AWW2013: Halfway Recap!

In January, I signed up for 2 reading challenges this year (alongside my regular Goodreads challenge). The first of these was Ellie's 2013 Translation Challenge, which I recapped recently here. The second was the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I set myself a target of reading 4 books by female Australian authors over the course of the year. Looking back at the halfway stage, I realise I have reached my target! These are the books I have read so far:

Nicole Hayes - The Whole of My World

YA with an interesting Aussie Rules setting.

Emily Gale - Steal My Sunshine

Coming of age YA with an intriguing subplot that delves into an interesting piece of Australian history. One of my top ten books of the year so far.

Simmone Howell - Everything Beautiful

YA set at a Christian summer camp. I had high expectations but was a little bit underwhelmed by this.

Melissa Keil - Life In Outer Space

Another of my top ten books of the year so far. Great YA with fab male characters.

Maureen McCarthy - Rose By Any Other Name

More coming of age YA - good, but didn't blow me away.

Anna Funder - All That I Am

Based on a true story, focusing on the German political resistance in the early 1930s.

I've really enjoyed this challenge so far - the Aussie YA has been strong, and I was excited to read Funder's latest novel. I'm hopeful that I will be able to add to this list by the end of the year, and I'd definitely recommend Gale and Keil's books in particular to any YA fans out there!

Challenge status: Complete.

Review: The Whole of My World, Nicole Hayes

The Whole of My World

Nicole Hayes

Random House Australia, 2013

[New release: June 3rd, 2013]

Goodreads

Desperate to escape her grieving father and harbouring her own terrible secret, Shelley disappears into the intoxicating world of AFL. Joining a motley crew of footy tragics and, best of all, making friends with one of the star players, Shelley finds somewhere to belong. Finally she's winning. So why don't her friends get it? Josh, who she's known all her life, but who she can barely look at anymore because of the memories of that fateful day. Tara, whose cold silences Shelley can't understand. Everyone thinks there's something more going on between Shelley and Mick. But there isn't, is there? When the whole of your world is football, sometimes life gets lost between goals.

The Whole of My World stands out as a somewhat different take on the theme of young adults dealing with loss and grief. Likewise, the main character, Shelley, is both recognisable as a certain kind of YA heroine - confused, withdrawn, wary of who she can trust - while managing to seem unique in her own way and retaining a strong presence in the book. Dealing with a new school, the loss of old friends, and both her own grief and that of her father, Shelley finds solace in her love of AFL and her local team.

Setting the novel against a backdrop of (Aussie rules) football was different, and I thought it worked really well. Shelley is passionate about her team, the Falcons, and as a fellow (English) football fan - and one who was similarly obsessed as a teenager - I could relate to her enthusiasm, the way a win or a loss could affect her whole mood and outlook, and the energy and emotion she channels into it. For Shelley, football is a kind of refuge.

And it's not difficult to blame her. Shelley and her dad are living in a strange, dull world after a family tragedy, and the two of them barely communicate. In fact, communication is particularly hard to come by in this book. Enveloped in grief, Shelley not only keeps her dad at arm's length, but everyone else, too: her best friend Josh, her old classmates, the people at her new school, even Tara, her new friend and footy ally. Tara is also struggling with her own problems (largely hidden from Shelley, so the reader is also clueless for quite a lot of the book), and is equally allergic to meaningful conversation. While she and Shelley appear to need each other, their relationship is quite hard to fathom at times - a lot of monosyllables and meaningful looks that the other one is left to interpret. The lack of communication was quite frustrating as a reader, but at the same time it did fit the situation, and it was easy to sense a kind of helplessness on Shelley's part, as she struggled to make sense of everything around her.

In the middle of all this, Shelley befriends the Falcons' new player, Mick Edwards. She sees a kind of kindred spirit in him, as a fellow newbie (Shelley has a new school, and is also new to the world of the training ground), and the two forge a friendship that was, again, difficult to fathom at times. Again, this seemed intentional. Everyone around them is convinced there's something going on, and Shelley is quite naive about the whole thing, whilst remaining protective of the friendship they have developed. The lines seemed blurry at times, and I did feel for Shelley as she tried to figure out what exactly (if anything) she was doing wrong.

There were a couple of bits that fell a bit flat for me, not least the token pretty mean girls at school, and the repeated use of "slut" as a insult against these girls, and the girls at the football club who are, it is implied, having sex with the married players. (That the married players weren't castigated at all was revealing, however, about the dodgy gender dynamics at play that these girls were dealing with.) At one point, Shelley seems surprised that one of the "lovely ladies" (her and Tara's name for the football fangirls, who go for the players rather than the play) is actually kind of nice and smart. Overall, though, I enjoyed The Whole of My World - the football background was obviously done with enthusiasm on the author's part, and these bits really came alive on the page, and as a teenage girl dealing with grief and guilt and a feeling of not knowing where she belongs, Shelley was an engaging protagonist - just a girl trying to find her feet.

Overall rating: 6.5/10

Book source: ebook ARC received via Netgalley.

This review counts towards my Australian Women Writers 2013 Challenge.

Review: Steal My Sunshine, Emily Gale

Steal My Sunshine

Emily Gale

Random House Australia, 2013

[New release: May 1st, 2013]

Goodreads

During a Melbourne heatwave, Hannah's family life begins to distort beyond her deepest fears. It's going to take more than a cool change to fix it, but how can a girl who lives in the shadows take on the task alone? Feeling powerless and invisible, Hannah seeks refuge in the two anarchists of her life: her wild best friend, Chloe, and her eccentric grandmother, Essie, who look like they know how life really works. But Hannah's loyalty to both is tested, first by her attraction to Chloe's older brother, and then by Essie's devastating secret that sheds new light on how the family has lost its way. Even if Hannah doesn't know what to believe in, she'd better start believing in herself. 

If I can liken Steal My Sunshine to any particular holiday-related chocolate product, then it'll have to be the good old Easter egg. What appears to be one story actually turns out to be two, one nestled inside the other and revealing a whole extra layer of history, family and reconciliation. On the surface, this novel is about Hannah - a typical, if somewhat shy, teenage girl living in Melbourne. She lives at home with her mum and dad and her older brother, Sam, who is at uni but still manages to infect the house with his stinky trainers and capacious appetite, a la every brother ever. Hannah also has a bubbly, popular best friend, Chloe, who works in her dad's bar and manages to seem cooler and more grown up that Hannah can ever hope to be. Hannah's home life isn't particularly brilliant - her brother is always sniping at her, her mum is perpetually angry and quite brittle with Hannah, and her dad is just in it for the quiet life. I really felt for Hannah in the first couple of chapters as she struggles to understand why she and her mum seem to be on the opposite sides of everything, while at the same time dealing with a best friend who is a little bit disdainful and dismissive of her.

So far, so ordinary - but then the second layer of the story begins to unfold, focusing on Hannah's grandmother Essie, who is agoraphobic and increasingly needs help with day-to-day things. She's a sparky old woman, always full of gin, and Hannah is always worried that Essie thinks she's somehow too boring and too safe, not like Essie herself. Hannah discovers that her grandmother has a secret, and over the rest of the book it is Essie's story that begins to unfold. Here Gale brings in a particular issue of Australian history, that of the use of laundries (quite often known as Magdalene Laundries, at least in the UK and Ireland) run by nuns, which were used to house teenage girls who got pregnant, or "fallen women", as they were known. (There's a Sydney Morning Herald article entitled "Bad Girls Do the Best Sheets" that I found on the same subject.) Girls would give birth and have their babies taken away and adopted by "respectable" couples, and while they were pregnant (and it wasn't quite clear, but I think afterwards as well, for some of them) they were required to work for free in these laundries, overseen by the nuns.

Through Essie, Hannah discovers a part of her family history that she didn't know about, and through this she  begins to see the bigger picture and where she fits into it. Essie's story was really interesting, and I enjoyed the historical element, which prompted me to go away and look up these laundries after finishing the novel. In between all of this, Hannah struggles with more typical teenage problems - tentative dating, her parents, having to speak in the school play, whether or not she even likes her best friend anymore - and the balance was just about right between the past and the present storylines, as Hannah tries to find more confidence in herself. A solid young adult read made much more powerful by the historical details that Gale chooses to include.

Overall rating: 7/10

Book source: ebook ARC received via Netgalley.

This book counts towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

Review: Everything Beautiful, Simmone Howell

Everything Beautiful

Simmone Howell

Bloomsbury, 2009 (2008)

Goodreads

Riley is sixteen and lives with her dad and stepmum. Her mum died a while ago, and Riley has been on the verge of going off the rails for a while - mostly drinking and having sex and causing a bit of mayhem with her best friend Chloe. She doesn't talk much about it, but she seems to be having some issues coming to terms with her mum's death. Her dad and stepmum decide that she needs a change of scene and a bit of discipline, so they ship her off to a Christian youth camp for a week.

While at the camp, Riley is initially hostile towards the counsellors, the other two girls in her cabin, and most of the other kids there. During the course of the week her relationships with all these people - and with the people on the outside - change and fluctuate. Although there are a lot of not-so-nice kids there, Riley does meet Olive and Bird, a misfit brother and sister duo, and Dylan. Dylan has been going to the camp for years, and he's always been one of the cool, sporty guys - except after an accident, he's now in a wheelchair, and feels just as out of place as Riley does. The two of them kind of band together on the outside, and end with a little mini-adventure of their own. Their friendship was sweet, and I thought Riley's friendship with her roommate Sarita was nice to see evolve, too. The whole clique-y camp atmosphere was captured really well: there are some people willing to accept Riley, and a lot of others who are snide or mean or downright cruel. (A lot of this has to do with Riley's weight, and one of the other girls in particular seems threatened by Riley's self-confidence, to the point where she plays a pretty horrible prank on her.)

The choice of the Christian camp seemed a little bit strange - the explanation was that Riley's stepmum had some link there, but given that Riley is an atheist it was slightly odd, and I was a bit worried that somehow Riley's atheism was going to get sucked into a general air of rebellion, and that rather than it being a valid choice it was going to come across as something that needed fixing, but in the end there was a good balance and I don't think anybody came across badly based on their religious beliefs. There was a nice contrast between two of the camp leaders, Neville and Roslyn - both are over-enthusiastic and keen for Riley to get involved, including with the more religious aspects of the camp, but while Neville comes across as quite understanding, Roslyn was genuinely unlikable for me.

Reading this sometimes felt like I was reading through a fog. Riley is an interesting protagonist - she bucks the trend of the meek, unconfident heroine, at least outwardly, and she's not afraid to speak her mind or to go after what she wants. Underneath, it's a different story, and it's here that she and Dylan seem to recognise something in each other, but it felt like a lot of these things were unspoken, or left hanging, or slightly obscured. It's difficult to explain in a way, but as a reader I sometimes felt one step removed from what was happening - this is very much Riley's week in the wilderness, and it feels like looking at a few snapshots rather than being right in the middle of it with her. I think in many ways it suits the story, but I found myself feeling a little bit disengaged at a couple of points along the way.

Everything Beautiful is refreshingly different in both setting and protagonists. I really liked the ending - again, it wasn't a spoon-fed happy ending, but one that fit the story well, a mixture of optimistic and realistic that kind of sums up the mood of the whole book. I felt a bit lost at times, but overall a good read.

Overall rating: 6/10

Book source: Borrowed from the library.

This book counts towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

Review: Life in Outer Space, Melissa Keil

Life in Outer Space

Melissa Keil

Hardy Grant Egmont, 2013

Goodreads

Sam Kinnison is a geek, and he’s totally fine with that. He has his horror movies, his nerdy friends, World of Warcraft – and until Princess Leia turns up in his bedroom, he doesn’t have to worry about girls. 

Then Sam meets Camilla. She’s beautiful, friendly and completely irrelevant to his life. Sam is determined to ignore her, except that Camilla has a life of her own – and she’s decided that he’s going to be part of it.

Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can learn from the movies ... but now it looks like he’s been watching the wrong ones.

You know how happy Yoshi looks in Super Mario, like you can't help but be a little bit happy too because IT'S A HAPPY LITTLE DINOSAUR?

Just me, then.

But feel free to insert your happy moment up there instead, because that's exactly the feeling that Life in Outer Space generated for me the whole time I was reading it. That's not to say it's a relentlessly happy book - there's a lot of light and shade - but just that there is an infectious quality about it that makes me think Melissa Keil had just as much fun writing it, and creating these characters, as I did reading it.

Sam is a film-obsessed high school guy who has never been part of the cool crowd. Instead, he spends his time with his two best friends, Mike and Adrian, and their friend Allison. Sam, Mike and Adrian came to life immediately, and I felt like they were written with tons of affection from Keil - I think in the wrong hands Adrian could have come across as creepy or cartoon-losery, but instead he was totally understandable even in his more baffling or embarrassing moments. There's a point about 3/4 of the way through when Sam and Adrian have an argument, and Adrian's reaction nearly made me cry, something I can only attribute to the fact that by this point I really felt like I knew all the characters.

The construction of the friendship between the three guys reminded me a bit of the film The Girl Next Door: "You know what we are? We're a tripod. Knock out one of our legs and we all fall!" I can't stress enough how much I liked all three of them - they were quite different in some ways, but it made complete sense that they were all friends and there was a good blend of genuine affection for each other, and believable boy-stuff.

Their lives - especially Sam's - are turned upside down and inside out by the arrival of Camilla, daughter of Cool Rock Journalist who is immediately accepted by the cool kids but who forges a friendship with Sam and his friends too. She kind of bridges the gap between them, and in refusing to be pigeonholed (in a lot of ways) Sam and his friends start to figure out that maybe they can enjoy their final year of secondary school after all. There was a lot of personal discovery for Sam and Mike in particular, and I think it captured really well that transition period at the end of school when everyone starts thinking more seriously about their lives and what they're going to end up doing.

I think the point at which Sam wonders if his dad is actually Batman, a few pages in, was the point at which I knew this was going to be One of Those Books, and I was right. There is so much affection for the characters, and it was refreshing to see male protagonists who were both 'normal' and believable. There are lots of funny moments, and a lot of film references, which I enjoyed, and if you don't finish this doing a stupid goofy grin then I will eat a whole plate of mushrooms (and I really don't like mushrooms).

Overall rating: 10/10

Book source: Read as part of Mandee's ARC book tour.

This book counts towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

Review: Rose By Any Other Name, Maureen McCarthy

Rose By Any Other Name

Maureen McCarthy

Allen & Unwin, 2008 (2006)

Goodreads

Don'tcha just hate the way you get caught up in stuff without really wanting to? You make a wrong move and before you know it you're in some weird scene that isn't you but... how do you get out of it?

Rose is all packed up. She's got a van full of petrol and a stack of CDs. She's got a surfboard in the back and a secret that won't go away. But that's okay. She also has enough attitude to light up the night sky.

Then her mother decides to come along... and Rose's road trip takes an unplanned U-turn, straight to the heart of last summer.

The cover of this book shouted two things at me: ROAD TRIP! and SURFING! (Quietly, of course, because we were in a library at the time.) Two things I am a big fan of in books. And Allen & Unwin, the Australian publisher, put out a lot of good stuff, including some really good young adult novels I've read in the last year. I was sold.

About ten pages in, I wondered if I'd made a mistake in picking this up, and this is why: Rose. Rose is perhaps the most aggravating, frustrating, bad-attitude-laden main character I've come across in a long time. Prickly and antagonistic, she's planned this whole road trip to Port Fairy to visit her dying gran, but at the last minute her mum has decided to join her, so Rose is a complete uber-bitch pretty much the whole way there - which is most of the book.

There are two lines that really stuck out for me, and might help sum up what pissed me off so much about Rose.

"Can't you just love the band without wanting to be the band? I wanted to scream at her." - This is aimed at her best friend Zoe, in one of the flashbacks to the past summer. Rose has a total boner about 'proper' music and being authentic and cool, and when Zoe gets excited about some band they go and see she's entirely mean to her for no reason.

"I'm only eighteen but I've already found what everyone else spends their lives searching for." - HOLY MACKEREL, BATMAN. Seriously. Besides which, the person she's talking about here is really not appropriate.

At the same time, though, I think McCarthy has really nailed Rose as a character. She irritated me, but she was also believable. As the book goes on, it becomes clear that all this hard-as-nails, screw-the-world stuff is just a cover up for a lot of crappy things that she's had to deal with, and by the end when she starts opening up a little bit, and starts to work things out with her mum and dad, it's quite a relief. There is a boy, but the focus here is really on Rose and her family, which I think is always interesting to see in YA novels. {Minor spoiler] I believed in Rose as a 'divorced kid', and a lot of her reactions and emotions seemed spot-on, but I was disappointed to see the all-too-common let's-all-be-a-bitch-about-the-stepmother and let's-not-talk-to-dad-for-months threads - again, while it was believable that Rose would react that way, I'd like to see a bit more variety when it comes to dealing with divorce.

The other storyline, focusing on one particular thing that Rose did the previous summer, seemed a lot less believable and just a bit weird.

Despite wanting to scream at Rose quite frequently, I enjoyed this book - a solid contemporary novel about family and life and figuring out what makes you happy.

Overall rating: 6/10

Book source: Borrowed from the library.

Rose By Any Other Name counts towards my Australian Women Writers 2013 Challenge.

Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013

So yesterday, I posted about signing up for the 2013 Translation Challenge, hosted by Ellie at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm, and how until that point I hadn't really seen any challenges around that interested me enough to compel me to sign up.

And then...

I have decided to sign up for a second challenge, as brought to my attention by Mandee: the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013!

Sign up here!

The aim is to read a number of books written by (surprise!) Australian women, regardless of when they were published. In 2012 I read Losing It by Julia Lawrinson, which served as a wonderful introduction to contemporary Australian YA, and there are a number of other books by Australian women lurking on my TBR list - Holier Than Thou by Laura Buzo, Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar, Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta (as well as On The Jellicoe Road), and plenty more titles that have caught my eye at some time or another.

I find one of the appeals of Australian YA is seeing the similarities (and differences) between Australian and British culture, and my city's library service is pretty good at bringing in non-US teen fiction for a bit of variety and balance. I'm also interested to do a bit of digging and find some adult fiction, too!

I've gone for the "Stella" challenge level, which is to read at least 4 books written by Australian women, and review at least 3 of them. I'll create a blog tag here so all the reviews are kept together.

Let me know if you're taking part!

Review: With Lots of Love From Georgia, Brigid Lowry

With Lots of Love From Georgia

Brigid Lowry

Allen & Unwin, 2005

Goodreads

My name is Georgia. I live in a town called Anywhere, that has too many shopping malls and not enough skate parks. I like to think of myself as a brilliant creative person, but sometimes I just feel like a sad lonely girl with a big bum.

Things I want:
A magic bicycle
Two tickets to Natural Affinity
A Vietnamese blue silk eiderdown
To see a ghost
Eva to shift to another planet
A cyborg to clean my room
Purple tulips
Hunter

If Seinfeld was an Australian YA book about a fifteen year old girl whose main aim in life is to save enough money for tickets to a pop concert, this might be it.

Well, okay, not really, but Seinfeld was famed for being about 'nothing', and in a way this book is about nothing, too. That's not say it's boring, and there's certainly a lot of different threads - but rather than focus on any of these, it's more about Georgia's journey through.

Georgia lives with her mum. Her dad died when she was young, and her mum remains fixated on her dad's memory. She's close to her grandad, but the rest of her family drive her a bit mad - her crazy aunt, her other aunt and uncle, who can't stop fighting, and her cousin Gilda, limp and disappearing under the weight of her parents' constant battles. Georgia's best friend is Mel, a vegan girl with acne who understands Georgia's anguish at not looking like everyone else, except Mel is a) in love and b) going to the beach for the summer, leaving Georgia all alone.

Feeling alone, Georgia starts to make lists. Useful lists and silly lists and wishful lists, all in a yellow journal. Her aim is to save up enough money to see her favourite band, Natural Affinity, in Melbourne, which prompts a string of jobs over her lonely summer. She hangs out with the cool kids but still feels inferior. She and her mum tiptoe around the subject of her dad. And, obviously, there's a boy.

I still couldn't say the book was about any of these things: mostly, it's about all of these things to some extent, but moreover it's a kind of coming of age, as Georgia comes to terms with her family, her friends, and herself. On occasion I found her narrative voice to be annoying, but the more I thought about it the more I think Lowry got it spot on. There's an edge to some of the things she says, a kind of self-righteous defensiveness, that reminded me of someone I knew when I was a teenager. But then a lot of the things that Georgia is dealing with - insecurities about her weight and appearance, growing apart from her best friend, simultaneously wanting and not-wanting to be like everyone else - reminded me of the same person, so although it was a little bit annoying at times it did in fact ring true for me.

That's not to say Georgia is an annoying character - it's easy enough to sympathise with her, and I liked that there wasn't a miracle makeover involved at any point, and that the boy wasn't used simply to fix all of her problems. Her changing relationship with Mel was also interesting, and there were some nice moments between Georgia and her grandad.

My only real issue was that although Georgia's voice rang true, some of the conversations didn't. Some of the conversations between the teenage characters sounded very obviously written by an adult, and rather than have conversations develop a character would just say everything they needed to say in one go, or offer up a handy pseudo-psychological reasoning for their actions, one of those "I'm sorry I yelled but I guess growing up with a violent father means I don't know how to handle my emotions properly" moments that seems unlikely to ever come out of someone's mouth in real life. Georgia and her mother handily resolve an issue that's been simmering for most of the book in less than two pages, going from full-blown yelling and accusations to hugs and forgiveness without the reader ever having to blink.

As a light, realistic coming of age story, this is certainly worth a read, and was perfect for a lazy weekend. Although I didn't enjoy it as much as the other Lowry book I have read (Follow The Blue), it's still a fun slice of contemporary YA.

Overall rating: 6/10

Book source: Borrowed from the library.

Review: Losing It, Julia Lawrinson

Losing It

Julia Lawrinson

Penguin Australia, 2012

Click image for Goodreads link.

To avoid Losing It in the bushes with some random guy in a heavy-metal T-shirt after too many tequila shots, four best friends make a bet: to lose it before schoolies week – and preferably in a romantic, sober way that they won't regret.

What follows is a sometimes funny, sometimes awkward, but always compelling comedy of errors as Abby, Mala, Bree and Zoe each try to find their Mr Right . . . or at least get laid.

Losing It centres on a pact made between four friends during Year Twelve, to lose their virginity before schoolies week, in the hope of doing it with someone they actually like (and, you know, getting rid of that pesky virginity thing). The book is split into four main sections, each focusing on one of the girls: Zoe, Abby, Mala and Bree. The girls have pretty varied backgrounds - Zoe lives with her mum, who is pretty easygoing and trusts Zoe to behave herself, more or less; model student Abby lives with her devoutly Christian parents and is dreading the return of her disruptive older brother Zeke; Mala is coddled by her parents and longs for some freedom; and Bree is both super confident and verging on full-blown popularity, and being vague and evasive with her friends. What links the four of them is their scholarship status at their school, and their collective existence as the GeeGees (Geek Girls).

Each section focuses on one of the girls' attempts to have sex, but in and around this are their broader issues with their families, friends, and themselves. Although the big mystery at the beginning is who will lose their virginity by the time the 'challenge' is up, and to whom, in actual fact this was only a small part of the story in the end, interwoven with the girls' struggles to define themselves in relation to everyone around them.

I particularly enjoyed Mala's section, which might also contain one of the funniest scenes I've read in a book for a while. Abby and Mala's stories in particular felt like they could have been books in themselves, and when each of them finished I was dying to know more about what happened next!

I enjoyed the fact that Losing It felt completely realistic throughout. The story starts off with the girls secretly drinking vodka in one of their bedrooms, which immediately struck me as being real rather than overly glossy or sensationalist. They talk about sex like you might expect a group of teenage girls to talk about sex. I don't think you could class Losing It as a romance, although there are some minor elements of that here and there, but I felt like this captured an essence of teenager-dom that I find unrealistic in some of the more kissing-in-the-moonlight-true-love-forever YA out there. (I might just be old and cynical. You never know.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Losing It - a great contemporary read and a great continuation of Australian young adult lit that I have been dipping into. My only gripe is that I wanted more from all the girls' stories, which isn't a complaint so much as wishful thinking, perhaps... :)

Overall rating: 8/10

Book source: Borrowed from Mands at VeganYANerds. :)

Review: Follow The Blue, Brigid Lowry

Follow The Blue


Brigid Lowry

Allen & Unwin, 2001

Who are you? Bec.


Who are you? Fifteen.


Who are you? Lovesick.


First my father had his breakdown. Then my parents went away, leaving a daggy housekeeper in their place. It was my fifteenth summer and I was tired of being good old sensible Bec. I wanted to be a wild and dancing kind of girl, so I dyed my hair, discovered magic, threw my first party... and then there was the boy thing...

Bec lives in Perth with her mum, celebrity chef Vera, and her dad, Lewis, as well as her younger brother Josh and her little sister Bing. When Lewis has a breakdown and has to spend some time in a hospital, Bec's world starts to tilt slightly. When Lewis comes home, everything is meant to go back to normal. Instead, the world just keeps tilting.

Follow The Blue is one of those read-it-in-a-day books, simultaneously about everything and nothing. "Following the blue" is how Bec frames the story, just one thread out of many tangled ones. When Vera and Lewis embark on a publicity trip for Vera's new book, first across Australia and then to the US, Bec is left at home with oh-so-serious Josh, crazy Bing, and their new housekeeper, Mrs D, who rubs Bec up the wrong way.

If that wasn't enough, Bec's friends are talking about boys and sex, while Bec wonders if she'll ever be interested in a boy at all. Her best friend has moved to New York. Bec's new friend, Jaz, is everything Bec wants in a friend, but Jaz brings her own complications: a hot older brother, Nick, as well as Nick's best friend, Steve. Add in missing guinea pigs, homework, and having nothing to wear, and Bec's head is swimming.

The book follows Bec's life during the few weeks that her parents are away. Nothing earth shattering happens, but that's what I liked about this book. Nothing earth shattering has to happen, because everything that does - the boys, the parties, the subtly changing friendships - are surely earth shattering enough as a fifteen year old. The story is actually one long flashback, and the writing fits perfectly: dreamy, almost, like the events are being remembered through a haze of summertime. There are no definite chapters, just a stream of snippets of conversations, images and colours that pull you in and take you along for the ride.


There were a lot of things I liked about this book. I thought Bec's relationship with Josh and Bing was brilliantly drawn, and Lowry captured that closeness between siblings that is different from anything else. I liked how Mrs D was woven into the story, and how she turned out to be not so bad after all. I liked how everyone did their homework. What I mean by that is: you know how in films when no one locks their doors? It seems like in a lot of YA, school is just one of those things that can be dispensed with. Everyone's having an endless summer. Here, school and homework are always there in the background. These were teenagers I could believe in, all zits and bravado and secret agonising.


If you like contemporary young adult, I would definitely recommend it as a quick and enjoyable read, quietly touching without overdoing it. This isn't quite a romance, nor a home-alone adventure, nor a high school book. Follow The Blue, in the end, is just about growing up.


Overall rating: 8/10


Book source: Borrowed from the library.