Greylands by Isobelle Carmody

I bought this book last January at a Writer’s Festival when I was lucky enough to see Isobelle Carmody speak, and she signed some of my books! Including this one actually, where she said “May your world be filled with colour” which seemed pretty nice before I read the book (and remains to be a nice thing to say), but I do get it a little more now. To be honest it was a little unexpected, yeah, the title gives away that there is this ‘grey land’, but as to what the story was about, I had not idea. And as I was reading the introduction for the new re-print edition, I found out that the story was a metaphor for grief. Partially prompted by Isobelle’s own grief over losing her father in a car accident when she was quite young. This makes me wonder whether I would have actually picked out and said this book is a metaphor for grief, if I wasn’t told. I mean, it wasn’t that hard to pick it out, the boy’s mother died, and it is about how his family deals with this loss, but would I have known if I didn’t know?