The Thorn Birds

I am supremely confident that life in the Australia outback in the early 20th century was not for the faint of mind or body, but at some point, the tragedies befalling the Clearly family got just a wee bit melodramatic. I read another goodreads review that captured the feeling well: you end up reading a lot about things that happened to the characters, without quite as much balance based one what they did as one might need to keep the plot from feeling like a string deus ex machina (not sure how to pluralize that??). The characters are also divided in a bit too pat of a fashion between “saintly” and “not saintly” for my personal taste. Also...I could write way more about this, and no spoilers here, but the subplot about a romance between a Catholic priest and his teenaged parishioner has not aged well. (although that's not to say that such encounters don't happen, and McCullough did write in a way that casts light on the dark corners of the priest's mind that justify his behavior to himself). But look at me, being all negative! On the plus side, I hung on because I really enjoyed the sense of place McCullough conveys about the geography, climate, flora, & fauna of rural Australia, and there were moments of painfully accurate psychological acuity in some of the characters' struggles.