Joanna Jenkins grew up on a remote Queensland farm, then worked for many years as a lawyer in an international firm. She brings both of those experiences to her new book The Bluff, where a big city lawyer works locum in a small town and finds herself embroiled in the connected cases of a missing teenager and a dead farmer. Allen & Unwin were kind enough to send me a copy for review.
The cast of characters in The Bluff is large, but it’s mostly pretty easy to follow. True to life for small towns (even though the town of Myddle is fictional), everyone is connected and all up in each other’s business. What jumped out at me, though, was that every mother in this story kind of sucks. There’s the violent mother who throws public tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, there’s the militant vegan stepmother who imposes her hippie nonsense on everyone she meets, there’s the hardworking single mother who would be the salt of the earth except that she’s been lying to her son about his paternal family and martyring herself by rejecting money all his life… even the main character, Ruth, has the strangest relationship with her grown son where she never asks him a single question. Not one. In the entire book.
Nonetheless, The Bluff is compulsively readable – I ‘just-one-more-chapter’ed my whole way through. I was impressed with how Jenkins wove in legal issues that impact small town life: inheritance, divorce, development, discrimination. The end gets a little bit confusing, with a lot of back and forth about who went where and did what to whom (and Ruth apparently acting as legal counsel for absolutely everyone), but I still didn’t want to put it down.
Oh, and one more thing: readers should steel themselves for some of the brutal ‘realities of farm life’ (i.e., a lot of animals have horrific deaths, including one loveable trouble-making Corgi). If you’re especially sensitive to that, you might have to give The Bluff a miss.
Read The Bluff on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)
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