Customer Reviews

The Daughters of Moab

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Synopsis: In Kim Westwood's imagining of post-apocalyptic Australia, a religious group called the Followers of Nathaniel have taken charge. Their health is poor, suffering from the lack of food and the extreme heat and cold. In hope of healing themselves by making an alchemical elixir of health, they harvest the blood of the miraculously healthy and strong female 'transfects', girls who have have been created in genetic laboratories and who have had their genetic code spliced with that of the animals of Australia. But in the dark caves, the Earth is beginning to heal herself, plants are starting to grow again, and the Nathans can't hold onto their power forever.

There is a lot to like about this book, the kind of apocalypse and the society left behind are original and different, the characters are well developed and unique, and the writing style is poetic and emotive. I love that the setting is so clearly Australia, and Kim Westwood has described the devastated landscape so well. Her writing style creates a kind of Mad Max atmosphere of desolation, loneliness, madness and a society which bears no resemblance to its former civilisation. There is reference to the Stolen Generation, and I particularly loved the ghosts of the Indigenous Australian spirits. That these ancient beings were here long before us and will last long after we are gone makes it seem that all that we hold so dear about our world is simply transient and can disappear without a trace, and yet the land will always carry on. This is a very powerful book full of these kinds of ideas.

However, I just can't say that I really liked it. While the language makes this book what it is, it was problematic for me. I think my vocabulary is pretty good, but on several occasions I had to stop reading and look words up because the meaning of the sentence was obscured by my lack of understanding. (I can now add 'enfeoffment' and 'chiaroscuro' to my lexicon!) Some of the sentences are awkward and jolted me right out of my reading flow, and this is one of the things that makes or breaks a book for me. I had the sense while reading this book that I was holding a work of art in my hands, but I just kept getting annoyed by having to re-read passages and get on the online dictionary. People who love language will no doubt love this book, I think it's worth a read and I would read further work by Kim Westwood.

In the future, in Australia, cut off from the world, poisons spilling from the soil, fragile humans eek out an existence in the desert, but among them walk the young Daughters of Moab, who are healthy, thriving almost in this strange beaten world. The Daughters were the result of gene-splicing experiments and are oppressed by a religious sect who bleed them, in order to find the secrets of their health. One of them is not oppressed tho. One of them is an Assassin. The mood of this story captures the reader and draws her in. A top first novel by Kim Westwood. Looking forward to novel number two.