Devotion

© 2021

Pan Macmillan Australia

Magical realism is not my cup of tea but I pressed on in the hope that I might gain a best-selling novelist’s insight into the nature of the community of Old Lutherans who migrated from Prussia to South Australia aboard Captain Hahn’s Zebra and established Hahndorf in 1839. The non-fiction element is sound but the arbitrary substitution of fictional names and places for actual in some instances yet not in others seems pointless – as does the literary style in which the story is told. The author exacts a high price – subjecting the reader to an indulgent contemporary love-letter of sentiment laid on with a trowel – for providing a fleeting glance at the inner-workings of that nineteenth-century migrant community. The shadow of the publisher’s marketing reach will no doubt see this excruciatingly drawn out tome praised to the heavens by influential folk wheeled in for the purpose.