Our Australian Girl – The Grace Stories

Our Australian Girl - The Grace Stories by Sofie Laguna is a historical story for 8 year olds about a girl scraping a living out of the mud of the Thames.

What happens

Grace is a mudlark. She wades into the river at low tide and feels about with her toes for anything worth selling. Coal. Rope. Copper nails. Whatever has come off a barge.

On one bitter winter afternoon she stands on something sharp, and it turns out to be an iron hammer. No rust on it, no chips in the handle. The most valuable thing she has ever pulled out of that river.

Then Joe Bean sees her. He runs a gang of mudlarks under Blackfriars Bridge and he takes what he likes off anyone working alone. Grace has spent years quietly keeping out of his way.

Not this time. She wrenches the hammer back off him, holds it up over his head and tells him to leave her alone. Her voice shakes the entire time.

That's the first few pages, and it tells you exactly who she is.

Then she carries her prize home to Uncle Ord, who has her out on the river because his own leg was smashed and he can't work. He doesn't say well done. He calls her a thief.

What stays with you is how much Grace notices while all this is going on. The fishwives singing in time over the scaling table. The fact that the only thing anyone ever told her about her mother is that she liked to sing.

This is four books in one, by the way, so you get the whole of Grace's story rather than the first quarter of it.

Now, it's a hard life and the writing doesn't dress it up. Grace is cold, hungry and barefoot in a filthy city. She has no parents. The uncle who took her in drinks, shouts, and lets her know daily what a burden she is. The kind neighbour down the lane goes to the alehouse and drinks until she can't remember who Grace is.

There's a reason it's called Our Australian Girl when it starts in London, too. Grace ends up a convict, and she does get a second chance, so there's trouble with the law ahead of her.

If your reader has been asking what life was really like for poor children long ago, and can take an honest answer, Grace will hold them completely. If cruelty from the grown-up who's supposed to look after them upsets them, hold this one back a while.

What to read next

Clover Moon lives in that same grim London. She's the one all the children in the alley trail after, she lost her mother young as well, and she's already heard of somewhere else she might run to.