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At the age of eight, Virginia was ripped from her family by the Aboriginal Protection Agency and placed in a hospital. After a short stay, she was sent to a farm and forced to do menial labor. Her life was hard but there was one bright point – she learned to play the violin. Virginia developed into a gifted musician. Unfortunately, her music lessons ended tragically, and she abandoned her instrument. Years later, Ruby Virginia’s granddaughter, found Virginia’s violin and expressed a desire play it. With her grandmother’s help, Ruby developed into a talented violinist. Ruby’s gift for music was discovered, and she began a quest to receive a coveted music scholarship.
I liked this story. It was enlightening to learn about a few of the traditions of the Aboriginal culture. Virginia’s no nonsense attitude was intriguing. I thought the author did a good job of developing the characters and story line. Even though I liked Gifts of the Peramangk, its positive attributes did not hide the noticeable mistakes in this book.
As I read the book I became irritated because there were many grammatical errors that interrupted the flow of the story. At many points in the story the writer stated that the characters manifested inner turmoil. The author did not need to do this because the inner conflicts of the characters’ were revealed through their dialogue and actions. The author also spent a lot of time describing some of the characters instead of seamlessly slipping each character’s appearance into the story line.
Even thought this novelist had trouble creating visual descriptions of the characters, I appreciated that he took the time to develop them. Their dialogue was realistic and I could identify with much of the turmoil that they went through. I feared for the safety of some of the characters while they faced difficult situations. There were even times that I worried about their fate.
I was puzzled during one key moment in the story, Ruby played beautifully while she thought about a horrific historical event but the author did not indicate that Ruby had prior knowledge of the event that inspired her to play in a passionate way.
As I stated earlier, I liked this story but, the book left me wanting more. I wanted to read more about the relationship that Virginia had with her music teacher. I wanted to know more about Virginia’s courtship with her husband, and I wanted to know more about the relationship between Virginia and her daughter.
This is a good story. I did not understand why the editors of this book did not encourage the author to improve his manuscript. The inappropriate use of grammar and awkward sentence structure broke the spellbinding illusion of this tale. In some instances, a few words could have been taken out of the poorly constructed sentences to improve them. Although I like Gifts of the Peramangk, I thought that more effort should have been put into improving this book before it was published. I give it 2 stars out of 4.
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