Review by Michael McGirr SJ is consulting editor of Eureka Street
One of the most striking features of The Pines Hold Their Secrets is the way in which it shows other people with access to privilege in the deranged world of Norfolk Island, such as military officers; coping with moral depravity. They find such depravity not so much below them, among the convicts, where it might be expected, but above them, among those who have been supposedly enlightened to lead.The Pines Hold Their Secrets is written with energy and conviction. It is compelling stuff.
Review by Dr. Frances Devlin Glass, School of Literary and Communication Studies, Deakin University.
Jill Blee's woman's eye and imagination gives us a colony one can relish for all sorts of sensuous pleasures: The exoticism of its strangely tropical flora and fauna, the inventiveness and gourmet quality of the cooking to be had from loyal Irish peasant convict cooks, the problems of finding mouming dresses at short notice when the shopping is primitive, the risks to delicate finery of making one's way down a ships rope ladder in multiple petticoats, or being unceremoniously hoisted in a sling to a waiting boat. She also has a fine eye for the absurdities of trying to maintain middle class rituals in such a place: the picnics, wooings and church expeditions which were an effective denial of the reality of a colony which could suffer radical disruption because of the imperatives to escape of a badly abused and numerous convict class There is additionally some fine satire at the expense of those who seek to use the remoteness of the colony as a way of covering the traces of reprobate lives in the Old World. One such person masquerades as a surgeon, with disastrous consequences
This is lively history and cleanly written fiction. What's more, it speaks unspeakable realities from a moral core.
Review by Brendan O'Cathaoir, The Irish Times
Congratulations. Your book is a triumph of the historical imagination: it describes the 19th century convincingly, the Australian landscape beautifully, and creates some memorable characters.