But in a town teeming with corruption, prejudice and blackmail, Eliza soon learns that the truth can cost more than pearls, and she must decide just how much she is willing to pay – and how far she is willing to go – to find it . This discovery made Broome — a sweltering, remote town at the edge of the Indian Ocean — the center of the world’s lucrative mother-of-pearl industry in the late 19th century. Eliza is suicidal in her mission to find her father and towards the end of the story, she really does not care if she lives. I really liked Balarri (an aboriginal man who works on the Brightwell’s boat) who we are introduced to through Eliza’s memories, he introduced much of the native fauna and flora to her Eliza and the more I found out about him only endeared me to him further. While I know what colonizers do to natives (as an Indian), the pearl diving community was new to me.

They land in 1886 on the blood-red sands of Bannin Bay, a fictional stand-in for Broome — and like the real town, simultaneously cosmopolitan and isolated, over a thousand miles from the region’s capital. As the story begins, for a moment it switches between 1886 and 1896, but this is very brief and I actually hoped that it would continue throughout the whole story. Truth skillfully weaves together the characters, including Nico; his brother, Sebastian; Sebastian’s wife, Fannie; and the “heartless deceiver” Udo.

Pook sets up some intriguing female sidekicks—Eliza’s childhood friend Min, who becomes a prostitute, and deckhand Knife, who disguises herself as a boy—but their stories are not fully explored. It is 1886, and a 10 year old Eliza has sailed from England to Bannin Bay in Western Australia with her parents, older brother Thomas, Uncle Willem and Aunt Martha.

It was so relentlessly depressing, and once I had gotten through the whole story, it seemed to be without purpose.

Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. With the earlier timeline, I was hoping for character-development, pearling historical background – how it was first discovered and evolved into booming industry and then its decline. It was slow, so very slow, dragging, not building on the protagonist, Eliza or her partner in crime Alex.