Beth Teller has already died. She knows that for certain, and the other thing she knows for certain is that her father is the only one that can see that she's still around. He's a cop and although his beloved daughter Beth is still with him, in a sense, he's also mourning the loss of his girl. When a seemingly innocuous crime involving a burned down children's home slowly appears to seem like much more, Beth's dad starts following the trail of clues, one of which leads them to Isobel Catching. Isobel is a girl full of stories, and while those stories don't seem to give any information about a burned down house at first, soon the whole idea of a story will take on new meaning. When one mystery leads to another and the girls who are lost need to find themselves, The Things She's Seen will take you deep into another side and back out, but changed.
This is a slip of a book, a little kernel of a story. But woah. There's a lot to sort through by the time it's over. Sometimes Beth's naivete was off putting and her narrative voice could be a bit clunky, but I forgive her all of that because while parts of this story just felt vaguely amateur, other parts of it really made me think and hurt. One scene every made me a little teary, the idea of your family rooting you, your tribe and your history rooting you to the most important parts of yourself. I know so little of Australia's Indigenous peoples and their heartbreak, so little of their culture and view of the world, that once I listened to the wonderful and powerful afterward, I had even more appreciation for what the author has done here. Things that didn't sit quite right with me at the time, made all kinds of sense when I understood a different way of viewing the world and time and continuity.
I'm so glad I stumbled upon this story of the power of girls to survive, to help their communities and to heal.
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