Storyland in Aussie Readers

Jun 22, 2017 PattyMacDotComma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: australian-author, kindle, historical-fiction, arc-netgalley-done, aa

3.5 ~4★
“At first, the coast is like the walls of a crumbling castle, only walls where shrubs have rooted. It is forbidding and eye-gobbing. This is not a land of elves and fairies, but one full of misshapen monsters and skeleton ghosts...
We spy a likely spot for a stream and sail through a gap in the reef but cannot land as the surf is in a beheading mood.”

I’m a fan of short stories, especially linked or interconnecting or overlapping ones, where something from one story appears in another. In t ...more

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Aug 16, 2017 Michael Livingston rated it liked it

A intriguingly constructed book, with Illawarra and surrounds as the key character in a set of stories spanning hundreds of years. There's a lot of very impressive research underpinning the historical fiction sections of this and yet another climate change apocalypse section, which rang terrifying true. The flicking between stories mostly worked, with the connections and themes gradually becoming apparent. There were a few sections that I didn't really connect with, but on the whole this is a hu ...more

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Mar 30, 2017 Nicki Markus rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-historical

Storyland is a hard book for me to rate; in the end, I have settled on three stars. I enjoyed the five narratives and their characters, but I didn't love them. I wasn't on the edge of my seat turning the pages; although, neither was it a slog. It was simply a middle-of-the-road read for me: enjoyable but not breathtaking. I think part of the problem is the use of the same narrative style as Cloud Atlas. In that work, it was bold, new and, therefore, a huge selling point. However, now it's been d ...more

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Dec 28, 2022 Averil rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2022

Storyland, a finalist for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, is an unflinching look at Australia's past, and the author's view of a potential future, told through multiple narrators.
The book is cleverly structured, with each narrator's story leading naturally to the next as we travel from 1796 to 2717 then back again. The structure works really well, and I loved how McKinnon linked each story to the next, not just by flowing a sentence through, but by dropping little connections - names, pl Storyland, a finalist for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, is an unflinching look at Australia's past, and the author's view of a potential future, told through multiple narrators.
The book is cleverly structured, with each narrator's story leading naturally to the next as we travel from 1796 to 2717 then back again. The structure works really well, and I loved how McKinnon linked each story to the next, not just by flowing a sentence through, but by dropping little connections - names, places, people. It makes me want to read it again, to see what I missed!
I wasn't a huge fan of where McKinnon took the narration in the middle section with Nada - no spoilers but I think the message could have been delivered with just the 2033 part.
Specific recurring locations and landmarks are key to the story, with each narrator covering the area's development. Within this theme of place, we are constantly hit with how destructive settlement has been on our land and waterways, and how instead of fixing it when it first became a problem (e.g. tarnished waterways in new settlements meaning clean water became scarce and disease rife), progressive generations have just made it worse.
In other words, this story is an elegy to the land that Australia was, and a warning of where climate change could take us. Everyone becomes a victim, but no one more so than Australia's indigenous people and the land they saw as their 'job to look after'. McKinnon stresses this by writing so beautifully about nature.
One theme I found especially powerful was the idea of storytelling itself, that every story has an angle constructed by the storyteller, and that therefore stories are inherently unreliable. McKinnon sets this up in the epigraph then hammers it over and over. We are shown not to blindly trust what we think we know from stories. It's an important reminder, especially in this era of media bias and political game-playing.
So read this for its literary merits -a clever structure and an examination of 'the story', put together beautifully - but read it also as a love letter to nature, and to remind yourself that action on climate change is essential.

Please shop at your local independent bookstore.
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Oct 11, 2018 Rachel Watts rated it really liked it

A remarkable and distinctly Australian novel. I really enjoyed it and loved the way it left questions in my mind for me to ponder about our past and our future.

Full review here: https://wattswrites.com/2018/09/29/bo... ...more

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