Book Review – “The Golden Day” by Ursula Dubosarsky
Set in the late 1960’s, Dubosarsky’s novel follows eleven school girls and the impact of their teacher’s sudden disappearance on their lives. Miss Renshaw is a spunky, old – yet, not the oldest – teacher in an all-girls school in Sydney, Australia. Miss Renshaw preaches to her small classroom of eleven girls about the importance of poetry and the disgrace of capital punishment. “Whatever he did, I ask you, is it right to take a man and hang him, coldly, at eight o’clock in the morning” (Dubosarsky, 2015, p. 5). In her haste of the morning, Miss Renshaw lines up her eleven “little girls” and takes them down to the Memorial Gardens to “think about death”. It is there in the gardens where the girls meet a strange man – Morgan – who’s the groundskeeper for the gardens and the apple of Miss Renshaw’s eye. Although Miss Renshaw appears to be smitten with Morgan, the girls are far more cautious of their new classmate. Morgan leads Miss Renshaw and the girls into a small hidden cave to look at ancient paintings on the cave walls. Very shortly after entering, the girls begin exiting for various reasonings. The eleven girls return to school when Morgan and Miss Renshaw do not surface from the cave. The incident is reported and soon the girls are locked into a realm of secrets, guilt and shame as Miss Renshaw becomes less and less likely to resurface. The bonds that the girls have made out of the traumatic incident they all faced is not lost over time. The book fast forward to 1975, where the story revisits the same eleven girls and reevaluates how the disappearance of their once loved teacher, Miss Renshaw, still cripples them.
Dubosarsky provides a wonderful platform into the world of children’s minds when they are faced with adult situations. Dubosarsky does not shy away from the traumatic ideas that have been placed among the eleven girls that attend the highly structured and privatized school in Sydney, Australia. Rather, she focuses on the wonder, change and growth that the girls undergo in their response to their teacher’s disappearance. Dubosarsky goes further than to just provide feedback on the girl’s responses, but also allows a look at the positives and negatives of teaching and parenting types on children in a time of trauma. Her novel is ageless and easily classified as crossover literature. Both adults and children can read her novel and gain insight into the difficulties that these eleven girls faced in the wake of the trauma – some being not limited to just one traumatic incident. “… crossover literature addresses a diverse, cross-generational audience that can include readers of all ages: children, adolescents and adults” (Beckett, 2009, p. 3).
What works best for “The Golden Day” is that Dubosarsky is native to Sydney, Australia. She is a teacher there and attended school in similar settings to her characters in “The Golden Day” when she was younger. Dubosarsky mentions in her authors note that the element in “The Golden Day” when the girls grow and change is partially autobiographical (Dubosarsky, 2015, p. 152). This insight alone, allows “The Golden Day” to have a more emotionally charged plot and allow the audience to feel connections and emotions from the characters on a different level. To Australia natives, there are many points in Dubosarsky’s novel where both adults and children can reminisce or connect with their own personal feelings about loss and trauma. Going above just her own personal connection to Australia, Dubosarsky also based a large amount, and even the idea of the novel on pop culture native to Australia. She states in the author’s note that her inspiration for “The Golden Day” came from a painting by Charles Blackman – who is an artist also native to Sydney, Australia (Dubosarsky, 2015, p. 152). “The idea began at least thirty years ago, when I saw Charles Blackman’s wonderful Floating Schoolgirl in the Nation Gallery in Canberra… The flying child may be frightened, but she’s also brimming with the joy of a secret life” (Dubosarsky, 2015, p. 152). Dubosarsky also honors Blackman’s artwork further with a statement on the table of contents page. “The chapter titles in this novel are taken from paintings and drawings by Charles Blackman” (Dubosarsky, 2015, table of contents). The power of “The Golden Day is not limited to the flawless writing by Dubosarsky, but the full integration of true Australian culture to fill the audience with a sense of life and understanding for little girls in Sydney, Australia in the late 1960’s.
Ursula Dubosarsky’s novel, “The Golden Day”, can be purchased from Amazon from six to eleven dollars, depending on the reading format.
Work Cited:
Beckett, S. L. (2009). Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dubosarsky, U. (2015). The Golden Day. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.