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Emily Conolan

Författare till Touch the Sun: The Freedom Finders

4 verk 16 medlemmar 4 recensioner

Verk av Emily Conolan

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Trigger warnings: Death of a child, death of a friend, death of a mother, physical injuries, blood depiction, gun violence, death in the ocean and harbour
Score: Six points out of ten.

The premise seemed intriguing but sadly I didn't enjoy this one and I highly doubt the target audience would read this one due to the content inside. The story revolves around a young girl who doesn't have a name yet but I'll call her Alana, who lost her mother to some disease and then she tries to find her father known as Patrick Sean Ryan and that lead her to a long and quite dangerous journey to travel from Ireland to Hobart, Tasmania, Australia which was thousands of kilometres away. The execution however is a bit of a mixed bag since it's told in 2nd person POV and I wondered why wasn't it told in 1st or 3rd person POV which would have made a lot more sense to me. The writing style got the job done of immersing me enough into the story but there could've been more details described about the characters or the worldbuilding and most of them were forgettable due to them not having any characteristics. Alana died in many horrific ways such as falling to her death, getting shot, getting hit by a pan, dying of a fever or exhaustion and worst of all dying in the ocean or the harbour because she couldn't swim for whatever reason which was the main reason why I didn't enjoy this book but at the very least there were two good endings where she found her father or had a family. Read Refugee by Alan Gratz for a better historical book about immigration.… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Law_Books600 | Nov 3, 2023 |
Representation: Black main character
Trigger warnings: Death in the ocean, death of a child, fire, explosions, gun violence, refugee experiences, death of parents, car crash, physical injury
Score: Six points out of ten.

I did not enjoy this book at all, except for one of the happy endings, where the main character (I'll name him Abdul) became a writer, and it also showed how this book was related to Break Your Chains, made by the same author. Maybe I'll give this author one last chance with the only novel I haven't read in the series yet called Move the Mountains. However, that was the only positive thing about this book. Almost all of the endings of this book either were bad or led to Abdul dying in horrific ways (heatstroke, shot by a bullet, dying in the ocean, blown up, burnt alive), and I didn't like him at times, and especially, when he edited some paper to include a swear word. I couldn't connect to any of the characters within this book, but at least I could understand their struggles for freedom, and this book wasn't as action-packed as I had hoped. Read Refugee for a better novel about immigration. Also, the fact that a white author wrote a book with a Black character rubs me the wrong way. I get that this raises awareness of refugees, but as with another book called Zenobia, it would've been better if a refugee wrote an account of their experience. That doesn't take away from the fact that this is well-researched.

Update: I read Move the Mountains. It was okay.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Law_Books600 | Nov 3, 2023 |
Representation: Minor First Australian character
Trigger warnings: War themes, World War Two, blood depiction, racism, sexism, racist slur, white supremacy, amputation, near-death experience, hospitalisation, PTSD, grief and loss portrayal, fire, death of a soldier, death of a child in the ocean, murder, deaths from falling, lethal injection, train and car crashes, workplace accidents, physical injuries and asphyxia
Score: Six points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

First off, that's a lot of trigger warnings, so if these trigger you, don't read this book. Now that I said that, this is the third book out of the series, and I've read two of them so far called Break Your Chains and Touch the Sun, both of which I found less than enjoyable, so I went in with low expectations. This. Was. Brutal. The most in the series. It starts with the main character (she doesn't have a name but from now on she's Amara) who lives in an Italian town called Lenola in 1943, what makes this book stand out is that it's in 2nd POV, I don't see that in many books since usually they are in 1st or 3rd POV. This was not. The book warned me that I/Amara would die in this book, but right from the first choice, it did not pull any punches. There was a scene in one of the choices I'd generally see in a young adult book, even though this isn't one.

Not many pages later, there are two choices I must make for Amara. One option didn't go down well, and the other made her immigrate to Australia by ship in 1951. During the journey, some of the choices left her in one piece. Some different endings made her die in horrifying and tragic ways, as mentioned in the trigger warnings, and even if Amara arrived, there still would be a long way ahead of her. I have two statements: one, there are still catastrophic endings during the latter half of the book, and two, did the author go out of her way to put as much triggering content as she could? I think so. Amara gets over the racism and sexism somehow when, after escaping all the antagonists, she decides to get a job for, I don't know, gender equality. This is the 1950s, after all, and society works differently from what I see now.

There are some alternate endings that I won't discuss in detail, but let's say Amara was working when a workplace accident nearly killed her and killed another person. She ended up at the hospital without an arm. I'm wondering if this scene belongs in a book like this, but I think that was to turn up the drama and make me relate to Amara, but that effort was unsuccessful. In the final ending, Amara gets past the accident, gets a job at the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectricity Project, reunites with her family and... That is a high note there. The fact files and author's notes were a nice touch.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Law_Books600 | 1 annan recension | Nov 3, 2023 |
I love this series – It’s like a role-play but with properly researched history instead of fantasy adventures.
Aimed at middle school readers, but readable into mid-high school, Move the Mountains evokes stories from the author’s own family history and those of other post-war migrants working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. None of the historical detail was new to me but I got to be a feisty heroine and it was fun to discover whether I survived hiding an Aussie solider from the Nazis on an Italian mountain side, exposing corruption on a migrant ship, learning to live with a debilitating physical disability, and fighting the sexist expectation that women are destined to fulfil serving roles such as tea lady or child-rearer. It was also interesting, from a structural perspective, to see how cleverly the diverse story lines channelled into the same future choices (ending up on a ship from Italy to Australia, travelling to Cooma, meeting the airman’s brother) and how different choices revealed different sides of the same characters (especially the villains!).
Recommended, along with the rest of the series, for all school libraries and for students aged 10-14. History teachers may also wish to use it to initiate discussions about opportunities for migrants in post war Australia.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
IsabellaLucia | 1 annan recension | Oct 24, 2020 |

Statistik

Verk
4
Medlemmar
16
Popularitet
#679,947
Betyg
½ 3.6
Recensioner
4
ISBN
20