(AUDIO) BOOKS
When A Helping Hand Turns To Abuse
Book review: Sisters of Mercy by Caroline Overington
A mother, a father, and two daughters. A family. That’s what you would think, right? But what if only one of those two daughters is part of the family? Only one grew up with their parents. And she — Snow Delaney — has no notion of having an older sister until both parents have passed away.
When I read the blurb for this book, it didn’t prepare me at all for the story I would find inside. It left me curious — which, of course, is the purpose of a blurb — to find out why Snow was in prison. Did she kill her sister — Agnes — because she wasn’t the only one mentioned in their father’s will?
What was the eerie red dust that blanketed Sydney on the day Agnes disappeared? Why exactly had the two sisters never met? What does Snow tell journalist Jack Fawcett in the letters she writes to him from prison?
Caroline Overington, the author
Born in Australia in 1970, Caroline Overington is an award-winning journalist and author of fourteen books. She won the Walkley Award for investigative journalism twice, first for a series of articles about literary fraud, and second for a series about the AWB oil for food scandal.
She has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch prize for journalism in 2007, the Blake Dawson Waldron Prize in 2008, and the Davitt Award for Crime Writing in 2015.
Overington has worked for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and currently works for The Weekend Australian Magazine.
This author wrote two non-fiction books before her first novel. Her non-fiction books are: Only in New York: How I took Manhattan (With the Kids) (2006), Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal (2007), Last Woman Hanged (2014), and Missing William Tyrrell (2020).
Her fiction: Ghost Child (2009), I Came to Say Goodbye (2010), Matilda is Missing (2011), Sisters of Mercy (2012), No Place Like Home (2013), Can You Keep a Secret? (2014), The One Who Got Away (2016), The Lucky One (2017), The Ones You Can Trust (2018), and One Chance (2021).
Caroline is a mother of twins and lives in Bondi with her kids, her husband, a blue dog, and a lizard. You can find more of Caroline Overington on her website.
Two daughters, a generation apart
Agnes is born in England, during the Second World War to her unwed parents, while her father is fighting in the war and her mother didn’t know if she would ever see him again. She leaves Agnes at the orphanage, promising she will be back.
After the war, the parents emigrate to Australia, where they build up a new life, sad for not having their daughter Agnes with them, and happy when Snow — Sally Narelle Delaney — enriches their marital life.
By the time Agnes and Snow meet, Agnes is already a grandmother, and Snow — now a middle-aged woman — a generation younger than her. They have nothing in common except for being siblings.
A broken system
Snow Delaney and Jack Fawcett are the main characters in the book, even though Jack is actually only a means for Snow to tell her story. What unfolds is the story of a young, naïve Snow, who eventually wants to make something of her life, so trains as a nurse.
She receives an offer to care for handicapped children, being paid handsomely for it by the state. What unfolds is a horrible story of a broken system. Snow and her partner cares not for one, but for many children, and live off the money they get for the children. Not once did anyone of the state check on the children, so Snow gets away with… unspeakable things. She lacks the insight into the horrors of her own behaviour, into her lack of empathy.
Sadly, this broken welfare system doesn’t stand on its own. It’s a fact in too many countries, even the richer ones, and made me think of something we have experienced. It threw me from feeling sorry for Snow, to actually hating her because she tried to justify herself and her actions to Jack, the journalist.
An engrossing read
From the moment I read the blurb, until I heard the last word read by the Australian narrator, this book captured my attention. Despite the horrors in it, I wanted to know how it ended. Unlike traditional crime stories, the author doesn’t wrap up the story neatly in the end.
While listening to the book, and after I finished it, I wondered whether the author wanted to address a broken welfare system when writing this book. I have read none of her other books, or looked at their blurbs to understand whether her books might all deal with ‘the system’ or trying to address wrongdoings in society.
Her name is on my ever-growing list of authors of whom I want to read more of their books in the future.
