"We have to think of the women first. We have to help them. Men protect each other so we women have to do the same." I liked the concept of Hurdy Gurdy more than the execution. I found it a bit of a dreary and confusing read in the first half of the book. Once you finally understood it is a story about a troupe of traveling circus performers who also performed abortions, including er... late abortions where they dispatch the odd child rapist or wife beater ("Queenie calls it a dispatch, a community service"), it started to flow better and get a bit of tension.

I assume the front of the book is deliberate blurry as it overlaps with Win coming to awareness of what she's assisting the circus matriarch Queenie to do in the "reclamations". The early chapters have a sing-song tone and a lack of certainty that I found hard to engage with. There are snippets that draw upon historical Australian responses to sexual violence: "It sits inside the woman, it has a mechanism built-in that shreds anything that goes in, it might be a finger or something else." These nuggets kept me reading, but in small doses: I took nearly two weeks to finish it.