The story -- three aboriginal girls who escape from a government settlement and make their way home -- is interesting and exciting. Sadly, the writing is poor; the grammar is iffy and Pilkington isn't very good at crafting the story or at working background details into the main narrative.

This is the true story of three bi-racial girls who were taken from their families by the Australian government in 1930 and relocated to an Aboriginal "settlement" half a continent away, and of their daring escape and return to their families.This was not a great book, but it was interesting enough.

This is a true and sad story of times past, about a rather shameful era in Australian history. Of course similar stories has been told from all parts over the world were the white man has come to make his demands. This rather short story gives the reader some background, some knowledge of the aboriginal way of living and the story of the three sisters. It was interesting to read it but it never got me hooked. I can understand those writing that they liked the movie better because the book is frankly a bit boring. I felt that the book is nothing more than the retelling of this event, which is a good thing because it needed to be told, but it does´t have the qualities of a good novel.

This is a quite interesting book that contains a lot of rules about races and details about the race descriminations. For me, i hate descriminations.Wether rich or not, people have their own rights to have what they want and enjoy what others can enjoy. Freedom is still a big problem that didn't solve nowadays. Also, i was impressed by the little girls in the story, they are really brave....

A true story and an important story, but unfortunately very poorly written. As narrative non-fiction it just doesn't work. The author tries to stick too closely to the bits and pieces of details remembered by the protagonists after a period of 50+ years without giving thought to the narrative effect and the 'story' for the reader. Factual historical information, while giving authenticity, is inserted in such a clunky way. And we are not given the girl's story and that of the trek until quite late in the book; after an initial lesson from "invasion history 101". The author is Molly's daughter and is clearly too emotionally close to not only the immediate story, but having suffered the same fate herself, also to the whole issue of the stolen generations. Emotive and biased language is used too readily, giving the impression of an obvious political aim (even if not intended); whereas some distance and more balance would actually have served her better in portraying this atrocious policy and truly shameful period in Australia's history.On the other hand, more fictionalisation, better editing and less effort at including historical research verbatim would have made for a more powerful retelling of her mother's amazing story.

It's a pity that such an interesting story has been written in such a poor way.Pilkington Garimara does not have the control over the writing that one expects from a published author, and the book suffers from constant amateurish shifts in perspective, unnecessary repetitions, and outright intrusions. It's almost as if it hasn't been fully proof-read and line-edited.Of course, if you do give the story to someone else to "fix up", you may get something like the dreadful film based on this book, "Rabbit-proof fence". In the added features interviews of that particular mess, the screenwriter admits that she felt the story was ripe for having all manner of things "overlayered" on it. The result is that the film grossly distorts the events in the actual story for obvious political purposes.This story is already politically manipulated by Doris Pilkington Garimara, with impressive biases built right into the narrative in an embarrassingly ham-fisted way. It's interesting to note that Pilkington Garimara was, at the time the film was released (half a decade after the book) Co-Patron of State and Federal Sorry Day Committees' Journey of Healing (?).What can one say after reading this? What would one say to the author? 'Well done, you've written a whole book, with words and capital letters and all! Good work!'As i said, it's a terrible pity that such an important story has been told with the skillset of a poorly organised year 9 student.Specifically, there's too much detail of what the girls had for breakfast. There's too much a sense that this is a story of "Are we there yet?". Pilkington Garimara is happy to interpret for us the evil deeds of the evil whites who do evil things, but there's no real interpretation of all the whites who help the girls out with remarkable generosity and who support their bid for freedom.There's no explanation of why the police didn't just drive down along the Fence and pick the girls up: it was well known where they were headed and how they were getting there. The film invents something to gloss over this, but why not do some research and really find out why the girls were allowed to elude recovery? That would have been a very interesting piece of character analysis: there are hints that some of those evil whites were actually on the side of the absconders.Overall, this is just so many wasted opportunities.