Kate Grenville - The Secret River

While I quite enjoyed this book, reading it has reminded me of why I've never particularly been into historical fiction as a genre (which does, now that I come to think about it, render my choice of the subject "Contemporary Historical Fictions" slightly odd, at least when looked at from that angle). I mean, it was easy to read, there was a suitable sense of place and time, etc, etc, but still it didn't engage me on any deep level - there was no sense of 'ah' to it. I should say, though, that I didn't predict the direction that it took in the closing stanzas, and that the choices made by Genville seemed, in retrospect, to be the right ones, giving the story a sense of honesty and imbuing it with more of an allegorical character (which is, in this case, a good thing in that it's not distracting). So yeah, this is good, but I suppose I'm just a philistine, or looking for different things in literature, or both, because it doesn't excite me.