The award-winning author of Finnikin of the Rock and Jellicoe Road pens a raw, compelling novel about a family’s hard-won healing on the other side of trauma.
Award-winning author Melina Marchetta reopens the story of the group of friends from her acclaimed novel Saving Francesca — but five years have passed, and now it’s Thomas Mackee who needs saving. After his favorite uncle was blown to bits on his way to work in a foreign city, Tom watched his family implode. He quit school and turned his back on his music and everyone that mattered, including the girl he can’t forget. Shooting for oblivion, he’s hit rock bottom, forced to live with his single, pregnant aunt, work at the Union pub with his former friends, and reckon with his grieving, alcoholic father. Tom’s in no shape to mend what’s broken. But what if no one else is either? An unflinching look at family, forgiveness, and the fierce inner workings of love and friendship, The Piper’s Son redefines what it means to go home again.
The Piper's Son is all about pain. It starts out in the middle of Tom's pain in a similar way to how [b:Saving Francesca|82434|Saving Francesca|Melina Marchetta|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327865374s/82434.jpg|18042740] started out at the beginning of Francesca's. And of course [a:Melina Marchetta|47104|Melina Marchetta|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1277655889p2/47104.jpg] can unflinchingly reveal her character's pain. She roots around and shows you the source of it even as she serves up their anger and bitterness and lets them make bad choices because of it all, and good choices too.
Except it doesn't really hurt, which astounds me because when I read my own review I think, "I would never want to read a book like that." Except if it's Melina Marchetta's. Because there's something cathartic in her books - the gentle way she exposes her characters pain and the small moments of happiness that restore them in the end, and even in the middle to, piece by piece and bit by bit.
And because it's Melina Marchetta this world is made up of rich characters who love each other so strongly and devotedly even when they're so angry at each other and betrayed. She grants each one of them healing so that in the middle of the book I have tears falling down my face through a few chapters without the need to really cry. There's such strength and such vulnerability in her writing and in her characters that they're kind of impossible not to love.
