Holiday assignment
‘Reading and Responding’
The Divine Wind
Daphne Kandiran
Year 11
12 December2007
Dear journal,
Today I read the first chapter of the class novel, ‘The Divine Wind’. The novel starts off with the main character of the story telling us a brief summary of their lives. The theme of the novel is clearly a combination of romance and drama. The setting is a small town called Broome, set in the North-west of Australia, the main characters in the novel are Hartley, the main character that tells us the actual things that occur in the forthcoming events, the is Michel who’s his father and a major pearling master in Broome his young sister Alice and his mother Ida, who is originally from London, and also Misty the young Japanese girl, that Hartley is in love with throughout the novel.
These are the characters we are introduced to in the first chapter. The first chapter tells us about their daily lives, and a bit about the distance between their mother and them. Hartley describes their family as clamorous, but also adds that there is a ‘faint pain’ that surrounds their house, which I think is due to their mother Ida being isolated from the family. Hartley describes a little about the time before the war, when before the bombs were falling like silver rain, as in so many and so much that it seemed like rain. Hartley mentions a time before old ‘certainties were crumbling’, as in things that he once was so certain about seemed to be falling apart and he seemed to question them, a time before they were so ‘transfigured by enmity and fear’ meaning before they became the enemy and felt fear.
Some words the seemed strange to me were;
Creepers: a plant that grows on walls or along the ground.
Barramundi: a large Australian freshwater fish.
Clamor: an outcry.
Profusion: lavish, plentiful....