The Home Child

by Liz Berry

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”)