Review: THE FAMILY STRING, Denise Picton

• 
  this edition published in 2022 by Ultimo Press
  
• supplied by my local library
• ISBN 978-1765115066-1
• 325 pages

Synopsis (publisher)

A darkly funny and poignant coming of age story by an extraordinary new voice

Meet Dorcas, a spirited 12-year-old struggling to contain her irrepressible humour and naughty streak in a family of Christadelphians in 1960s Adelaide. She is her mother’s least favourite child and always at the bottom of the order on the family’s string of beads that she and her younger siblings Ruthy and Caleb reorder according to their mother’s ever-changing moods.

Dorcas, an aspiring vet, dreams of having a dog, or failing that, a guinea pig named Thruppence. Ruthy wants to attend writing school, and Caleb wants to play footy with the local team. But Christadelphians aren’t allowed to be ‘of the world’ and when their older brother Daniel is exiled to door knock and spread the good word in New South Wales after being caught making out with Esther Dawlish at youth camp, each try their hardest to suppress their dreams for a bigger life. But for a girl like Dorcas, dreams have a habit of surfacing at the most inopportune moments, and as she strives to be the daughter her mother desires, a chain of mishaps lead to a tragedy no one could have foreseen.

This is a superb coming of age story that explores a fraught mother-daughter dynamic, and the secrets adults keep from their children. It is about resilience, and the loves that sustain us when our most essential bonds are tested, and how to find the way back through hope and forgiveness.  

My Take

For my blog readers - this is not my usual crime fiction.

What struck me about this novel was that it is set in Rostrevor, very close to where I live now, and in the 1960s when Dorcas was 12 and I was in my late teens. The Adelaide that is depicted was very similar to the one that I knew even though I was a country girl, and not Christadelphian. However in the 1960s I was very Church-connected and so Dorcas's religious world was familiar to me.

Dorcas's mother obviously had mental health problems, partly because she had left Scotland come to Australia at a young age, she was home-sick, but also because she had three such disparate children. Her husband worked long hours and she got little chance to get out of the home because she didn't, and she resented that. Her social life was confined mainly to Church on Sundays and church events. She had converted to being a Christadelphian and other church members were very critical of how she dressed and how she behaved. In addition, her older son had been sent away because of how he had behaved at a church camp, and because he wanted to have a worldly career. As well as that, he younger son had serious health problems.

Dorcas was on the tip of becoming a teenager, could put her foot in her mouth very easily and her mother seemed to blame her for all the misadventures that befell the family. In addition Dorcas saw herself as the cause of most of the family's problems.

There was a lot of empathy from the author, and I enjoyed the book a lot. There were some extremely well drawn characters, and it easily took me back into the 1960s.

My rating: 4.4

About the Author

Following the establishment of a career leading human services, Denise Picton retrained in business and established a management consulting firm that has worked across Australia and Asia for over thirty years. In her twenties she published short fiction in literary journals, and returned to writing to begin work on a series of novels in her fifties. This is her debut novel.