A Bridge To Wisemans Cove by James Moloney

A Bridge To Wisemans Cove Reviews

• 
  Zitong Ren

  A Bridge To Wiseman’s Cove is a young-adult novel by Australian author James Moloney. It has won the CBCA book of the year for older readers when it was first published, and as such people would expect that this would be a pretty good book. Well, the average rating on Goodreads hovers just above the three star mark, and I kid you not, for a book that almost has a thousand ratings, it is by far the lowest I have yet seen. I can say that reading the book was not an enjoyable experience and unless your school teacher has forced it upon you, there is much better YA literature out there. All thoughts and options are my own, they are not meant to offend or hurt anyone.
  
  My experience with Moloney on the whole has not been great, and before I had yet begun this book, I was dreading that it would be bad, and yes, by just looking at my rating, it was bad. The writing was miserable, the main character was annoying, and dare I say it, whiny, and the plot was uninteresting and lacks in energy. This book is targeted towards young-adults, yes great. How do you get people who read little enough as it is to read more? Slow pacing, boring characters, heavy descriptions and a plot that never goes anywhere, genius! No one wants a riveting storyline with badass yet funny characters and writing that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Of course not, we don’t want that.
  
  The writing in this book is horrendous in every way. It is slow, boring and bland. The author’s use of metaphors and similes were infuriating. He is far too over exaggerated in many of the things he writes. At one point he compares the amount of damage a bike has done to Genghis Khan. My issue with this is that how many thirteen year old’s are actually aware of who Genghis Khan is, and yes, I understand it is hyperbole, but the whole point of YA is to make them feel like they can relate to the writing and the story, not making them feel like they are reading a history textbook. Furthermore, for a book of its genre, there is too much descriptions of everything, and far too less of everything else. This makes everything really slow and the story never actually really picks up at all. The prelude was useless until the last page of the book and aside from the the first and last few dozen pages, very little happens at all.
  
  There is this constant battle between these two barges that sees both them going back and forth for effectively the entire book and the way it was resolved was very bland and was up to no brilliance from the characters. This is somewhat of a romance, and possibly even a love triangle if one could call it that, the trouble with this though is that it never goes beyond holding hands and some cuddling. In general, there could have been so much depth to the story and it could have been so much better, but it wasn’t, and perhaps I can’t stand his writing style or that the prospect of a guy with his barge bores me, but nothing else happens! Carl starts washing cars on the barge and he is still doing the same thing two hundred pages later. Aside from some slight character development, there’s not much left to the story.
  
  The characters. I do not even want to think about the characters, they are that wretched. Carl is stated to be a ‘lumpy fifteen-year-old.’ Ok, I’m cool with that, complete fine, but that’s not all, he’s also a pervert and it is the creepiest thing and makes him feel like a fifty year old pedophile. He trails this girl and spies on her, he creeps in and hides when trying to listen in to conversations and later, when she is nude and sleeping, instead of walking away, he stand there and ogles her. It is wrong, it is creepy and he did it again hundreds of pages later. But no, that’s not even the worst part of it.
  
  Carl’s Mum abandons them every once in a while, Carl’s older sister, Sarah also ditches them for Europe(it is set in Australia), his brother Harley is a thief, Aunt Beryl is an alcoholic and gambles, so Moloney, congratulations on creating the most annoying and hate worthy crew of characters. Skip and Bruce are prone to temper tantrums, and Nathan is a bully. The nicer characters, like Joy, Justine and Maddie get overshadowed by the people who are annoying, whining and unlikeable, so, well done. Do they improve, well yes, but actually no. Aunt Beryl and Bruce ditch the town at the end, Nathan and Maddie don’t actually appear at the end, Skip has let go of the past at least and Carl cries the entire time.
  
  It mentions issues such as being overweight, but is not necessarily dealt with as Carl is bullied for his stature but after months of work, is looses lots of his weight and bam, problem solved, which escapes the hard reality.
  
  It is unfortunately not a very good book from my perspective, and I’m aware that there are people that have loved its so it can’t be entirely terrible, but I would give it a pass. 1.5/10
  
  Edit: It is riddled with grammatical errors including missing quotation marks, missing words and misplaced use of quotation marks.
• 
  ambsreads

  I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS BOOK FOR LIKE FOUR YEARS. OH MY GOD. SHOUTOUT TO CAIT FOR GIVING ME THE NAME.
  
  I read this around 4/5 years ago for school. It was a great book. I don't say that lightly since I hated 98% of books I had to read for school. However, this book was amazing. I was 14 at the time I read it, turning 15 later that year so idk, but it was incredible. It was over dramatic now that I look back but it was powerful in tackling real life issues and throwing in twists my 14 year old self couldn't solve. I remember the ending had me even sobbing in class.
  
  Obviously, I wouldn't recommend this book. However, if your school recommends it read it.
• 
  Trevor

  This is the sort of book that teachers tend to pick to introduce kids to the sorts of things teachers like to talk about in books. This book is one of the first books for young adults I’ve read – I won’t literally do this, but a very interesting exercise would be to go through a book like Stephen King’s book Writing and then to see just how many of King’s pieces of advice are broken or ignored in the writing of this book. This book is a remarkable resource in examples of the kinds of writing usage guides consistently advise writers to avoid.
  
  This is also an example of the kind of book that gets written by someone who doesn’t really trust their audience to ‘get’ the point of the story they are writing. This means that they spend lots of time being hyper-explicit. But life is full of contradictions and so their longing to be known as a good writer gets in the way too. This compels them to be ‘someone who writes interestingly’ – the adverb ‘interestingly’ here meaning writing ‘in ways that are not standard and are somehow supposed to enhance the meaning of the text through the text’s convolution.
  
  So, for large parts of this book hardly anyone merely says something – they inquire or they shout or there is a very long adverbial phrase making it clear just how the person said whatever piece of wisdom they were passing on. Look, at least no one ‘ejaculated’ – so that is a bonus, but there were times in some of the steamier handholding scenes when that seemed a distinct possibility. What is it with a certain class of writer that they can’t seem to get their characters to just say things? How much could you ever hope to improve a story by ‘improving’ how you describe the tone in which stuff is said?
  
  This is the story of a young boy, Carl Matt, who is abandoned by his mother and sister and has to look after his young brother whilst living with his less than caring or capable aunt. They are staying in the town where their family had originally lived prior to either boy being born. There are lots of family secrets that everyone in town knows about the boys and their family but that the boys do not know at all. Mostly these centre around the young boys’ grandfather who, through an act of stupidity, killed the son of one of the other main characters in this book, Skip, the barge owner. Through the loving kindness of Joy, the wife of Skip, the Matt boys redeem their family, bring Skip back to life and finally become part of a family that will protect them. Carl ends up being something of a hero, not least because of his willingness for hard work and his dedication to his brother.
  
  If you have characters with names like ‘Joy’ in a book like this, you can pretty much guarantee there will be no irony in their name and that this will be a useful signpost for your young readers so as to help them spot one of the ‘good guys’ in the story…
  
  There are lots and lots of themes in the book like, ‘how responsible are you for the actions of your family?’ ‘how much loyalty do you owe your family?’ ‘who is responsible for rescuing you from despair?’ but then there are also lots of very strange themes here like ‘should fat people only go out with other fat people?’ There is a kind of eugenics side to this book that I found quite disturbing.
  
  And, of course, this is the sort of book that you want the young boys in your class to read, so there has to be at least some titillation. You even get a glimpse of one of the hottest girls in town’s nipples, made even more titillating by being caught in the act by another character. There is also the serious handholding scenes I mentioned before. Add to that a few splashes of sunscreen being applied liberally with sweating palms and lots of talk about how unusual, but also how nice this all makes Carl feel and the requisite quota of soft porn has been added to guarantee any young males in the class will immediately become avid readers for a lifetime.
  
  There is an odd use of periodic sentences in the book - that is, sentences where the main information bit of the sentence is kept until the very end of the sentence. I think the intention here is to show just how confused and upset Carl is at the start of the book, as it is a technique the writer gives up on about half way through – as he does with his habit of leaving out the subjects of his sentences more or less at random. I found this a very difficult book to read because of the non-standard grammar throughout. I got to hear kids reading parts of this book and believe part of the reason for them tripping and stumbling over parts of the text was because the language so consistently confounded their expectations of what words were likely to come next. I’m not sure that whatever was gained in artifice by his style of writing was worth the confusion often caused in the reader by these techniques. Periodic sentences are often a clear sign of a writer begging for attention – a possibility not to be discounted in this case.
  
  I’ll just give some background and then an example from the text of some writing I particularly didn’t like. Carl is working for Skip on a barge both directing cars where to park and washing them down on the trip over so as to take all the salt and sand off them. He fancies Skip’s daughter, Maddie, the hottest girl in town mentioned earlier, but also knows she is too hot for a fatty such as himself (did I mention there were themes in this book I really didn’t like?). Every day Maddie and her mum, Joy, cross the strait and this allows Carl a quick glimpse of Maddie, even if it is a stolen glimpse. And how is this expressed in the text?
  
  “Carl saw Maddie each day as she crossed the strait to take the bus to Hendon High with the rest of the kids. He would spot the Landrover waiting in the queue and made a show of guiding Joy to the right spot, all the time avoiding the passenger seat. Later, he would steal a view of her profile from the far side of the barge.”
  
  I can’t begin to tell you how annoying I find that ‘avoiding the passenger seat’. Its ‘purpose’ – I assume – in the writer’s mind is to ‘show’ Carl not being too obvious in ‘going the perv’ on Maddie. All this is done because we all know we need to ‘show, and not tell’ when we write. But then the writer’s fundamental lack of trust in the reader comes screaming to the fore. The little buggers just won’t get it – so I’d better tell them anyway. We are left with all the convolution of the language and all of the blurted out explanations both at the same time. That is, the worst of both worlds.
  
  Then there are the overwrought metaphors, ‘smiling wider than the strait they sailed across so many times a day’ is merely one that was at hand. And then there is the use of smashed up language for which the point seems quite obscure:
  
  ‘“I’d like you to stay on for a few weeks,” he said bluntly. “See how things go.” After he’d spoken, he looked out to sea. He was asking, really. Knew he needed Carl Matt to bolster hope.”
  
  The last sentence is a sentence fragment, which would be fine if the subject of the sentence had been left out for a reason. And then that phrase, ‘to bolster hope’ – which sounds like something you might have read in a 1940s boys’ own adventure. When was the last time you heard someone talking about ‘bolstering hope’?
  
  Hmm… there might be things about becoming an English teacher that will remain a bit of a struggle for me.
  
• 
  Bianca

  This book was absolute rubbish.
  One of the worst books I have ever read, to be quite honest.
  It was boring and the characters didn't do anything amazing.
  
• 
  sara

  read this for english as well and it was so boring and didn’t keep me captivated at all😐
• 
  Renee

  I really enjoyed A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove. It was a school book, but it was a great story. It talks about stereotypes in society and has simple lives weaved together to create a story. The obvious choice for the main love interest, turns out to be only a crush and Carl and Justine are more suited to each other, helping each other understand their flaws and accept that it doesn't define them. James Moloney writes with raw honesty and weaves complex emotions and storylines into the simplest lives.
• 
  Ray Ray

  Carl is one of the most memorable characters in Australian literature.
  I wonder why...
  
  
• 
  Brooke

  I read this book back in 2003 for a High School english assignment - we had to choose an Australian author. I remember feeling underwhelmed, having never really enjoyed a book that was school-appointed. Little did I know I would still be thinking about this one seven years later. I was lucky enough to meet James Moloney about the same time as he came and did a speech at our school - he was a genuinely friendly person and in my opinion, a great Author.
  
  'A Bridge To Wisemans Cove' tells the tale of Carl Matt - an awkward, lumpy fifteen year-old who just wants to be loved. Sarah, Carl and Harley’s fathers all walked out on the family and their mother often finds them too hard to cope with. When his mother walks out on the family, apparently for good, nineteen year-old Sarah, terrified of the responsibility of raising the two boys, heads to Europe, packing the boys off to stay with their Aunt Beryl in Wattle Beach.
  
  Beryl is less than delighted at the idea of taking in the boys, until she realizes that she can keep their social services payments. However, far from filling the role of their mother, she shows the boys no love and even attempts to keep Harley chained to the house to prevent him stealing and misbehaving.
  
  Carl is miserable in Wattle Beach. His size and awkwardness make him feel self-conscious and unable to make friends at school. Even the townspeople of Wattle Beach regard the boys with suspicion, believing all the Matt clan to be useless no-hopers. All Carl wants is a family and the security of knowing that he is loved.
  
  When, at sixteen, Carl stops receiving any social security benefits, Beryl forces him to leave school. He finds work with Skip and Joy Duncan who run a rusty run-down barge from Wattle Bay to the nearby island. When Carl first starts to work for them the business is losing money, largely because of competition from a rival barge company. Before long however, Carl, reveling in finally belonging to something, shows initiative and helps to bring trade to the struggling business. He even begins to find the courage to stand up to his uncaring, manipulative Aunt Beryl. But, just as Carl begins to experience happiness, family secrets come back to haunt him and again bring his world crashing down around him.
  
  James Moloney has a way with words, making his characters emotions and experiences feel very real. He deals with some confronting issues in this book, and you sympathise with Carl and everything he has to go through. This book really makes you think about family and just how far you're willing to go to protect each other. Definitely worth a read!
  
  
• 
  Ghostly Writer

  A feel-good story.
• 
  Scarlette

  I actually liked the book and it’s story, the flow and how the chapters can be short and straightforward, although the description of Maddie’s body and how Carl always thought of her wearing the blue bikini from the first time he saw her was just not it for me. He then ends up having Justine as his love interest which I think is actually good. I just felt like the way the author would keep bringing up how Maddie appeared to our MC was off and kind of uncomfortable.I did enjoy the book, I was kind of in a reading slump and this was just light (but also kinda not when you reach the climax) and just calming, I saw other’s reviews and they didn’t like it but it really depends on the person so if you’re interested I’d say give it a shot and see how you like it:))
• 
  Anne Hamilton

  I was tempted to give this just four stars but it's such a powerful story, I think that would be underrating it.
  
  Carl is a fat fridge of a boy. Hulking, lumbering, self-conscious of his flab, desperately lonely, terrified that his mother has disappeared for good. Kerry - his mum - sometimes has a meltdown and takes off for unannounced 'holidays' and leaves him, his older sister Sarah and younger brother Harley to fend for themselves. One day, Carl's greatest fear comes to pass. Mum stays away longer than she ever has before. Days pass into weeks, then into months...
  
  Sarah decides she's had enough. She's saved up from her job in the travel agency and is going on a holiday to England. Carl knows she's lying... like mum, she's moving on and not coming back.
  
  He and Harley are packed off to their aunt in Wattle Bay with a couple of bags, crammed full of clothes. Ostensibly it's for the school holidays, but Carl knows it isn't. He buys survival for himself and Harley through his ability to finely judge the worst side of human nature and, if he can, work to appease it.
  
  His aunt wants money. So he'll get it. He leaves school and finds a job on a barge that goes to Wiseman's Cove on Bede Island. The bargemaster, Skip Duncan, doesn't want him initially - and it's not just because the barge is failing to pay its way because a rival has started up and indulged in cut-throat price-cutting. There's a secret Carl can't quite penetrate about Skip's limp.
  
  Eventually Carl shows his initiative and through various means brings the barge run back into profitability. But he's in a constant state of terror: Harley is running wild and his aunt is threatening to split the boys up and send them to foster homes.
  
  Carl works obsessively to make the barge pay its way and bring in a profit. But the terror in him never quite subsides... until, one mysterious day, Justine the overweight girlfriend of the girl in the blue bikini he'd love to speak to, asks him to a pizza party. His reserve is entirely broken down as he realises Justine's friends all admire him for his crazy attempt to save the Duncans from bankruptcy.
  
  But where's his mum? How can he save Harley? He can't work any harder or faster than he is but his best efforts aren't good enough. The other barge copies his every improvement with something bigger and better. Then Carl finds out the true story of Skip's limp - who caused it - and what else happened that horrific day. And then he has an even greater terror to add to his emotional burden: is he just like everyone else in his dysfunctional family - someone who, through his own selfishness, causes permanent pain for others? What is lurking in his generational DNA that just seems to want to harm others?
  
  
  
  
• 
  Emma Balkin

  I didn't find this book that interesting. The plot was rather depressing and I didn't that the characters were particularly likeable. A book with bad reviews.A book by an author I've never read before.
• 
  Asawari

  It was a great book... once I started reading it, I just couldn't put it down. James Moloney is a great author.
• 
  Caitlin

  3.5/5 stars
  I read this book for school a few years ago and it was one of the few books I truly enjoyed reading at school. It tackles a lot of real teenage issues and is truly a wonderful read.
• 
  Bruce Wadd

  Words cannot begin to express the masterly way Moloney handles the difficult family dynamics, the myriad of emotions and complexity of circumstances faced by the key character of the story, Carl Matt. Through clever and yet highly sensitive writing the story never seems to shy away from the underlying theme of desiring love, craving attention and the many different expressions of those desires. The almost fairytale ending is delivered right at the close of the book in a mature and delightful way… loved every moment of this read. [In fact, I listened, and found it just intriguing, and personally I connected with many of these emotions]
• 
  Kristen

  A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove by James Moloney is a novel aimed at young adults. It focuses on the unsettled life of teenager Carl Matt as he works desperately to make a barge business profitable after moving in with his aunt.
  
  Its as interesting as it sounds. The plot drags a little, but the protagonist is rather sweet.
  Theres character development and a plot, and one complex female character.
  
  It's rather middling but a pleasant enough read.
• 
  Chris

  This is touching YA novel that examines identity and our need to belong. Carl Matt is a character we have all known. An outsider who wants desperately to belong, but feels unworthy of anyone's love. This lumpy kid stole my heart. You can't help but root for him and his plodding, deliberate determination. The Australian beach setting could have been the Florida Keys with it's motley, individualistic characters. If you need a feel-good read, this one's the ticket.
• 
  Rebecca

  I read this in high school and couldn't remember anything about it. I don't think I loved it or hated it at the time (I feel like books they make you read for school are either terrific or awful, but this one I couldn't remember particularly hating or liking it). Now reading as an adult, I loved it! Really enjoyable story and the characters are awesome! Justine is my kind of girl (self deprecating weight humour abounds) and Carl is really likeable.
• 
  Mr_Tuckerman

  Carl's family is breaking apart, and he finds himself the only one who can hold things together. Along the way he learns the secrets of his family.
  
  Probably a good choice for boys 13-16. Carl is a likeable protagonist and his struggles are realistic.
  
  Adult readers might be frustrated by the way the whole thing is so neatly wrapped up, given the grittiness of some of the elements.
• 
  Kat

  I loved, loved, loved this book in school and now in my adult years I dared to read it again to see if my memory stayed true to the book. So glad it did. The day it arrived in the mail, I had powered through the entire book reliving my school years whilst doing so. I giggled, I cried, I praise James Moloney for bringing me these characters
• 
  Bree Glasbergen

  I have been looking for this book for years. Finally found it by looking up who wrote Angela and Gracey. Thank you for writing such an exquisite young adults book. I read this in grade 7 and am still gripped by some of the content. 5/5
• 
  Bridget

  for school- 2019 term 1