The Home Child
by Liz Berry
Genres: Historical Fiction, Verse NovelPages: 128
Rating:
Synopsis:'Home's not a place, you must believe this,
but one who names you and means beloved.'In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants.
In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has - until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything.
Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this spellbinding novel in verse is an exquisite portrait of a girl far from home.
I haven’t read a lot of verse novels, but I’m generally curious about them, so when I spotted Liz Berry’s The Home Child on the National Poetry Library’s catalogue, I decided to give it a shot. I’d vaguely heard about “home children”, I think, and either way it’s a very familiar sort of theme across the world: young children being sent to other families in order for them to exploit their labour. It might’ve been meant for orphans, and it might’ve been meant to give the children opportunities… but that wasn’t, of course, how it turned out.
Berry’s focus in this novel is in fictionally reimagining the life of her great aunt, but she doesn’t just straightforwardly give us Eliza Showell’s point of view. The whole has a bit of a disjointed feel at first, as you jump from Eliza’s point of view to bland reports about her health before the choice to transport her to Canada to gossip back to Eliza — but I felt it came together quite well, giving us pieces of the truth (a certain kind of truth, anyway, even as it is all actually fictionalised) to build up the full story.
Unsurprisingly, it isn’t a happy book, though there are moments of happiness and sweetness. It doesn’t tie things up neatly, leaving us to sit with the messiness of the unknown, of how Eliza might’ve finished growing up, what might have happened to her and how she might have felt beyond the boundaries of the story.
Overall, it’s a quick read that worked pretty well for me, but if you’re looking for something more like a single character narrating their life through poetry, this one wouldn’t be for you.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
In the case of home children, they were orphans or children who had been placed with charities temporarily by their parents in distressed situations. Often the parents would be told the kids were with a family in Britain, or told nothing at all; the kids would be told their parents were dead. Siblings were often separated (almost guaranteed if they weren’t the same gender). While conditions in the British care “homes” and even the receiving facilities seem to have been good for most charities, the kids were then sent to remote farms without regard to suitability, expressly as labour despite their ages and with no provision for education etc, and their employers often at best exploited them severely, and at worst abused them outright. There was no oversight into what happened to the kids after they were placed if they were placed permanently, and still very little for the kids who were regularly rotated between different farms. And some of the charity receiving homes in Canada were pretty bad – we’re still finding mass graves of children at some of the former sites. The scale of the programmes to Canada were such that somewhere around 10% of the Canadian population today is probably descended from a home child, even though they stopped sending kids by the 1960s.
HarpGriffin recently posted…A book about one of your old hobbies
Yeah, the intro goes into some of that, and I did a little extra reading around it as well.
I figured you would have, but wanted to post a summary anyway more for folks dropping by the comments, if that makes any sense? It probably doesn’t make sense ahaha.
HarpGriffin recently posted…A book about one of your old hobbies
No, that does make sense! Thanks.