Monday 16 May 2022

What We All Saw

What We All Saw by Mike Lucas (Penguin Random House Australia) PB RRP$19.99 ISBN 9781761045936

Reviewed by Kathleen Grace

One of the characters in this YA novel, Shell, is blind, which has roots in the Australian author’s own personal experience of vision impairment. That the book is chilling is evident in its first sentence: ‘Nineteen seventy-six was the year we covered up the death of a twelve-year-old boy, hiding his body from his family and the world forever.’

Sammy is the narrator. He and his friends Gray, Charlie, and Shell live in the south-west of England near an old quarry in Hags Drop into which witches were said to have been thrown. Witches only exist in stories. Everyone knows that. But what if the stories were real?

This is a suspenseful novel about coming of age, standing by your friends, and about the power of storytelling to change our perceptions. Prepare yourself for witches, curses, ghost stories and dark forests with dark secrets!

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