Blood In The Dust by Bill Swiggs

          This isn't really my genre of novel and isn't something that I would have necessarily picked to read.  The blurb is appealing and it gives a sense of a "sweeping saga" dealing with the trials and tribulations of the O'Rourke boys after the senseless murder of their parents by an outlaw.  It's maybe not as sweeping as the author perhaps intended (or as the publishing house think) but it is a good, solid tale.

My problem with it was it took so long for anything to really get going.  Initially the story is told from three perspectives - the O'Rourke brothers, the outlaw Anderson and his native guide Chilbi and the Hocking family.  I really, really struggled with the early chapters of this book.  Once the murder of the O'Rourke parents takes place it all becomes a bit flat and keeps digressing to following Anderson's party which I just wanted to skip past.  The sections dealing with the Hockings' Family arriving were interesting but very short lived.  To be honest they were what kept me reading whilst I waited for them to somehow to hook up with the O'Rourkes in the hope that things would improve.

It does get better from that point, but I did feel like the build up to it went on too long.  The descriptions of the gold miner's life are vivid and you can almost feel the choking dust and grabbing mud.  Sadly, the personal angle is rather clumsily dealt with and the burgeoning romance is ever so slightly cringy.  However, this is overshadowed by the weaving in of an actual historical fact; the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. 

The plot does move at a decent pace, once you get past the first 110 or so pages (so just under a third of the book).  The characters are solid and believable with a good depth to them.  The author also manages to bring in the plight of the Aboriginal people who were not only displaced by colonisation but were also decimated by diseases that the white man brought with him.  This is done subtly and in such a way that you feel for Chilbi and his two brothers, the only survivors of their remote tribe, without beating you over the head with the atrocities that were perpetrated on the indigenous peoples.

Overall it is very much a slow burner of a book but it is a solid tale, told reasonably well.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK PROVIDED BY READERS FIRST.