All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
My rating: 4/5 cats
jake whyte is an australian who has emigrated to a remote island off the coast of england to live alone on an isolated sheep farm, with only a dog for company. jake whyte has nothing in common with this similarly-named individual
because she could probably snap him in half over one of her muscular thighs.
jake is a tall, big, strong woman with a troubled past, a deeply scarred back, and very good reasons for staying hidden. her only human contact is with don, the man from whom she bought the house and land, on his occasional passes by to assist her with various tasks. he is always trying to encourage/strongarm her into being more sociable – to go into town and meet a nice fella at the local, because although she is capable of meeting most of the demands of the farm, he sees her stubbornness and antisocial behavior as unnatural, and insists that regardless of gender, farmers need to form a sort of community, and her isolation is detrimental to herself as a woman, and to the success of the flock.
this belief seems to have merit as jake’s sheep begin to be attacked – torn apart by some kind of animal much larger than any witnessed in the area. jake initially believes it is the work of the local teenagers who give her attitude when she goes into town for supplies, but then other strange things start happening – noises in the middle of the night, the feeling of being watched, rumors of a mysterious beast… and then one night jake discovers a man, lloyd, in her shed sleeping off a night of drinking. the two of them enter an arrangement that becomes a sort of friendship, despite jake’s reservations and emotional resistance.
intercut with the story of jake and lloyd is the story of jake’s past, told in reverse order, as we learn what drove her to flee australia, and the source of her physical and emotional scars.
it’s a definite page turner, but not in a fast-paced sort of way, more of a reader’s need to find out what happened. it has all the things i like in my literary fiction, with the dark secrets and perseverance in impossible situations, and despite the ambiguous ending, i don’t really think it is really a story of redemption, or even acceptance. it is just a story of one woman who makes a terrible mistake, finds herself getting into more trouble with each of her attempts to run from her past, and discovers that even self-exile brings its own set of difficulties.
now, about that ambiguous ending. that’s one of the few things i wasn’t wild about. i don’t mind ambiguity as a rule, i liked the is-it-or-isn’t-it dusting of magical realism, but the last two epilogue pages confused me, and clouded the situation for me a little. it felt soft, tacked-on, and while i have a thought about what it could signify, there isn’t enough textual evidence for a confident assertion. i think i would rather it have ended on the harder ending that came before, which was still ambiguous, but in a somewhat more satisfying way – where possibility-seeds were planted in the reader’s mind, without feeling so… misty.
but it is still a gripping story with plenty of depth and surprises for its size, and i am really interested in seeing how other people respond to it.
