Swamp Gum: A Thrilling Tale From Australia's Forest Wars

by Rowan Sylva

A group of young activists is all that stands between a wood chipping company and an ancient Australian rainforest. But when they discover a decomposing corpse in a logging coupe, they find they are up against more than angry loggers.

Genres: Fiction

266 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 19, 2017

Reviews

[Livia Wren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fun and fast paced in a way reminiscent of chapter books for 10-14yos are fun and fast paced - lots of unlikely events, 2D characters, and sparse world-building means the storyline has nothing to get caught on. The plot had promise, but the book was definitely in want of a more experienced editor to help catch punctuation and typing errors, improve ambiguous sentences, and flesh things out better. It felt like there was an opening scene imagined, and a general ending imagined, but the path between the two was a series of lurching jumps due to a lack of planning - just frequent sudden sidesteps to escape a literary corner that the story was about to get stuck in, with little regard to what is realistic. Yes, corruption can run very deep, and the beliefs of different characters do represent ones seen across the spectrum, but nonetheless, it was just caricature after caricature, which quickly got frustrating.