Review

The Exiles is a wonderful historical novel by Christina Baker Kline (Orphan Train). The novel centers on the 19th century practice in England of shipping convicts out of the country to the penal colonies in Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania). The story is told through the eyes of three young women who are forcibly uprooted from their homes and the highly difficult circumstances each one faces in their journeys. In London in 1840, Evangeline is serving as a governess, is seduced by her employer's son, becomes pregnant, and is arrested on trumped-up charges pressed by his parents to get rid of her, and sent to the infamous Newgate Prison. After suffering for months in Newgate, she is briefly tried and told she'll be exiled for 14 years to a penal colony in Van Dieman's Land. She is loaded on the Medea, a repurposed slave ship with 164 other women prisoners, packed in the miserable holds of the ship, and heads off on a four-month voyage to the other side of the world. During the journey she meets Hazel, a teenager from Scotland who was sentenced to seven years "transport" for stealing a silver spoon for her alcoholic mother. Hazel is a talented midwife and herbalist and is soon helping prisoners, as well as some of the rowdy crew. Meanwhile, Mathinna, an intelligent eight-year-old Aboriginal daughter of a chief, is taken away from her tribal home on the island of Flinders to live with the Governor's family in Hobart as an "experiment." The author's descriptions of the wretched human conditions of Newgate, the transport ship, and the prison in Van Dieman's Land are detailed and hard to take, but she is a great storyteller and readers are propelled through the ordeals of these three young women. The writing is gut-wrenching and vivid and marked with surprising plot twists, but through it all, there are moments of light and hope and a great cast of secondary characters. This is a memorable read that all readers will savor.

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