Felicity McLean, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone.

                                                


- I was not that impressed by this novel. It has a YA feel to it - the narrator being an eleven year old girl for most of the novel, then twenty years older for the rest of it. That sort of straddling between teen and adult fiction leaves me cold. 

- There’s a hint that the new male teacher Mr Avery could be a child abuser. As could Mr Van Apfel, the bible bashing and violent father.

- The nature descriptions are constant and over the top. And there's too much deliberate quirkiness in phraseology (‘in his lay-preacher’s soothe’); 

- The author keeps hinting and suggesting as to what actually occurred at the heart of the mystery but never explicitly depicts or clarifies. The police must have been pretty incompetent not to work it all out. 

- Lost children in the harsh Australian landscape is a pretty common theme in Australian literature. There is nothing new here.