully written novel. One of the best I’ve read this year.
- A young girl, Martha, is in her mid teens. It's the 1970's. She’s absolutely delightful and fascinating, and the only child of an unhappy marriage. Her parents and their friends are all conservative Liberal voters. They of course hate Whitlam.
- Martha attends a private girls boarding school south of Sydney, and she loves it. She's exceptionally bright. Classes on the ancient underworld of Greek and Roman times captivate her. ‘A dead language suited her best. It was her own. Latin - reading it, translating it, learning the stories and poems - was her private inner puzzle...It was study and reading and being in the library that made Martha feel better’. Her school friends are her life, and her best friend is Valerie, a girl from a large family (mainly boys) from a farm just east of Broken Hill.
- Her mother doesn’t like Martha. ‘It had been that way for years’, and Martha doesn’t like her mother either. She particularly hates horse riding with her. But she likes her father, sort of. She enjoys being with him - eating pizzas, watching TV. But he’s also frequently distant and absorbed in his work.
- She gets her first period, and Laguna describes the painful experience in detail. Martha writes the dreaded letter 'M’ in her calendar.
- She reads that homosexuality was accepted by the Romans, but not between women. Valerie invites her and another friend to her family’s property. With the many brothers and dogs they have a wonderful time - riding horses, singing songs, eating good food, roasting marshmallows around the fire. She undergoes a sexual awakening. She feels sexually aroused by Valerie.
- She reads about homosexuality at the library. Homosexuality was accepted by the Romans, but not between women. It was considered ‘…a social or moral aberration….No individual is born homosexual’, according to most scholars.
- At their final end-of-year party she's partly drunk and thrusts herself onto Valerie. She’s shamed by the other girls. They isolate her, as does Valerie herself.
- She finds her first year at Sydney University very difficult but really excels in the following years, getting High Distinctions in all of her subjects. But she misses Valerie, who went to Adelaide Uni, terribly. Laguna brings Sydney University alive - the old sandstone paths and buildings, the beautiful lawns and trees, the surrounding streets and pubs. And Martha's lectures on Roman poets are described in detail. We're immersed in the course details. And there are heaps of quotes in Latin, many not translated into English. The point is to absorb us, to thrust us headfirst into it.
- The 1970's of course, to those of us who were students at the time, were alive with protests on political issues like Vietnam, Women's liberation, and University administration. Martha however ignores them. ‘Latin language, literature and the history of Ancient Rome formed the parameters of her world’.
- Over the four years of her course she receives short letters from Valerie expressing love and friendship and apologies, but she doesn’t reply.
- Martha's choice for her honour's thesis in her fourth year is the poetry of Sulpicia, a female poet who was considered a fake by male scholars. A visiting Professor from the UK was convinced the poems were written by the male poet Tibullus. His anti-women attitude pissed Martha off, so she decides to write her thesis on Sulpicia. '…what really gets me is that it’s still going on today - and so pervasively. The male dominance, and the attempt to monopolise scholarship.’
- Laguna plummets her reader into the ancient world and Martha's thesis, and doesn’t condescend. I personally found it absorbing. (Martha's thesis in the end is judged 'outstanding').
- The final chapters of the novel are very dramatic, involving rape, trauma and depression. But the resolution is very satisfying indeed.
- Sofie Laguna has written an exceptionally powerful and original book which doesn't hold back. We're thoroughly immersed, challenged and enlightened. The whole point of novels after all.
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