Every few years i read a book of such magnitude, significance that resonates deep personal meaning to me. This is such a book. This is a magnificent Australian saga set in an epic landscape. I am truly moved and blessed to read such a work. a work of genius about the Riverina NSW.

"This is a landscape beautiful only to those who know that beauty must be hard won in the mind and eye as well as the heart. It is a harsh, new beauty with very little antecedent poetry to till and seed the white mans imagination. A landscape that must be viewed with an aboriginal eye to see its colours and patterns and cunning shifts in perspective. The white fella eye is still a long, long way from seeing this land's dreaming and the white fella heart is not yet fully opened to the high and ancient antipodean sky". Bryce Courtney from "Jessica".

One of my favourites of his...just brilliant...

This is one of the finest novels I have read. It's based on a true story, takes place in Australia. Jessica is still well loved by the aborginal people. In the early days of the 20th century all aborginal children fathered by white men were taken away from their familys and given to whites to raise. This is Jessicas story..A young girls fight for justice against tremendous odds. A tomboy, Jessica is the pride of her father, as they work on the struggling family farm. One quiet day the peace of the bush is devastated by a terible murder. Only Jessica is able to save the killer from the lynch mob..but will justice prevail in the courts? Nine months later, a baby is born...with Jessica determined to guard the secret of the father's identity. The rivaly of Jessica and her beautiful sister for the love of the same man will echo througtout their lives-until the truth must be told. Set in the harsh Australian bush against the outbreak of world ww1, this novel is heartbreaking in its innocence, and shattering in its brutality.

I loved this book. I first read it more than 10 years ago and I still often think about certain parts because it touches on themes I hadn't considered before.
The ending is perfect (in my opinion).

This is the 2nd Courtenay book I've read. I loved his "The Power of One," and picked this one up at our Library book sale for $2.

Courtenary says he bases this book on the real life of a young Australian woman who fought hard for social justice issues, which defied the conventions of her time. This story is full of mean spirited people, deceit, theft, physical hardships and murder. This book backs up the saying "life is hard, and then you die." Numerous times I looked up from the book and just said "really?" Even though I saw a number of inconsistancies in the story, and felt it was a bit over the top in its believability, I still found it readable and entertaining.

This has been a good and yet at the same time a sad read. The fact that it's based on a true story was what attracted me to the book when I found it in a local charity shop recently.
Jessica has been such an astonishing character , full of life and determination to be her true self . Her life has not been easy , losing her love to her sister , so stolen by her mother after losing her father suddenly . Then placed in a mental institution by her own mother.
Jessica fought back , got released and made herself a life in the world . She helped her friend Mary get her children back and gave an old man a cause and the chance to achieve something good plus giving him the love and care he needed . Jessica is a truly remarkable and strong woman , a fighter with such kindness in her heart . I as adored her as a character and also her feisty personality.
Her ending upset me , though I liked that she was found with her beloved pet rusty/ her death was so unexpected and I wasn't prepared for it.
I always knew who the father of her child was , and I liked that her sister Meg never realised it though spitefully I would of had it revealed as I didn't like either the sister or the mother and it would be the perfect comeuppance for their horrible treatment of jessica .
What I loved most was her relationship with Jack , a forever love cruelly separated by her family and war. The knowledge for her that he always loved her and the letters made me smile but also feel sad for both the very likeable characters .
A mighty good read that I can't wait to share with others .

Author Bryce Courtenay is an excellent storyteller, and his Jessica is no exception. Jessica was made into a television mini series. My husband watched it and strongly recommended that we buy the audio book. Then on a recent car trip he suggested that we listen to it. We spent a day and a half listening to this 19 hour audio book on our way to our destination and then finished it on our way home. It made the trip fly by.

Jessica grows in the bush of New South Wales, on a farm, in the early twentieth century. She is a tomboy and fiercely independent. Her mother is loving to her older sister and cruel to her. Life on a farm that barely makes a go is hard and Jessica helps her father with the work and he cares for her.

Jessica’s story is dramatic and might be considered a soap opera, but her tale is so well told and narrated that it is hard to stop listening. Jessica fights for what is right and protects her friends.

The last few hours were a subplot and not as interesting. If this book was purely fiction I think it should have been edited out. But, since Courtenay says his story is based on real person, he should tell her whole story. I’m appalled that some people have such difficult lives and can have the strength to fight for what they believe to be right.

I’m eager to listen to more books by Courtenay. Humphrey Bower is an excellent narrator. I could, and did, listen to him all day.

I have loved some of Courtenay's work (The Power of One, and Brother Fish) and I have been ambivalent about some of his work (Fishing for Stars). But this was one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It's so many pages of life just getting worse and worse. The poor protagonist gets beaten down time after time and things keep getting worse, and you hope, "hey, there must be some redemption eventually, this book's darn long enough." But no. Things get worse. Then she dies. It was awful. Now I don't mind sad endings, or challenging reads, dealing with hard material, but this book takes the cake for the relentless abuse of character and reader without any light at the end of the tunnel. I would not recommend this.

I hoped that would be the end of it.

ALAS, not so long ago, a friend of mine texted me this:
"So I am reading 'Jessica' because you said it might be worth a read." I most certainly did not, but that aside, he went on saying "I need to know, does it have a happy ending? I'm going to quit if it doesn't have a happy ending. *feeling super angry*" And with those words, it all came flooding back to me. The powerless anger of seeing Jessica mercilessly abused and hoping and hoping things would turn around for her. I know life doesn't always have happy endings, but it is painful to see only the dark side. Needless to say I disabused him of the idea of there ever being a happy ending and that I had ever encouraged a single reader to undertake the dark and fruitless journey that is the reading of Jessica. Stick to pretty much ANYTHING else Courtenay has read. But not Jessica. Never Jessica.

A bad good book.
This book has a great story interspersed with pages and pages of unnecessary writing. I simply couldn't be bothered with finishing it because
- you have to read through so much extra stuff before the action introduced by the author gets completed (example: when Jessica hears the dogs barking strangely, she ignores it three times before she does something, four, if you count her still holding on to the pail when she can actually see that the dogs are bothered by something strange. example 2: Jessica taking #spoilername# to #spoilerplace# is a whole chapter in itself even though there is actually very little going on between the beginning and end of this event.

- too painful a read. Too much tragedy without any lightness or comfort.

I couldn't read it and i wouldn't recommend it. Check out the summary if you must. The author has brilliant plot twists that are carried out well from time to time. If only he managed to make them flow from one to another without an awful amount of material in between.

Despite Courtenay's writing being as good as always in this book, I didn't really find the story as enjoyable as some of his others. It was too long, with too many tangents and I think the synopsis implied a much greater focus on Jessica's baby and the consequences of her having it, when the subject didn't really feature much after the baby was born and almost felt like an aside at the end. I didn't feel the explanation of why she wouldn't reveal who the father was a bit weak.

Courtenay's books always try to cover a lot of topical issues of the period they are set in. They also attempt to educate the reader about what life was like during the period by going into a lot of detail or focusing on specific jobs and careers. In this book, I don't think he managed to meld all these issues and details as well as other books. In particular, the whole Stolen Generation storyline felt like it was thrown in just to teach readers about this shameful time in Australia's history rather than adding to the story.

My god, it has been ages since i read this book but I still carry the scars. I don't think I have ever cried so much during a book. Okay maybe a few times, i am a bit of a cry baby. However, this book wassad because nothing ever got fixed and then she dies. It screamed of injustices, come on how much can a person go through before she just gives up! It has stayed with me because of the unfairness dealt to Jessica, why? I wanted to and did scream this at the book on many occasions. Alot happens in this book,it stirs up feelings and opinions about many topics, the stolen generation in australia for one. Even though this book was sad I did read and enjoy it, but if you like a happily ever after you are not going to get it from the tale.

Jessica, by Bryce Courtenay, Narrated by Humphrey Bower, Produced by Bolinda Audio, Downloaded from audible.com.

I love Courtenay’s vast sweeping epics about Australia, and no one narrates them better than Humphrey Bower. This one is about Jessica, a girl who was raised almost as a boy because her father had no sons. She preferred being outdoors to learning the charm school virtues of feminity in the early 1900’s. She grew up to be her father’s right-hand “man” and only with her help was he able to farm and keep enough income to keep the family goin. She was in love with the neighbor boy, Jack, Thomas, the son of the richest sheep station owner in the region, and Jack was in love with her. But her mother and sister planned from early childhood that Jack should marry her sister, Meg, and Meg would be the lady of River Station. Meg and their mother tricked him into marrying Meg by saying Meg was pregnant. Then Meg, who was not pregnant, stole Jessica’s baby when he was born and raised it as hers and Jack’s. Jessica was an outcast from her family and from the community because she dressed like a man, raised animals and farmed like her father, was independent, and, most of all, because her friends and neighbors were the aboriginal people, whom she helped and defended at every possible moment. This is a book about the time from the end of the 19th century to about 1929. As with Courtenay’s other epics, I was sorry to see it end.