The Salt of Broken Tears

On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and the brutish farmhand wants to possess her. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the only trace of her a bloodied dress, the boy sets out in search of an Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his dog, the boy becomes aware of another party converging murderously on his destination.

The vast, sparsely settled wilderness of the Australian outback is the setting and true protagonist of this manifestly heavy-handed and obscure (in both language and theme) debut "walkabout" novel, which was published in 1999 to high praise in Australia. A sensual, free-spirited young woman, hardly more than a teenager and offering few clues to her past, stumbles half-naked into the mundane existence of a family farming the margins of the desolate Australian salt flats. Accustomed to being the focus of male attention, the wife is jealous and resentful. Aroused by the young woman's sexuality, the farmer's postpubertal son indulges his voyeuristic obsession, spying on her clandestine late-night trysts with a loutish farmhand. She suddenly vanishes the morning after the boy sees the handyman strike her in anger, and the only clue is a bloody dress neatly laid out across the straw in the stable and a smashed cardboard suitcase spilling her possessions. Convinced she has gone off to join Cabel Singh, a charismatic, nomadic Indian peddler, the boy takes his horse and dog and sets out across the wasteland to find them. Repetitive, tedious, overly detailed descriptions (an exhaustive inventory of the contents of a minor character's car stretches over several pages) of featureless landscape and gratuitous characters mar this convoluted, disjointed narrative as the dispirited odyssey moves back and forth in time. Bright spots are a scattering of strongly crafted musings by the central characters. In the end, however, there is little resolution and virtually no sense of redemption.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

When strange, beautiful, and thoroughly metaphorical Eileen appears with the wind on a boy's farm, he cannot hide his fascination. But it is when Eileen leaves--the only sign of her is a dress soaked in blood--that the boy needs to understand what has happened, not only to her but to himself. The boy sets off with only "a horse that needed attention and a three-legged yelping dog that ought to be shot" in search of a mysterious Indian. The resulting pilgrimage, wandering through a landscape filled with no less temptation than the desert Jesus encounters in the New Testament, shapes the novel. Along the way, the boy meets strange and wonderful people, nearly all of whom keep talking about Caleb Singh. As the boy learns more about the mysterious Mr. Singh, the scope and danger of the boy's quest become palpable. With characters that speak with wonderful figurative images, and Meehan's lush, lyrical descriptions of the world's vastness, this first novel reads like a traditional southern story told in an Australian accent. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

This is an extraordinary and beautifully realized first novel about a 12-year-old boy who lives on a farm in a remote region of Australia. The novel begins with an astonishing event: a young woman staggers out of the wilderness and on to the family farm. Bold and enchanting, Eileen is informally adopted by the family, and the boy is quickly enamored of her. When Eileen vanishes one night a year later under suspicious circumstances, the boy sets out on his horse to search for her a search that becomes an epic journey into a world of sudden violence, unexpected generosity, and dangerous passion. Meehan describes the unusual people the boy meets, the heartbreaking stories they tell, and the foreboding grandeur of the desolate landscape he traverses with language that approaches the condition of poetry. The boy emerges from this heroic journey at the end of the novel battered, exhausted, and transformed. Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries. Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.