Golden Urchin by Madeleine Brent

I read all 10 of Brent's adventurous gothic romance novels as a girl and loved every one of them, but Golden Urchin was my favorite story about a young Irish girl brought up by Australian aborigines to whom she is a tolerated outcast. She runs away at 14 in the hopes of finding people like herself and ends up saving the life of a white man wounded in the outback. In gratitude, he brings her home with him to his wife and they teach her English. From there the story takes many twists and turns and is just... really hard to put down. There is plenty of intrigue and a colorful cast of characters, and even though parts of the plot were a little too transparent, it was still a really fun read. Brent's novels always have a strong heroine and a mysterious, oftentimes tortured love interest, but even though they're billed as romance novels, they're really more like exotic adventure tales with people who happen to fall in love with eachother. Interesting little aside: Madeleine Brent is actually the nom de plume of Peter O'Donnell -- something nobody knew, not even the publisher, until the early ninties.

"We want to tell you something about yourself, Meg," he said, "but I'm going to begin with a question. Why do you think your skin is white?"
I was puzzled, for I had explained this before to Rosemary. "It's because I'm not a true person," I said. "I wasn't born like real babies. A totem-spirit made me, and Manyi found me."
Luke said, "That's all quite wrong, Meg. Quite wrong. You were born in exactly the same way as all babies in the world are born."
"But...I am sure I did not come from Manyi's body," I said, baffled. "Her baby had just died, so I could not have come from her so soon."
"No. You came from the body of a white woman." Luke looked directly at me for a moment. "Your mother was a white woman. Your father was a white man." He gave a small shrug. "And one of them doubtless had red hair, not that it matters."
I put a hand to my head, trying to think. Then I said, "My father? You mean the chief man of the family?"
"Well, I suppose so. But really I mean the man who... who..." Luke took a big breath and looked at Rosemary. "How do I say it?" he asked.
Rosemary gave him a sympathetic smile and turned to me. "Meg, we must speak of things now that we would not speak of if other people were present, because it would be bad manners to do so. But while you and I and Luke are alone it is not bad manners, because you are like our child and we must teach you."
I said, "Is it about lying with a man?"
"Well yes, dear, partly." She stared as if struck by a new thought. "Have you done this thing yourself?"
I shook my head. "No. All the other children of ten summers and more did when they played together, but nobody wished to lie with me because I was not a true person."
Luke looked at the ceiling, and for the second time I heard him mutter something to Jesus." (40-41)

(New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1986)