The bonds that the girls have made out of the traumatic incident they all faced is not lost over time. The incident is reported and soon the girls are locked into a realm of secrets, guilt and shame as Miss Renshaw becomes less and less likely to resurface. The eleven girls return to school when Morgan and Miss Renshaw do not surface from the cave. Very shortly after entering, the girls begin exiting for various reasonings. Morgan leads Miss Renshaw and the girls into a small hidden cave to look at ancient paintings on the cave walls. Although Miss Renshaw appears to be smitten with Morgan, the girls are far more cautious of their new classmate. It is there in the gardens where the girls meet a strange man – Morgan – who’s the groundskeeper for the gardens and the apple of Miss Renshaw’s eye.

In her haste of the morning, Miss Renshaw lines up her eleven “little girls” and takes them down to the Memorial Gardens to “think about death”.

“Whatever he did, I ask you, is it right to take a man and hang him, coldly, at eight o’clock in the morning” (Dubosarsky, 2015, p. Miss Renshaw preaches to her small classroom of eleven girls about the importance of poetry and the disgrace of capital punishment. Miss Renshaw is a spunky, old – yet, not the oldest – teacher in an all-girls school in Sydney, Australia.

Set in the late 1960’s, Dubosarsky’s novel follows eleven school girls and the impact of their teacher’s sudden disappearance on their lives.

The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky