Product Description
Day's mother died with her eyes wide open in 1947, near Maude, New South Wales. No doctor was called. Day watched his father drop her body into the red earth wrapped in a feed sack. He was only twelve. When he rode up Muddy Gates Lane, away from there, he didn't know that he was leaving, but he was sure he wasn't coming back.

Day's journey took him to America, traveling as groom for a horse called Unusual. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland he meets Callie, who wants to be the world's first woman jockey. There is no doubt in her eyes, she knows about things that Day has never seen. He is stranded by a love for Callie that takes him back to the harshness of his childhood in Australia, to the dark secrets of his family.

An exquisitely crafted and poignant story that reveals David Francis as a writer with an extraordinary gift for language.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 8 reviews)

David Francis

I met this author in LAX, Los Angeles. I gave him a book which he graciously accepted and promptly began to read. In exchange, he gave me his card and explained that he had written this book. I misplaced the card, but never forgot the young man who had given it to me.
Once I located it again, I ordered this book from Amazon and it came quickly. I found it to be a good read. The author brings every page to life. It is a simple story with complicated characters. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys lessons taught by living.
May 30, 2007

A Debut Worth Noting.

David Francis has written a stark, beautifully textured novel reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. His understated and minimilist prose masterfully conveys his characters emotions with grace and humanity. A simple, haunting story of loss, love, and family.
December 06, 2005

subtle and haunting

I enjoyed this spare, quiet impressionistic novel, about a boy who runs away from the backwaters of Australia to the horse country of Maryland, haunted by the death of his mother. I liked that Day, a boy more comfortable with animals than with normal human life, comes into collision with a fiery unpredictable girl like Callie--in the middle of the highly predictable 1950's--an encounter to which he has no framework of comparison and from which he has no defenses. His reactions are always quiet and understated, even in big scenes, he's very internal and the pressure builds up. I look forward to Francis' future works.
August 27, 2005

Darkly Brilliant - 4.5 Stars

The plot of this wonderful book has been written about may times, so I just wanted to add my two cents worth about its effect. The Great inland Sea is one of those books that tattoos you. The scene where Day watches his mother die is just one extraordinary example. Strange , fascinating , wrenching, uncanny. The author of this book time and again depicts scenes where the reader at once meets the strange and yet recognises the familiar. It's a dark book, as any writing that captures life is, but it is not without hope. Not without the possibility of change through truth. The writing is spare and elegant. As taut as the bridled horses' heads in the story. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
August 25, 2005

potential not met due to flat tone and pace

The Great Inland Sea has a strong story in it--a slow coming of age and awareness, a stark childhood setting, a fiery (literally) dream girl, a dead mother who haunts the main characters thoughts and a living father who does the same, a return "home" to see if it can indeed become that. But the novel never met its promise I thought, especially after its strong beginning when 12-yr-old Darwin observes his mother, trussed and gagged to her bed, just before her death.
Darwin ends up running all the way from his home in the Australian desert to America, escorting a horse named Unusual to a Maryland farm where he ends up taking a job breaking horses. There he meets Callie whose outsized personality and ambition (she's known to start fires, she wants to be the first female jockey, she tours the near country running betting horseshows) immediately sucks him in, for good and bad. Their rocky relationship continues for a while then seemingly ends, at which point Darwin heads back home and begins to explore both a new relationship with his father and his own past, especially with regards to his mother--her youth, her strange marriage to his father, her relationship with their single farmhand (long gone), and her mysterious death. Soon though Callie invites him to a horse show in Mexico and when he returns home it will be with Callie and the long-gone farmhand as past and present collide and answers start to fall.
As mentioned, the book starts strongly but its flat-voiced narration and tempo, which I granted him early on as in accord with Darwin's shock and grief, never altered and eventually grew wearisome, dragging the energy of the book down. The sparseness of language has its poetic moments, there are some beautiful lines here, but the unvarying style, like the voice and tempo, also grew wearisome. The same was true of the characters themselves, who all fit into the same type and voicing. These stylistic decisions led to too great a distancing between the characters and myself and I found myself caring less and less what happened to them. Though I finished the book, by the end I was hoping for someone to show up in person on the farm or as part of the many flashbacks, that would break the patterns of behavior, voice, and mood. Someone to add a dash of color or a bit of loquaciousness or visible passion not marred as Callie's was with self-destructiveness or dark childhood secrets.
It isn't that the book was too quiet, it was too monotone in its silence. I'd try a second book by Francis as the prose was often quite strong, but this one I can't quite recommend.
August 18, 2005

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