Thursday's Child

by Sonya Hartnett

Overview

"A startling coming-of-age story. . . . Through Harper, Hartnett captures the humanity of her spirited, slightly eccentric, and then nearly broken characters." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Harper Flute believes that her younger brother Tin, with his uncanny ability to dig, was born to burrow. While their family struggles to survive in a bleak landscape during the Great Depression, the silent and elusive little Tin begins to tunnel beneath their tiny shanty. As time passes, Tin becomes a wild thing, leaving his family further and further behind. Sonya Hartnett tells a breathtakingly original coming-of-age story through the clear eyes of an observant child, with exquisite prose, richly drawn characters, and a touch of magical realism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536206647
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	970L (what's this?)
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Sonya Hartnett is the author of THURSDAY'S CHILD, WHAT THE BIRDS SEE, and several other acclaimed novels, the first written when she was just thirteen. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards in her native Australia as well as the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Prize.

“I chose to narrate the story through a child because people like children, they want to like them,” says Sonya Hartnett of Thursday’s Child, her brilliantly original coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. “Harper [the young narrator] is the reason you get sucked into the characters. Even I, who like to distance myself from my characters, felt protective of her.”

The acclaimed author of several award-winning young adult novels—the first written when she was just thirteen—Australian native Sonya Hartnett says she wrote Thursday’s Child in a mere three months. “It just pulled itself together,” she says. “I’d wanted to set a story in the Depression for some time, in an isolated community that was strongly supportive. Once the dual ideas of the boy who tunneled and the young girl as narrator gelled, it almost wrote itself—I had the cast, I had the setting, I just said ‘go.’” Accustomed to writing about edgy young adult characters, Sonya Hartnett says that identifying with a seven-year-old protagonist was a challenge at first. “I found her difficult to approach,” she admits. “I’m not really used to children. But once I started, I found you could have fun with her: she could tell lies, she could deny the truth.” Whereas most children know “only what adults want them to know,” the author discovered she could bypass that limitation by “turning Harper into an eavesdropper and giving her older siblings to reveal realities.”

In her second book with Candlewick Press, What the Birds See, Sonya Hartnett once again creates a portrait of childhood. This time the subject is Adrian, a nine-year-old boy living in the suburbs with his gran and uncle. For Adrian, childhood is shaped by fear: his dread of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. Then one day, three neighborhood children vanish—an incident based on a real case in Australia in the 1960s—and Adrian comes to see just how tenuous his safety net is. In speaking about Adrian, the author provocatively reveals parallels between herself and her character. She says, “Adrian is me in many respects, and many of the things that happen to him happened to me.”

Sonya Hartnett’s consistently inspired writing has built her a legion of devotees. Of Thursday’s Child, Newbery Honor–winning author Carolyn Coman says, “Hartnett’s beautifully rendered vision drew me in from the very start and carried me along, above and under ground, to the very end. This book amazed me.” The achingly beautiful What the Birds See has just as quickly garnered critical acclaim. Notes Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “Hartnett again captures the ineffable fragility of childhood in this keenly observed tale. . . . Sophisticated readers will appreciate the work’s acuity and poetic integrity.” Sonya Hartnett’s third young adult novel, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Her novels also include Surrender, a mesmerizing psychological thriller and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and The Silver Donkey, a gently told fable for middle-grade readers. In 2008, she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Read an Excerpt

The land where we lived was by nature dry and dusty but that winter there'd been more rain than a duck would have dreamed of and when I glanced at Tin the mud was seeping up between his toes and he was sinking into the earth, shivering and half asleep. I shook him wakeful and hurried him along. "Where will we go, Tin?" I asked, not expecting any answer because he was generally reticent. "Will we go fishing?"

I had him moving at a trot and his head was joggling up and down, which I took to signify his agreement. There weren't any fish in the creek but he was at the age where you can fool them. He was certain to start whining sooner or later, anyway, no matter what we did, and the best I could do was stall that commotion as long as I could. I had a pin in the hem of my dress and I stopped to unfasten it and give it to him. He examined it carefully before looking at me quizzically through tangles of dandelion hair. "You can spike a fish with that," I explained. "That's your hook."

I could see he liked that sharp reflecting thing. It was half a mile to the creek and I put him on my back and hiked him most of the way, he being light as a feather. I talked to keep him distracted, telling him it was callous to stab my throat with the pin and what would the baby be, a new boy or a new girl? We had two of each already, not counting Mam and Da, so things were pretty equal as they stood and it would be a hard blow to the side that came away the minority. I thought it was a shame that only babies could be born, whichever it turned out being. I could think of plenty of other things I would have preferred to get for nothing.

The creek was typically a drool of a waterway but that afternoon it was running high because of all the rain and the bank was soft and oozy; Tin's feet disappeared to his ankles and he was covered in mud before he even reached the water. He was a dark child anyway, so it didn't look too bad on him. I set on a rock and left him to his devices and looked around, bored. There were white-trunked trees on either side of the creek and you could see where the rain had washed away the earth that had hidden their roots and the roots poked out knotted and naked, groping. It was that quiet, cold kind of day when the birds are surly and refusing to sing and the leaves on the branches aren't moving and seem like they never could. The creek was sluggish, hardly rippling, made from something thick and heavier than water. I was hungry, and could hear my stomach rumbling. I would have exchanged a new baby a hundred times over for a plate of something warm to eat.

When I looked again at Tin he was crouched staring and musing in the shallows with the seat of his pants drenched black, so I crawled forward to see what was diverting him. There was a fish there, swimming in his shadow. There was a whole crowd of fishes, when I looked harder, stranded in a pocket of rock as if the creek had splashed them there for safekeeping or for Tin's amusement alone. "Oh!" I exclaimed. The fish were the length of Tin's thumb, each of them, and not worth the hooking, but they were pretty and silvery, they looked like that hem pin come alive. Tin was sucking on the pin so I took it from him and stirred the rockpool's water and the fish spangled and flashed in agitation. I put a finger in the water and the whole crowd darted and tapped and knocked and nibbled. Tin's teeth were clickering with the cold now; he crossed the steppingstones to the opposite bank and from the way he tugged despondently at a handful of tree root and looked mournfully in the direction of home I could tell he was pondering the practicality of crying. He wandered a distance upstream, clutching the bank to steady himself, hoisting his knees so silt and water came pouring off his heels. "Tin," I said, "come and look at the dainty fishes."

He wouldn't; he turned his face to the mucky wall of the creek and stood there, up to his knees in water. I wasn't about to pander to his childishness so I took no notice of him. I caught a fish in the bowl of my palm and it lashed about while the water drained between my fingers and then lay flat on its side, heaving like a bellows. I petted it with a fingertip and touched it to my lips. It didn't taste like anything. "Look, Tin," I said, but he went on masquerading to be deaf. So, "Look, Tin," I said again, this time making my voice full of wonder and amazement which he could surely not resist, same as a cat can't resist investigating when you suggest there's something hidden she might like to see. If it works on a cat it should work on a four-year-old, but it didn't. Tin stayed where he was and when I glanced over my shoulder full of annoyance, he wasn't anywhere. And the creek bank looked different somehow, with clots of dryish earth rolling down its flank and plinking into the water and the ground all about torn through with a great cleave, and I could hear the dog-scratch sound of tree roots tearing. The creek bank had caved in, right on top of Tin. There was not a spot of him left to be seen. That tiny fish I had in my hand went slithering into the water.

THURSDAY'S CHILD by Sonya Hartnett. Copyright (c) 2000 by Sonya Hartnett. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Thursday's Child"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Sonya Hartnett.
Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

In a starred review, PW wrote, "Set in the harsh mining outback of Australia during the Depression, this startling coming-of-age story combines the narrator's grindingly realistic account of a family mired in poverty with a more surreal tale of her younger brother, gifted with an uncanny ability to dig through the earth and create his own subterranean world." Ages 14-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 7 Up-This novel from Australia details the hardscrabble life of a rural family during the Great Depression. When the story begins, Harper, the narrator, is seven. She relates the many misfortunes that have befallen her family. The oddest member of the clan is her little brother, Tin, who gets temporarily buried in a collapsed creek bank when he is only four. After this incident, burrowing and tunneling become a way of life. The family sees him only occasionally as he gradually turns into a subterranean feral creature, hardly recognizable as human. This surreal strand of plot in an otherwise gritty, realistic story is jarring for a while, but eventually it becomes an accepted piece of the family saga. The father is often mean-spirited and ineffectual when it comes to caring for his loved ones, but is not a stereotypical brute. The mother's character is less well defined, but she comes across as long suffering and protective of her brood. A wealthy neighbor's ulterior motive in hiring the oldest daughter as a servant seems to escape everyone's notice until it is too late. The story begins slowly, gathers momentum, and builds to a page-turning climax. Along the way, the family's house collapses into Tin's antlike tunnels below, one child is the victim of a tragic accident, and Tin, ever watchful, metes out his own terrible justice when his sister Audrey is threatened. This title may be a hard sell due to its strangeness, but readers who stick with it will be rewarded with a unique and fascinating experience.-Bruce Anne Shook, Mendenhall Middle School, Greensboro, NC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Hartnett (Princes, 1998, etc.) tells a fantastic tale of an ordinary life during the Great Depression. Narrator Harper Flute begins with her brother Tin, "born on a Thursday, and so fated to his wanderings," and about the day he went underground. Having a baby brother who burrows beneath her family's ill-fated plot of land doesn't seem odd to her young eyes. Neither does her father, who, permanently "changed" by the Great War, has taken a farm plot though he knows nothing about farming, and squanders his inheritance on three breeding cows just as the stock market collapses. Harper's voice is precise, charged, and involved. Her nearsighted view broadens as the reader watches her grow. Her bossy older sister becomes a frustrated romantic, and her helpful older brother gives up on the family he's struggled to hold together through his adolescence. Tin disappears more and more from sight, becoming an allegorical and literal underpinning of the family. Hartnett's narrative stands on edge between the mundane and the stuff of legend, as Harper's childhood unfolds precisely and peculiarly towards the event that changes her family forever. Dark, unusual, familiar, and slightly miraculous-Hartnett's story is not for everyone, but it leaves its mark. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews

"Sonya Hartnett has written a haunting story that burrows deep into the hidden lives of children. Beautifully written and endlessly satisfying."—Ellen Wittlinger, author of HARD LOVE, a Michael L. Printz honor book — None

"THURSDAY'S CHILD is a brilliant story, brilliantly told—so deeply imagined and dreamlike in its unfolding, so compelling and believable in the wild, extreme world it creates. Hartnett's beautifully rendered vision drew me in from the very start and carried me along,
above and under ground, to the very end. This book amazed me."

—Carolyn Coman, award-winning author of MANY STONES and WHAT JAMIE SAW — None

From the Publisher

This sullen story of the Great Depression, many troubles, and the human condition is told in a correspondingly quiet, slow voice. Harper, a 7-year-old girl who feels trapped by her dysfunctional family, narrates this bizarre story of survival and peculiar happenings. Her younger brother, Tin, lives under the shack they call home and digs tunnels beneath the earth. He becomes a wild being, and the family accepts this as his fate. They live through horrors of losing a baby, alcoholism, poverty, and abuse. Melissa Eccleston finds a way to bring Australia’s mining community to life through her haunting narration while telling this surreal tale, which mires the listener in heartache for this pitiful girl. D.L.M. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

AUG/SEP 04 - AudioFile