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Resumen
Resumen
Emily Tempest, a feisty part-aboriginal woman, left home to get an education and has since traveled abroad. She returns to visit the Moonlight Downs "mob," still uncertain if she belongs in the aboriginal world or that of the whitefellers. Within hours of her arrival, an old friend is murdered and mutilated. The police suspect a rogue aborigine, but Emily starts asking questions. Emily Tempest, a modern half-aboriginal sleuth, is a welcome successor to Arthur Upfield's classic detective.
Reseñas (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-After a decade attending university and seeing the world, Emily Tempest, the daughter of a white Australian prospector and an Aboriginal woman, returns to Moonlight Downs, the camp in the Australian Outback where she was raised after her mother's death. Shortly after her arrival, Lincoln Flinders, the leader of the camp and father of her childhood friend, is slain, and Emily is determined to find out who killed him and why. Is the murderer an Aboriginal sorcerer with whom Lincoln had quarreled? Lincoln's brother, ambitious to take Lincoln's place as leader? An aggressive white rancher, angry at Lincoln's rejection of his demands? Or is it one of the whites in the nearby poverty-stricken town, whose smiling face hides racial rage? As she uncovers the events that led to the murder, Emily slowly comes to grips with what led her to leave the Outback years ago, and what is bringing her back there now. Comfortable with her biracial ancestry but caught between Aboriginals and whites struggling with the cultural adaptations necessary to live together peacefully, Emily is a sympathetic protagonist. This glimpse into Aboriginal culture will whet teens' appetites for reading more about the land and people portrayed.-Sandy Schmitz, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Australian Hyland's rewarding debut opens with half-aboriginal Emily Tempest returning to the Outback "blackfeller" camp of Moonlight Downs after years of traveling around the world. Just as Emily is settling in, her dear friend Lincoln Flinders, a highly respected community leader, is found strangled and missing a kidney. The mutilation points to the local sorcerer, Blakie Japanangka. Emily, with the help of police sergeant Tom McGillivray, tries to track down Blakie, who has escaped into the hills. When doubts about Blakie's guilt arise, suspicion falls on several people connected to land ownership disputes, leading to a series of rather unbelievable action scenes. The true strength of this beautifully written novel lies in Emily's ambivalent feelings about her culture and her complex interactions with Hazel Flinders, the murdered man's daughter and Emily's former best friend. Their relationship, and the way Emily moves between aboriginal and white society, provide the tension lacking in the mystery half of the plot. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A native returns to the Australian Outback and encounters bloody murder in Hyland's debut. Emily Tempest, half Aboriginal, half stormy petrel, has been away from her home in Moonlight Downs for ten years, getting well-educated, well-traveled and thoroughly disillusioned. But now "she come home," says a delighted Lincoln Flinders, head of the tiny Aboriginal community. Emily basks in the warmth of his welcome, but not for long. The following day, Lincoln is discovered murdered and horribly mutilated, and Emily, purposeless for so long, suddenly has a mission. She'll bring Lincoln's killer to justice for the sake of Lincoln's daughter Hazel, Emily's best friend; for her own sake; and most importantly for the sake of the Warlpuju, Lincoln's people, left leaderless and lost. Emily soon develops an ample list of suspects. There's Blakie Japanangka, the nightmarish, possibly insane, self-appointed keeper of the old ways. Lincoln had a violent, clearly disturbing argument with him the day of Emily's arrival. And there's an array of ill-disposed "whitefellers" whose reasons for disliking "blackfellers" in general and Lincoln in particular provide a bumper crop of motives. As befits her surname, Emily takes an approach to sleuthing that's unconventional--and, because she never quits, it's an effective one. A bit too long, but redeemed by its colorful setting and an in-your-face heroine fetching enough to warrant a series. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
This mystery is set in the Australian outback; its heroine, half-aboriginal, returns to her community in the Northern Territory after spells at Melbourne University, travel, and a series of hardscrabble jobs. Admirers of the Thurlos' Ella Clah series, in which a young Navajo woman cop both reveres and breaks away from tradition, will find another intriguing heroine in Emily Tempest. Tempest comes back to the scattering of corrugated iron shacks that makes up Moonlight Downs, not to stay but to seek some new direction. Shortly after her arrival, the leader of her tribe, a man who guided Tempest when she was little, is murdered. One kidney has been cut out, an infallible sign of sorcery. Tempest, already trying to figure out where she fits in the world, decides to investigate on her own. Hyland excels at drawing the reader into a strange, rough world. This debut novel is filled with both poetic descriptions and a great deal of wit.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2007 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
A couple of literary vagabonds taking it slow from Paris to Marseilles in 1982. YOU expect a French book to be quirky. There's Georges Perec's "Disparition" a 300-page novel without a single "e" in it (it's translated into English as "A Void," also "e"-less). There's Michel Houellebecq's "Elementary Particles," a talky book about a sex addict and his half brother, described in The New York Times as "deeply repugnant." And if you haven't read those two yet, don't bother: Pierre Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" suggests that the best approach to books might be to ignore them altogether. Surely France has its John Grishams and Danielle Steels, but when a French book shows up in this country, we expect it to be somewhat unusual. Though born in Belgium and raised in Argentina, Julio Cortázar lived and wrote in Paris from 1951 till his death in 1984, thus making "Autonauts of the Cosmoroute," though it was first published in Spanish, at least an honorary French book. As such, it begins in a refreshingly offbeat way: in 1982, Cortázar and wife, Carol Dunlop, took a car trip from Paris to Marseille. Normally, the drive would last around 10 hours, but Cortázar and Dunlop resolved never to leave the autoroute and to explore each of its 65 rest areas. Thus it took them 33 days to get from northern France to the Mediterranean, as they searched for the freeway's hidden side and tried to push the travel narrative to some new extreme. With a plan like that, readers know that they're either going on the ride of their lives or they're doomed to spend a lot of time in the back seat whining, "Are we there yet?" On the plus side, your driver is one of the masters of postmodernism, the Cortázar of "Hopscotch," the 155-chapter novel that can be read either linearly or "hopscotched" through, according to a scheme provided by the author. Film lovers know him for the short story that became Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," but Cortázar also wrote a fanciful short story, "The Southern Thruway," about a traffic jam on an autoroute so congested that the jammees organize their own society. Jean-Luc Godard used it as the basis for his rather different film "Week End," in which the stranded motorists resort to cannibalism and murder. No such drama here. Cortázar doesn't seem terribly interested in the bloodier side of postmodernism. Instead, he prefers to look at the fuzzy reverse of society's tapestry, the seemingly patternless surface from which emerges not the reflection of the image on the front but a new image altogether. If one emerges, that is. The problem is that Cortázar and Dunlop seem to have decided to write a book about the journey, whether or not the journey had a book in it. As it turns out, the narrative they hope for never emerges, so they turn instead to cute effects, like "Tristram Shandy"-ish chapter titles ("Where the Patient Reader Shall Be Introduced to the Protagonists of the Expedition," and so on). With heavyhanded irony, they overuse the word "scientific" to the point of stultification, referring to their "scientific labor," "scientific observations" and "scientific speculations." This is amusing the first couple of times, but as scientists will tell you, their work often consists of waiting to see something that never materializes, which is the case here. When the travelers pretend to mistake playground equipment for torture racks and gallows, you want to say, "Oh, come off it." Julio Cortázar and the camper he and Carol Dunlop drove on their trip. The text is accompanied by photos that are both amateurish and too numerous, though one, a self-portrait by Dunlop in a hotel mirror in which she's wearing only a towel around her waist, suggests what the French call a délectable compagne. Indeed, Cortázar and Dunlop seem altogether too satisfied with each other's company. "Blue Highways," William Least Heat-Moon's account of his drive across backcountry America, owed much of its charm to his conversations with the eccentric, suspect and surprisingly ordinary citizens he encountered along the way. You'd think French rest stops packed with travelers from dozens of countries would yield at least a few interesting conversations, but other voyagers are seen as devoid of "intelligence" and "sensitivity," "simply idiots," and therefore not worth the authors' time. Those who bemoan the self-absorption of the postliterate generation will be happy to know that before the self-indulgent, amateurish blog there was the self-indulgent, amateurish log. "We understood that in our own way we'd performed an act of Zen," the book's last pages declare. The problem is that my Zen is just peachy; to me, your Zen is a snooze. The travelers themselves admit that while the end of a great expedition or heroic feat is an apotheosis like "the crowning with laurel of the ancients to the Olympic medal of our days," the end of their trip is "the opposite of an apotheosis." Some days, it's better to stay home. David Kirby's essay collection "Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, the Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation" appeared in 2007.
Library Journal Review
This distinctive debut novel is perfect for mystery fans who are craving new horizons. Emily Tempest is half Aboriginal and grew up in the Australian Outback. After college and travel, she returns to her home and mob (clan). She notices changes, some of them disturbing. When Lincoln, a mob leader, is brutally murdered, Emily is not content to settle for the obvious solution: that he was the victim of a local sorcerer. As she reconnects with her old life and dear friend Hazel, she searches for the murderer. Hyland, who worked in remote Aboriginal communities and lived with the Walpiri in the Tanami Desert, touches on political and racial issues and Aboriginal spirituality as he weaves an intriguing tale that includes poetic descriptions and excellent characterizations. Included are two essential and helpful glossaries: Australian and Aboriginal. Much needed doses of humor and a sweet romance lighten this sometimes dark story. Winner of the 2007 Ned Kelly Award for best first mystery in Australia, where it was titled Diamond Dove, this is a choice selection for all Australian fiction and in-depth mystery collections. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 10/1/07; for another Australian mystery involving the Aborigines, see Peter Temple's The Broken Shore.--Ed.]--Susan G. Baird, Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.