The Twins of Emu Plains

On the dusty courts of rural New South Wales, twin sisters Jean and Jo Weston play with the kind of fierce joy that only teenagers possessed of perfect coordination and perfect solidarity can summon. When we meet them, the sisters are on the verge of everything: school competitions, growing responsibilities, and the slow, shameful discovery that the family farm cannot support them forever. Mary Grant Bruce, writing in the heady early years of the twentieth century, captures something precious about the particular anguish of watching your world narrow while you are still young enough to believe you could stop it. The tennis matches sing with competitive tension, but it is the quiet moments, the sisters strategizing how to keep their father from losing the property, the subtle jealousies and deep loyalties between two girls who share everything including a bed, that give this novel its lasting warmth. Australian children's literature has produced few more honest portraits of what it meant to be young, poor, and stubbornly hopeful in the bush.