The Eye of the Sheep in Aussie Readers

Apr 11, 2017 Kathryn rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, reading-list-2017, australian-authors, bookclub

Warning in advance: this is a rather long review! And I know a lot of people have loved this book, but I was not one of them. (I hope my GR friends who loved this are still friends with me after this…)

I was seriously underwhelmed by this book and bemused by what other people have seen in it (although I intend to read some reviews after I post this to see if I can work out what I missed!). I’m not sure whether I had expected too much of it, given that so many of my GR friends gave it 4 or 5 stars Warning in advance: this is a rather long review! And I know a lot of people have loved this book, but I was not one of them. (I hope my GR friends who loved this are still friends with me after this…)

I was seriously underwhelmed by this book and bemused by what other people have seen in it (although I intend to read some reviews after I post this to see if I can work out what I missed!). I’m not sure whether I had expected too much of it, given that so many of my GR friends gave it 4 or 5 stars and raved over it, or whether the writing style (from the POV of Jimmy, a little boy with autism) didn’t sit well with me, or whether there was something else at play preventing me from loving this book, but I didn’t love it, and I don’t even really think I liked it that much.

The style it was written in certainly felt like a lot of hard work - Jimmy describes things in ways which are difficult to understand, in varying degrees - sometimes he says that someone’s “pipes are overflowing” when he’s talking about them tearing up or crying, which is reasonably easy to understand, but at other times, I was at a complete loss to understand what he was trying to describe. Perhaps the book is written in this style because living life for someone with autism feels like reading this all the time, but it certainly didn’t make the book any more enjoyable… Perhaps I should have realised this when the GR blurb included a quote that was a bit wishy-washy, but I thought it might make sense in context. It didn’t. Some further examples:

“Dad was staring into his open fridge. He was the centre and the light from the fridge came out in rays around him. All of the rest of the shed was in shadow. Soon he closed the fridge without taking anything out. He stood up and leaned against his workbench, his back to me. Everything in the shed radiated from him. The spanner, the saw, the rope, the car parts, the posters on the wall, even the dust particles, all joined to him by lines.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night caught in a black circle box. Everything had stopped. There was no next thing, but I was still alive inside the circle box. It held me tightly inside itself. Even if I exploded, my cells were trapped within the walls of the box. There was no escape. I couldn’t move."

“For the first time that night I slept, as if my father had a power that ran through his inner liquids and was potent with sleep. The steam came through like osmosis and travelled through the lids of my eyes, heaving and drooping them so that I fell into a place both empty and full, where up was balanced by down, and down by up.”

Maybe I'm just being too literal, but none of this makes any sense to me!! And I never even fully understood the significance of the title of the story. His mother taught him to count sheep to help him get to sleep, and he would see the light in the eyes of the sheep, but I couldn’t see what the relevance was to anything else in the story. Perhaps I missed something in my irritation at not understanding things that were happening.

The story is incredibly sad, with Jimmy’s dad being a violent drunk - a fairly good man, if he could keep off the whisky, although his patience threshold was low (although I could sympathise with him) and he felt driven to it by certain situations, and his mum being a good and patient mum, but a comfort eater - “Mum bought cheese, lemon sponge, apple crumble, Monte Carlos, frankfurts, mayonnaise, ice cream, frozen potato puffs, peas, chops, caramel sauce, toffee squares and milk.” And as a result, she sounds like she is a lot heavier than a healthy weight, has trouble getting around easily at times, often has asthma attacks and is setting a poor example of eating for Jimmy. I can understand both Jimmy's mother’s and father’s ways of coping, although I doubt that I could be as patient as his mother in her circumstances - I would be more impatient, like Jimmy’s father.

Because as I read this, I thought if I was actually there, Jimmy’s running in circles and repeating things over and over again, and his insistence on unknowable answers (and then sometimes even the questions he asked didn’t make sense) would have driven me batty, and I probably would have snapped at him as his father did.

So it is a wonderful thing that there are some people who are very good at helping people like Jimmy. His story is still a sad one, however, but leaves us with a nugget of hope at the end. There were parts where I enjoyed the story more than other parts (perhaps they were the parts that were easier to understand…?), so I gave it an extra half-star for those parts, but overall, I can’t really say that I found it much more than “just OK”. 2.5★ ...more

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Aug 03, 2017 Bree T rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, australian, prize-winner, cultural, aww2017

Usually I have a disinterested relationship with prize winners. There’s been very few that I’ve read and really loved but I had heard so many good things about this book from so many different corners and the cover was so lovely that I decided that I absolutely had to give it a go. It appears that August is the month of reading books that have been on my TBR shelf for some time. I chucked this in the car and read it a few chapters at a time at school pick up. My kids’ school is super busy and if Usually I have a disinterested relationship with prize winners. There’s been very few that I’ve read and really loved but I had heard so many good things about this book from so many different corners and the cover was so lovely that I decided that I absolutely had to give it a go. It appears that August is the month of reading books that have been on my TBR shelf for some time. I chucked this in the car and read it a few chapters at a time at school pick up. My kids’ school is super busy and if you want a good park you’d better get there 30-40m before school even ends. That’s perfect because it gives me some good reading time (and some amusement watching people attempt to reverse park). This is definitely a book to challenge that distant relationship.

Jimmy Flick is definitely an unusual sort of child. He doesn’t really read social cues, he has trouble expressing his emotions adequately and reading tense situations and he tends to kind of explode when he can’t really process what is happening. His father Gavin works in Altona at some sort of plant and doesn’t really possess the patience to cope with Jimmy’s differences. Frustrated with aspects of his life, Gav often seeks solace in the bottle. Days his dad drinks beer aren’t too bad but Jimmy and his brother Ned know that when their dad reaches for the Cutty Sark in the cupboard, it’s going to be a bad night and they’re best to make themselves scarce. Because the narrative is Jimmy’s and he’s a 6yo child with learning and processing difficulties, he’s not really aware of what is happening between his mother and his father after his father has been at the bottle too much. His innocence of the situation makes it all the more hard to read.

Everything that happens in this book is told through Jimmy’s eyes. He provides the insight into his parent’s marriage, his father’s struggles, particularly after losing his job and the tension in the family as his older brother Ned grows bigger and stronger and less tolerant of Gav’s ways after being at the bottle. But it isn’t until something terrible happens to Jimmy that the entire family dynamics alter drastically and Jimmy and his mother are left on their own. His mother is unwell (chronic asthma) and is also floundering with the decisions she has made. Her illness is getting worse but so is her ability to cope with it and she withdraws, keeping her and Jimmy isolated from the world with some devastating consequences.

This book broke my heart in so many ways. Jimmy’s childlike (well he is a child, but his narrative reads younger and less aware than a child of his age, as he grows in the novel) makes everything so heightened, be it his father’s alcoholism, his mother’s illness and the terribleness that comes after. Jimmy is so beautifully portrayed – his innocence, his struggles to deal with things like school and even tense situations at home and the methods Paula (his mother) has developed for coping with his outbursts and for calming him down. Her devotion to Jimmy is never ending and he is the catalyst for a decision that changes everything.

Despite his difficulties…or perhaps because of them? Jimmy is such a brave character. It doesn’t appear that he really processes danger or difficult situations and because of this he can be easily manipulated but he also throws himself into things anticipating the reward at the end. Jimmy’s journey is truly devastating at times, he loses so much and his ability to express how he feels is severely stunted so no one around him is really grasping the severity of his situation (or they don’t care, which in some cases, is also quite possible). This book made me feel so much – I was so sad for Jimmy and at times it also made me blisteringly angry for him as well.

The writing is beautiful and clever – it takes a little while to get used to being in Jimmy’s head (perhaps a bit longer for me because I was reading this in snatches every day) but once you settle into the rhythm it’s such a genuine voice and it enhances the story incredibly. Sofie Laguna has a new book due out next month and after this, it’s a must read for me. ...more

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Jul 14, 2015 Rachel Watts rated it really liked it

There are so many high points of this novel. The tone of Jimmy’s narration, its unique tenor and view of the world speaks so many truths. The quiet threads of domestic violence, inherited violence, weave together so subtly you barely notice them until they’re everywhere. The characters are real, believable, Jimmy’s world is tangible and his losses are painful to watch.

Full review: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/11... ...more

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