The Pull Of The Moon – Pip Smith

My friends at UWAP were kind enough to send me a copy of Pip Smith’s new book, The Pull Of The Moon, for review. The story follows Coralie, a 13-year-old girl living on Christmas Island, who witnesses the crash of the Janga during a tropical storm in 2010.

This was a real event, the worst civilian maritime disaster in Australia’s waters for more than a century. In Smith’s re-imagining, Coralie locks eyes with a young boy as the boat goes down, and he is swept away by the waves. As bodies and survivors are retrieved from the water, the young boy isn’t among them, and Coralie decides it’s up to her to find him.

Of course, the events depicted in The Pull Of The Moon are inherently political and emotionally charged. The varying opinions and politics of the adults in the story – Coralie’s parents, and other Christmas Island locals – are filtered for the reader through the understanding of a child. “You couldn’t trust adults to know what to do,” Coralie thinks, on page 146. “They were just as scared and useless as kids, but better at pretending they weren’t.”

The story itself is powerful, but on the page in The Pull Of The Moon it feels like it’s missing some momentum. Coralie’s thoughts are naturally diverted by her mother abandoning the family to chase whale sharks off the coast of Mexico, a plot point that felt more distracting than enriching. I feel like the story might have been more impactful if the mother was an entirely absent figure, rather than someone who comes and goes.

There is also a lot of nature writing, mostly focused on the endemic fauna of Christmas Island: bats, birds, and (gulp) crabs. That will be a big draw for a lot of readers, but I must admit, crabs really give me the ick, and so a lot of scenes in The Pull Of The Moon made my stomach churn.

The Pull Of The Moon will probably be a great conversation starter for younger readers who are just starting to ask questions about Australia’s asylum seeker policy – but for adults looking for insight, I’d probably direct you to memoirs like The Happiest Refugee or No Friend But The Mountains.