The Things She's Seen by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina

The Things She's Seen Book Review

Rating: 4.5/5

Every summer, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL)  hosts an event called Summer Stride. Summer Stride challenges everyone of all ages to complete 20 hours of reading, learning, or listening to books before the end of summer for a prize. Throughout the summer, SFPL gives out free books, and the selection updates every week, which is how I got my hands on The Things She's Seen. This book also happened to be the last two hours I needed to complete my Summer Stride challenge!

The Things She's Seen is a murder mystery that takes place in a small Australian town. The novel has a complicated and unpredictable plot. From the start, the story immediately captivated me. The book switches between the narrations of Beth, a dead girl whose spirit is still in the human world, and Isobel Catching, who tells stories about stolen girls and monsters. I liked how Catching told her story in verse. At first, Catching's cryptic storytelling definitely confused me. But as the book progressed and the truth started to come out, everything began to connect. Each character had aspects that made them intricate and different from the others, and their emotions and struggles they faced were written well.

After Beth Teller's death, her father isn't the same and becomes isolated from the world by grief. However, Beth's spirit still lingers in the human world, and only her father can see and hear her. When news gets out of a body badly burnt beyond recognition in a mysterious fire set in a small Australian town,  Beth's father, a policeman, is assigned to investigate the case. As the story starts to unravel, and a potential witness, Isobel Catching, gives ambiguous riddles, Beth and her father realize something much more sinister is happening than what is being let on.

Through this book, Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, a brother and sister team with Aboriginal roots, bring awareness to the racial inequality and violence faced by the Aboriginal people of Australia. At the end of the book, there is an author’s note which I heavily recommend reading. It discusses the background of this book. The Stolen Generation were children who were taken from their Aboriginal families through Australian governmental policies and placed in residential schools. These schools forcibly took Indigenous children and tried to erase their heritage and culture. 

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