Hannah Cheshire is London ‘Quality’. Her father absconds, leaving her to survive alone. Her tutor, Thomas Behr, offers to marry her but she snubs him and spirals quickly into destitution and prison. She is transported as a convict but attracts the attention of the well-named supposed gentleman, James Belforte. The women’s convict ship is a cesspit of disease and prostitution, partly redeemed by Long Meg-who is perhaps more ‘Quality’ than the ‘gentlemen’ who use her, put her in a barrel and cause her death. Hannah’s existence in the Female Factory in New South Wales is just as sordid and harsh until she inadvertently ‘marries’ James when she picks up his handkerchief, before she finally escapes to the Blue Mountains. Threaded throughout this putrescent fairytale is the almost parallel tale of Scatterheart, a foolish girl who fails to follow the advice of the Great Bear and loses life’s treasures before finding the fairytale castle in the snow. Quotes from Scatterheart precede each chapter. The book aspires to being an Australian epic for YA, not a ‘grand’ saga but grounded, like the roots of Australia’s early European colonisation, albeit with gilded eucalypt tips.

Joy Lawn is the writer of teacher notes, Inside the Shortlist 2007, published by CBCA (Qld)

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