Read! Now!

The Golden Day is a very odd book.  I saw it on a couple Mock Printz sites and then saw it was pretty short and a mystery and historical fiction set during the time of the Vietnam War and I thought, why not?  So I bought the audio download and what a journey it was.  After I bought it, I discovered that it is set in Australia.  I am glad that I found this out AFTER I bought it, because of my own goofballishness, I don't think I would have read it, had I known and then I would have been the loser.
The story takes place in an all girls school, in a class of tweens, on the day that Ronald Ryan, that last man to be executed in Australia, was hung.  This event has really troubled the girls' teacher, and so she says to them, "Let us go out into the garden and contemplate death."
The young teacher wants to go into the garden to see one of the gardeners, a poet named Morgan.  She has a thing for him.  He's a poet and hippie and she is in love.  She also believes that the class can learn from him.
Well they do learn.  Something.
What a book.  What a wild, weird, floaty, psychological mind-trip book.  Very, very different.  A Printz winner?  Maybe.  Maybe.