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Steal My Sunshine, by Emily Gale
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'Steal my Sunshine is a gorgeous read, full of mystery, history, hope and heartbreak. I was gripped all the way to the bittersweet end.' - Simmone Howell, author of Everything Beautiful
During a Melbourne heatwave, Hannah's family life begins to distort beyond her deepest fears. It's going to take more than a cool change to fix it, but how can a girl who lives in the shadows take on the task alone?
Feeling powerless and invisible, Hannah seeks refuge in the two anarchists of her life: her wild best friend, Chloe, and her eccentric grandmother, Essie, who look like they know how life really works.
But Hannah's loyalty to both is tested, first by her attraction to Chloe's older brother, and then by Essie's devastating secret that sheds new light on how the family has lost its way.
Even if Hannah doesn't know what to believe in, she'd better start believing in herself.
Combined with Hannah's contemporary story, at the heart of Steal My Sunshine is the revelation of a shameful aspect of Australia's history and how it affected thousands of girls and women - the forced adoptions that saw 'wayward girls' and single mothers forced to give up their babies by churches and hospitals. The practice endured for decades, and only now are the numbers and the heart-wrenching stories coming to light.
'As Hannah tries to sort out the present - enigmatic best friend, dream boy, fractured family - it is a long-held secret of her grandmother's that will show the way forward. A tender, heart-wrenching story.' - Fiona Wood, author of Six Impossible Things
- Sales Rank: #1595569 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-05-01
- Released on: 2013-04-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An important book for young Australians to be reading right now
By Alpha Reader
There are two sides to the Moon family - Hannah and her dad on one side, her mum and brother Sam on the other. It's been that way for as long as Hannah can remember; her and dad have their Wednesday movie nights, while mum and Sam share private jokes and pet cat, Scribble.
But when her parents' marriage reaches breaking point, and it's Hannah's dad that leaves, she is completely unprepared for the fallout. Mum and Sam huddle together and lean on each other, while Hannah feels isolated and abandoned.
She has her best friend, Chloe, for a shoulder to cry on. But Chloe's mum abandoned the family when Chloe was six, and she constantly reminds Hannah that things can't be as bad as all that. Then there's the fact that Hannah has a painful, obvious crush on Chloe's older brother, Evan.
That's why she needs Essie now, more than ever. Essie is her mum's mum, Hannah's beloved grandmother - the only other person in the family who loves and understands her. Maybe it's because Hannah and Essie have her mother in common - or, rather, neither of them get on with Sara Moon and are constantly in her firing line. She accuses Essie of lying and manipulating, and she thinks Hannah is lazy and ungrateful.
As her home life spins more madly out of control, Hannah starts visiting Essie more and more ... particularly once she realizes how bad her grandmother's health has become. But there's also the fact that Essie has started telling a story, her story. And it might just explain why she and her daughter never got along, and why Sara seems to love her Sam so much more than her Hannah ...
`Steal My Sunshine' is the new young adult novel from Emily Gale.
This year, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard apologized to the generations of women and children who were victims of forced adoption. Gillard apologized on behalf of the Australian Federal Parliament, for the hundreds of forced adoptions that took place in Australia from the late 1950s to the 1970s. These involved babies being taken from their mothers who, for various reasons, were seen as `unfit' - babies were taken without consent, or mothers were compelled to give consent to the Australian State and Territory government agency. It's impossible to know the exact number, but it's believed a majority of babies taken were those belonging to single mothers -at a time when it was believed adopting out the babies of unmarried mothers was in the best interests of the child.
In her March speech, Gillard said; "We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children."
And this is the heart of Emily Gale's powerful novel, `Steal My Sunshine' - about young girl, Hannah, who starts unravelling her grandma Essie's harrowing story and how it still impacts on her own mother today.
When the story begins, Hannah and her mother are already in the midst of a tumultuous relationship, which is further fractured when her dad walks out on the family. Sara Moon seems to have unrelenting anger towards her daughter, and nothing but affection for Hannah's older brother, Sam.
But Sara Moon also despises her own mother - Essie. She constantly warns Hannah and Sam of Essie's manipulations and lies, and she has in fact stopped visiting her altogether. It's only Hannah who spends time with Essie now, and in the midst of her crumbling home-life and the discovery of a mysterious letter about someone called `James', Hannah starts prying apart Essie's lies to get to the heart of their family matters...
What Hannah discovers is Essie's own part in Australia's forced adoptions; as a teenage girl sent away from her London home, and forced to repent for her sins.
This book is harrowing and heartbreaking, brave and beautiful in equal measure. Gale picks apart an ugly chapter of Australia's history with a deft and sympathetic hand, bringing these old wounds into a contemporary story that's so important for young Australians to read and try to have a fraction of understanding about.
What really struck me in Gale's storytelling is that she very much presents this as a women's tale - and there's quite a visceral connection in that, a knowing that runs deep. It's in the fact that while Hannah's family life crumbles, and Essie's story is being told, a news story has captured Victoria - a young girl (Hannah's age) has been reported missing, believed to be abducted. There's a hubbub made about this at Hannah's school where one girl, greedy for the spotlight, cashes-in on her acquaintance-by-association to the missing girl, named Sophie. As Hannah muses on Essie's life; how she, as a teenage girl in the 1960s, was one day thrown into a Magdalene asylum, never to be heard from again - in the present day another young girl seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, and the worst is presumed. It hits home that this is a story about the abuses and injustices women seem doomed to always face. At one point Hannah muses that Essie's story doesn't mean as much to her brother, Sam ... and her own father admits to not really understanding how this also affected his wife. I'm glad Gale touched on this, because it is a truth rarely acknowledged but so important in this book that really revolved around Hannah, Sara and Essie.
One small aspect that didn't quite work for me was Hannah's crush on her best friend, Chloe's, older brother. Evan felt like an afterthought, and was a little out-of-step with the book. I actually think more interesting male relationships were presented with Hannah's father and brother. And I was more curious about another man in her life; young drama teacher, Mr Inglewood. Not in a romantic way (though the other girls at school titter about him) but Mr Inglewood posed an interesting new male dynamic in the novel, and there was a moment when he confronted and pushed Hannah - provoking a most interesting reaction. For me, personally, in a book where the male characters worked more to illustrate what's missing in the relationships of the females ... I would have preferred more of the charismatic Mr Inglewood than the half-hearted Evan.
In ending her `sorry' speech, Prime Minister Julia Gillard acknowledged the pain and suffering of those affected by forced adoption: "The hurt did not simply last for a few days or weeks. This was a wound that would not heal." And, indeed, `Steal My Sunshine' is about what has not healed - wounds that run like fractures through time and family trees, secrets that poison and pain that never goes away. This is a beautiful and tough book, an important book for young Australians to be reading right now.
4.5/5
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Stark Revelations of a By-Gone Era are Revealed
By Marcia@Book Muster Down Under
It all started over an argument about the Christmas tree on the last day of the school holidays during a stinking hot February afternoon in the midst of a Melbourne heat-wave.
Beginning with Hannah's present day narration, we are introduced to this fifteen-year old girl trying to come to terms with the inner turmoil that threatens to overwhelm her as she tries to find her place in the world and her family. Constantly in Sara's firing-line, Hannah is at a loss to understand why the relationship between her mother and older brother, Sam, is so different to hers; why Sam so blatantly attempts to divert their mother's attentions from her; why she is the only one who seems to care so deeply for her grandmother; and what's up with her mother and father!
Arriving at Essie's house, we are introduced to Hannah's eccentric and agoraphobic grandmother, and unreliable narrator, as she plays a trick on her unsuspecting grand-daughter and grand-son, causing a tirade of epic proportions by Sara when she discovers what has taken place. Afterwards, whilst making a cup of tea for Essie, Hannah comes across a hidden letter and, after guiltily reading it, asks Essie about "James". The conversation concludes with Essie whispering the promise of a secret.
Late for an appointment with her best-friend Chloe, Hannah heads off to meet the only friend she has, one who comes from a broken family, her mother having walked out when she was six-years old, never to return. Living with her father and brothers, one of whom Hannah has a crush on, Chloe is mature beyond her years and believes that Hannah's life is a fairy tale compared to hers. Finding herself relating the events of the day to Chloe, when all she wants to do is tell her about the feelings she has for Evan, and looking forward to Tuesday night movies with her dad, Hannah receives a text message from her brother urging her to get home. Arriving at home with a suitcase hindering her entry and a devastating announcement delivered by her parents, her life is thrown into further turmoil as the door slams on possibly the only ray of sunshine in her life.
As we see Hannah dealing with her inner struggles - the possibility of first love, her social ineptness, Chloe's stand-offish attitude towards her and the family drama playing out since her father's departure - her chain-smoking, gin-tippling grandmother's narration begins at Chloe's first visit with Hannah, and we are taken on a "disgraced" fifteen-year old girl's journey from her wealthy family in fog-filled London, aboard a ship headed for Australia and an aunt who declares that she is unable to "save" her, to a convent where she is put to work in the laundry while she awaits the birth of her baby. As Essie relates her painful past, a shocking familial relationship is finally defined, shedding light on Sara's antipathy towards Essie and perhaps the relationship between Hannah and her mother.
A shameful part of Australia's (and many other countries') shadowy past is exposed as Essie's in-laid narrative goes into vivid detail of the harsh treatment that many young "fallen" and "morally endangered" women, unsupported by their families, had to endure at the hands of the Nuns who ran the "Magdalena Laundries/Asylums" as well as the cruelty behind the victims being denied their fundamental rights to love and care for their children by being forced to go through the process of adoption, sometimes with their consent being obtained through forgery or fraud.
These stark revelations of a by-gone era brought a tear to my eye and resonated strongly with me as it brought to mind my own mother's harrowing encounter when I was born to her in the early 1970's in South Africa. Seventeen and unmarried, a nurse at the government hospital where I was born attempted to convince my mom to allow her (the nurse) to adopt me. My mom in no uncertain terms informed her that adoption was not an option that had ever been contemplated, nor would it be considered, and that she had every intention of taking me home, regardless of her personal circumstances. The difference between my mother and Essie was that my mother has a very close-knit family who supported her during her pregnancy and that support would continue with much love in caring for me - after all, my nursery was already waiting for me at home, the cot, the pram, the layette, the christening gown, an assortment of cuddly toys, having already been purchased.
At one of the feeding times when my mom went to the trolley on which the cribs were brought through, she noted that I was not in my usual crib. Beginning to panic, she approached the nurse and informed her that the baby in my crib was not hers. The nurse merely replied that perhaps I had been placed in the wrong crib, but what she hadn't counted on was the fact that an eternal bond had already been forged between my mother and I at my birth, at the very moment when I was laid over my mom's tummy after delivery, and that while breast-feeding, my mother had memorised every one of my facial features, every hair on my head, all ten fingers and ten toes, and even the very smell of me was already deposited into her memory bank. Informing the nurse that she had already checked all the cribs on the trolley and that I was definitely not there, the realisation must have dawned that my mother wasn't just another "ignorant young girl", but one who was most intent on taking her baby home, because she promptly went into the nursery and brought me back in her arms saying that perhaps one of the nursery staff had been working with me and forgotten to put me in the crib for feeding time!
However, the difference is that Essie did not have the support of a family, one which had abandoned her, and nor was she allowed to bond with her baby after the birth. Even after she is reunited with her baby and runs away, she is ambivalent about this motherhood thing. Her story broke my heart, but behind that story is another - one which will have you questioning how often these things happened, long after the last page is turned.
I really enjoyed this novel and found the split narrative and Emily Gale's frequent use of evocative analogies and metaphors - "I was a kid with a balloon and I'd handed it to the wrong person to hold on to. Now it was floating up to the sky and out of sight" - worked well in conveying Hannah's inner teenage angst in a real and effective manner. When she finds herself in a situation where under-age sex is imminent, for a fifteen-year old, she deals with it in quite a mature manner and makes a sound moral choice and, while Essie's deeper story touches briefly on issues of infidelity, incest - "It was me and Dad. Unholy is why" - and lesbianism, it was the broader themes of "forced adoption" and society's attitude towards women in the 1950's to 1970's resulting in the tragic consequences of a decision which should have been hers to make, which enraged me.
Steal My Sunshine is a lovely YA novel with a good moral message behind Hannah's story. Seen through the eyes of a teenage girl whose greatest desire is to belong and be loved, it is also an aching examination of one woman's shameful deception and painful re-living of a time she would rather forget and another woman's inability to forgive past transgressions and, in light of the recent historic national apology given by Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to thousands of mothers who were forced to give up their babies by enduring these cruel and sometimes illegal approaches by governments, churches and hospitals, it is a timely novel about the oft-called "White Stolen Generation" - one which will strike a chord with many present day Australians.
This is a novel which I feel crosses over between genres and will appeal to a broad range of readers from 15+ through to adults.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Liked it
By Genie
This book was satisfying, full of a family mystery and the importance of finding out who you are and where you belong.
"People have to be close because they want to be, not just because they think they're part of a story they can't get out of."
Set in Melbourne, Hannah's life looks to be falling apart after her parents decide to separate. On top of that, her mum is becoming more distant and her brother doesn't seem to even notice her existence. Additionally, her friendship with the slightly-unstable-bad-girl Chloe is becoming more tense as she starts to become more involved in learning of her grandmother Essie's past and secrets, ultimately unravelling a family mystery that will open up old wounds and bring the family together.
I found this a good read on the whole as a Australian novel, and it wasn't entirely what I expected. With the plotline about a family history mystery to be found out a little cliched I still did find this novel to be interesting and it did have me wanting to find out what would be happening next. That being said, there were a few instances in terms of characters and their relationships which could have been developed better or gone in a direction that made more sense. Some things I found felt like afterthoughts and didn't really tie in with what was going on in terms of the rest of the storyline.
*CONCLUSION*
In conclusion, Steal My Sunshine was a quick read that didn't totally blow me away but still was satisfying. If you're interested in a contemporary novel with family and frienships as a strong focus, and some historical famliy mystery thrown in; then this is one that might be worth looking at.
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