West, Joyce. Drovers Road: Adventures in New Zealand, Book 1. Bethlehem Books, 2019.
I ordered this trilogy of books set on a New Zealand sheep ranch on the strength of a recommendation from Sara at Plumfield Moms. And she did not steer me wrong. The narrator, Gay Allan, tells about her life growing up in rural New Zealand, and the story is a delight. It’s a bit like All Creatures Great and Small with all the animals–sheep and goats and dogs and horses, even bees–but from a child’s perspective.
“I have made up my mind that while I lie here waiting for my sprained ankle to mend, I shall write a book. It will be about ourselves, the Allan family, about Drovers Road and all our adventures here, and then when we are grown up we can read it, and remember how happy we were.”
I think Gay is about twelve years old in this book. She lives with her Uncle Dunsany, the owner of the sheep station, and her orphaned cousins, Hugh, Eve, and Merry, and their Great Aunt Belle, who mothers them all. Drovers Road is a very horsy book, as the children and the grownups ride horses just about wherever they go, and the sheep ranch is also a horse raising concern, And of course, there are dogs, sheep dogs and stray dogs and a special dog named Bugle who saves Gay’s life at one point in the story.
Or perhaps I should say, stories. The chapters in the book are episodic, with stories about a ghost, and a hunt, and an elopement, an old romance, and a new one. There’s even a Christmas story and a running-away-from-home story that nearly ends in disaster. The narrator, Gay, weaves all these stories together as she tells about her own coming to maturity in the context of a loving family in the remote hill country. I think I noted one curse word in the book with several mentions of men cursing without the specifics of words used. Merry, who is Gay’s best friend and partner-in-crime, does get a whipping from the schoolteacher when he brings an army of frogs to the one room schoolhouse where both cousins attend classes.
“The funny part is that when he went home he quite bragged about how hard Susan could hit, and admired her very much for it. He insisted upon showing us all the imaginary marks on his legs. My Uncle Dunsany shouted with laughter when he heard about it, and said that he had not been so pleased for years, and he was going round to call upon this little teacher who had spunk enough to put Merry in his place.”
There’s a lot of laughter and reasons for it, in the book, and I am looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy in which Gay grows up to become a young lady and an adult.