Picnic At Hanging Rock
By Joan Lindsay
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1 review
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Read this fantastic, atmospheric Australian thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a group of young girls.
It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
They never returned.
Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction the reader must decide for themselves.
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A smaller than usual Whitley Bay Book Group discussed Picnic at Hanging Rock in July 2023.
We chose this book from the 1960s section of the Big Jubilee Read. The novel, set in 1900, is about a group of female students at an Australian girls' boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic, and the effect the disappearances have on the school and local community. Although it is a work of fiction, it is framed as though it were a true story, and has an unresolved conclusion.
We all thought it was an interesting and in some ways challenging read, and had a good lively discussion of a book we all thought was worth reading. Variation in our scores depended on what we thought about the lack of a solution to the mystery and the overall coherence of the narrative.
We awarded it between 2.4 and 4 stars, with an average of 3.