The Thorn Birds in Around the World in 80 Books

Feb 04, 2025 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it

Shelves: healing, happiness, historical-fiction, friendship, family, health, fiction

I enjoyed so much reading this book along with Tina!

Here are my comments to Tina as I read along in the book. There may be some spoilers.

January 24:
I started reading last night. I think it is going to be one of those stories that is hard to put down. I was most taken with Meggie’s first day of school. Oh my goodness. I would never have returned.

I know my mom and my sister both got spanked in school (both for talking!) and neither of them liked school after that. My mom was in Catholic school, ...more

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May 14, 2017 marianne rated it liked it

Shelves: bookclub

This Australian classic is a long family saga spanning three generations, starting with the family’s move from New Zealand to the Australian Outback in the early 1920s. Though moments of good fortune and happiness occur from time to time, it’s mostly chock full of drama. Death, loss, woes, broken dreams and heartbreak plague the Cleary family throughout the decades. Even Mother Nature seems to have it in for them as they suffer droughts, floods, heat and fires.

The book is written well. The desc This Australian classic is a long family saga spanning three generations, starting with the family’s move from New Zealand to the Australian Outback in the early 1920s. Though moments of good fortune and happiness occur from time to time, it’s mostly chock full of drama. Death, loss, woes, broken dreams and heartbreak plague the Cleary family throughout the decades. Even Mother Nature seems to have it in for them as they suffer droughts, floods, heat and fires.

The book is written well. The descriptive language is great, whether McCullough is describing breathtaking scenery or a decaying corpse, and the dialogue is fresh and feels as if it’s hanging in the air in front of you. But McCullough’s greatest strength may be in depicting the changing natures of relationships through time, especially those between mother and daughter. I was fascinated by how realistically and naturally she orchestrated these changes. She also portrays aging with an astuteness and richness that I’ve rarely seen, even among my favorite authors. There is no doubt that she is a really talented writer.

The incessant drama was somewhat of a turnoff for me, and I also suspect I would have connected more with the novel had I been raised in a Catholic environment and better appreciated the fever of the forbidden love between Father Ralph de Bricassart and Meggie Cleary. The themes surrounding temptation, loyalty, faith, chastity, punishment, power, sin and honor all have a religious quality to them that I’m only vaguely tuned in to and not usually interested in; I prefer to explore morality when it doesn’t have immovable boundaries. I’m curious if these underlying biblical themes were intentional by McCullough, or more of a product of her upbringing, something that subconsciously infiltrated her prose and narrative.

The book is also a bit dated in terms of gender roles. I’m still fuming at a reference to a man who had no choice in falling in love with a woman since he had “made” her, or in other words had shaped her from her childhood into her adult self. That’s supposed to be romantic? It’s possible McCullough was critical to this attitude or practice and not necessarily endorsing it, or that there was a Catholic theme, perhaps an Adam and Eve rib reference, that I didn’t pick up on all the way. But in a book where characters’ internal thoughts are shared in great deliberation, not one character seems to question or even recognize the perversion of this man, or of the woman's loss of her identity and personality to the fantasies of one man. Did I miss something here?

Despite the weight of so many unfortunate events plaguing the Cleary family, the book carried me a lot further than a lesser author would have succeeded in doing. I can’t imagine re-reading The Thorn Birds. But if I were ever to revisit it, I'd pay extra attention to the biblical themes. In retrospect, I can see that there was more to this story than a simple family saga. ...more

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