Wood for The Trees by Ian Belshaw is an easy read with characters you can relate to.
Luke Barkley has an obsession with old-time bushrangers. He can only see the romance of their lives and disregards the fact that they were simply lawbreakers that stole and often killed innocent people.
Luke decides to live his life as a modern-day bushranger and follows the lead of bushrangers from the past. Things don’t go quite as he had planned and he begins to see that perhaps this lifestyle was not as romantic as he had thought.
His good upbringing starts to cause conflict with his bushranger life…but he is in too deep.
Stephen Owens has spent his life as a police officer and finds himself hunting down this modern-day bushranger. As he becomes more involved in the case he also has personal concerns for his marriage.
Somehow things are just not the same. There is a breakdown in communication between him and his wife that he decides he will work on and repair. But, he sidelines that until after he captures his criminal.
As Luke and Stephen’s paths finally cross nothing goes the way either of them wanted or expected.
This was a story that was a great weekend read. A story that’s very real. I felt that I understood exactly where both main characters were coming from.
A selection of our Beauty and Lace Club Members are reading Wood for The Trees by Ian Belshaw. You can read their comments below, or add your own review.
ISBN: 9781922444011 / Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
Im a Mum of 3 beautiful girls.
An avid reader that loves to travel but lacks the funds to venture far and wide constantly. A perfumeaholic with an addiction to beauty and skincare.
If not found with my head in a book or on a plane I can be found spending hours upon hour in Doctors and Hospital waiting rooms as part of my job as a Carer
I don’t know quite what to say about this novel. If I hadn’t been reading it as a review book for Beauty and Lace Bookclub, I would have put it down several times over and not picked it back up. I enjoy poetic, descriptive writing, but this novel was saturated with it to the point I skimmed where I could, but it was hard as in a paragraph of description there might be one sentence that was important to read.
The story of a man aiming to be a modern-day bushranger and the police officer that pursued him sounded like a great premise for a story, and it was, but I think this would have faired far better as a short story, without the extraordinarily poetic prose, that at times made me wonder if I even understood what the author was trying to convey. He did do a great job of describing the landscape however and I could clearly see the vast Australian plains and the rough Australian bush.
I had a hard time really connecting to the characters, I felt a lot of the time that I was just being told a story, rather than experiencing the story, then there would be times where I was engaged with the characters only to lose the flow as the writing changed and I was thrown back out again.
I got to the end of the novel and was upset by the ending, that I’d made my way through this plethora of words and it ended the way it did, I guess it was a good ending, but for me a disturbing one, that didn’t leave me feeling any hope or joy whatsoever.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people who will thoroughly enjoy this tale of caution.
Thanks to Beauty and Lace Bookclub (http://bookgirl.beautyandlace.net/book-club-wood-for-the-trees) and Shawline Publishing Group for providing me a copy in return for an honest review.
An interesting story of a young man who wants to be a bushranger and the policeman who pursues him. But, for me, the story got bogged down in the language. I ended up skimming and reading the bits where something happened just to find out what happened. And the ending left me confused!
Thank you Beauty & Lace for the opportunity to read and review this book.
I did enjoy the storyline but struggled, I found the words perhaps a bit too fancy for me….I know that sounds ridiculous as it is so well written but it made me kind of drift away and have to bring myself back to the story a few times.
I’m just not quite sure how I feel about this book. The ending wasn’t what I expected. I’m sitting on the fence with this read.
A very wordy tale of a modern day bush ranger.
What started as an interesting story, took a poetic turn about a third way in and the story became somewhat lost in the detail. A thesaurus was definitely at play as the words became more obscure at this point, further detracting from the story.
I really wanted to like this but as Ned Kelly was heard to say, such is life!
Ian Belshaw’s Wood for the Trees promises an interesting storyline with lashings of bushranger folklore and Australian history. However, the flow of the novel was somewhat impeded by the writing. It never really absorbed my attention, although I did enjoy the landscapes in which the story is set.
Many thanks to Beauty and Lace for the opportunity to read Wood for the Trees.
I was intrigued by Wood for the Trees and the concept of a modern day Bushranger in this debut novel by Ian Belshaw .
Luke has been fascinated with Bushrangers since he was a child. He decides that he wants to see what being a modern day Bushranger is really like despite his own good moral compass. Of course the law eventually gets involved. This was an interesting read but the language and writing at times became a bit overwhelming which could put off some readers.
Thanks to Beauty and Lace and Shawline Publishing for my review copy.
Honestly, I struggled to get into this book, I think perhaps it needs to move faster at the start because it just didn’t do it for me, I had to pick it up several times and couldn’t get into it, sorry!
Thank you Beauty and Lace for giving me the opportunity to read this suspense novel based on Australian Bush rangers.
I was extremely fascinated by the storyline at the start and was wondering what would make someone do that but I have to say even though the characters were strong I didn’t particularly liked the style of writting.
It was a bit of struggle to finish the book but can’t just leave a book unread. I also found that there was no proper conclusion to this story, I was expecting more to the story.