I read this for English, and I have some complicated feelings about this book. The narrative, and interesting of a plot it started out with in the beginning, felt extremely flat by the end. The whole book, there were character foils or pieces of information given that ended up being irrelevant. After annotations, this took me almost 14 hours to read and analyse, and I can honestly say that it was an extremely boring piece of literature. The white saviour complex as everyone knows is troublesome, and it was very basically written. For some positives to this book, it gives a representation of rural Australia, which isn’t commonly explored in modern texts. It relates to the current events at the time period set (the Vietnam War), and expresses how people were not opposed to blatant displays of racism. The intertextual references to “To Kill and Mockingbird” led me to believe that Mad Jack Lionel would be foiled with Boo Radley’s character, but nothing ever came of this. There were so many opportunities to strengthen the message shown throughout the novel, and it felt a bit too rushed or long in unnecessary areas. The book has a strange ending, almost saying that it is perfectly acceptable to commit heinous crimes because it helps one person. Eliza especially, felt like a very strange character, and she did not have strong moral values. *SPOILERS* She watched her own sister die, and then did nothing about it, only to start dating the boy who dumped the body in the river. It wasn’t a terrible book, and sometimes felt enjoyable, but I think that there were some very major and obvious flaws that could have been altered to make it better.