This slim, potent novel takes place in the nineteen-fifties in Australia, in a convalescent home for children with polio. Frank, thirteen years old, spends his days longing for his fellow-patient Elsa, sharing covert smokes with the gardener, and writing poems on prescription pads. Poetic intensity suffuses the novel, too: the children sweating in their splints; verandas flanked by peppermint trees; “a heat wave so intense it was like a time of war.” Frank, like many of the children, is a “New Australian,” his family having recently fled Nazi Europe; the novel, resisting easy sentimentality, presents polio rehabilitation as a metaphor for postwar recovery. Frank and Elsa’s deepening relationship suggests the possibility of forming a new society and the unsettling consequences of that process.
