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Bryce Courtenay Message Board 1/1/2012
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Courtenay has written!

Author Courtenay's Book Reviews

Jessica
Jessica is one of two girls born into a poor farming family in outback Australia. She takes on the role of the son of the family and helps her dad with the farm and shearing etc. She becomes great mates with two boys she works with named Billy and Jack. The three are inseperable. After an accident during a fight, Billy gets kicked in the head by a horse and is mentally damaged and called "Billy Simple" thereafter. He murders his tormenting employers an...
Power of One
This story is a great book about a young English boy growing up in a South Africa with racial discrimination. The boy, Peekay is discriminated against for being English by the Boers (Dutch), but is still strong and due to his genuis and boxing skills and strength comes to lead all the tribes of Africa. "First with the head and then with the heart, that's how a man stays ahead from the start." Hoppie Groenewald, advise that Peekay will carry with him thro...
The Potato Factory
. Isaac (Ikey) Solomon was known as the “Prince of Fences” in 1800s London. He was so called because any illegal activity went through him. He dealt in gold, stolen goods, but especially, counterfeiting. He employed a Jewish deaf, dumb Belgian to make his counterfeit bills. Mary Abacus was so named because she had a Dutch father, a drunk, no less, who'd taught her to use the abacus: the strange mystical instrument of the Chinese. Although Mary had...
The Power of One
The book opens with a white British 5-year-old being sent away from his home (and his sympathetic black nanny, who provides him with a lifelong understanding of black South African culture) on a South African chicken farm, to a rural, barely-civilized boarding school where all the other kids are Afrikaans. It's the late 1930s, and the Afrikaaners (Boers) hate the British, so the boy comes in for an enormous amount of physical and mental abuse - and acqu...