It's bright, clear and cold here in Bendigo for the BWF, and I have just enough time before breakfast to tell you about the book I finished reading last night. It's Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth, and I have had it on the TBR since I went to a Debut Authors reading event at the Wheeler Centre, back in 2012.

It was a reading that made us sit up and take notice, and I don't imagine anyone was much surprised when the novel went on to be shortlisted for the 2014 Barbara Jefferis Award. But I still didn't take the book off the shelf and read it because I was a bit put off by the excerpt that Amy had read. The novel begins with a hunting scene in the harsh winter in Wisconsin. It was such vivid writing that I couldn't get it out of my head... which is what you want, but not about deer hunting!

Especially when it seems that this violent scene is a portent.

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/05/07/sufficient-grace-2012-by-amy-espeseth/ ( )

Winner of the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Award, SUFFICIENT GRACE is a difficult book to categorise.

Told from the viewpoint of young Ruth, it's a story about life and survival in a brutal climate, in a brutal, bleak, religious community.

Presented particularly to this reader as a crime novel, I've struggled to get this categorisation to work effectively. Partly I suppose you could call this a psychological thriller, partly there is a small crime element to it, but ultimately it seemed more saga than anything else.

It's beautifully written, poetic almost lyrical in parts, but with a matter-of-factness which is soothing and chilling, all at once. All of which explains why the bleakness of the world that the girls, Ruth and her cousin Naomi inhabit seem even more stark and the existence of secrets and hidden lives perfectly believable. It is, however, talking about a life in which religion is overwhelming and family dynamics are everything - bad-apples and all. Not an area of reading that I'm personally ever drawn to.

It is, however, a book that has at its core, a story about life in a religious, closed, sheltered community. Self-sufficient, this is not a life that's neatly packaged and presented. There is brutal reality - in the way that animals are hunted / slaughtered, in the cover-ups. Not a book that you could call "enjoyable" SUFFICIENT GRACE is a book that many readers will find instructive, moving and very effective.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/sufficient-grace-amy-espeseth ( )

At first glance, SUFFICIENT GRACE is really on the outer edge of the crime fiction genre, although at least one crime does take place. Most reviews have emphasised the literary nature of the book. And so it clings to the crime fiction claim by the slenderest of threads.

I'm finding this a difficult book to review in my usual way because I really don't want to reveal too much of the plot. Told from the point of view of twelve year old Ruth, the story is set in a remote and isolated Pentecostal community in rural Wisconsin.The setting is not that old, perhaps at the end of the twentieth century. The time frame covers a small period, about 5 months over Christmas and New Year, and through the harshest season. The small community is family-based, although there are members who are not immediate family, and attempting to live a close-to-nature lifestyle while the technology they have at their disposal reveals modernity. Life is dominated by attendance at church, and a strict sense of sin.

Ruth often interprets what she sees around her in a religious fashion but then frequently sees things more clearly than the adults of the community, who made me angry with what they were prepared to ignore, and their lack of awareness of the dangers they subjected their children to.

This is a book that will provoke considerable discussion in book clubs so I encourage you to consider the Book Club notes provided by the publisher.

In a final word the author writes:
Finally I appreciate that although this is a work of fiction, people close to me - now or in the past - may read this novel as a betrayal of both the family and church in which I was raised. I have not intended to cause any hurt. I wrote what I was given to write. ( )