Owls do cry by janet frame

On an afternoon outing to the dump, Francie falls and is accidentally killed in a fire.

Francie is forced to leave school at 13 and fears having to work at the local woollen mill, but her father finds her work in domestic service. Part One, set in the 1930s, follows the children through a life of Depression-era poverty, playing in the local rubbish dump and being shamed at school for not being clean and presentable, while their parents live on credit and struggle to pay their bills. The father, Bob, is a railway worker, who struggles to provide for his wife Amy and his four children: Francie, the eldest, who dreams of being an opera singer Daphne, who has aspirations to be a writer Toby, an epileptic whose disability terrifies his family and makes him the town pariah and Teresa, nicknamed Chicks. The Withers are a working class family living in poverty in a small town in Waimaru, a small rural town in the South Island of New Zealand.