After loving Boy Swallows Universe when I read it earlier this year, I decided I needed to read more books by Trent Dalton. This one didn't disappoint.
It's about a homeless girl whose mother has kept her on the run as long as she can remember. To keep her safe, she's never been told her real name. The threat of violence is real and has hung over them the whole time they've been running from town to town, city to settlement. Now, almost eighteen and determined to become a world-famous artist despite her background, the girl and her mother live in a junkyard near the river in Brisbane. To keep themselves afloat, both help distribute drugs for the city's feared drug lord, Flora Box.
When the mother drowns in the midst of undertaking an heroic act, the girl is set adrift, the one person anchoring her to the world gone. In the aftermath, she begins to discover things about herself that change the portrait she's drawn of both her mother and the person she thinks she's becoming. The one person who can talk to her and offer some guidance is Lola, the mysterious woman in the red dress who appears in a mirror the girl salvaged somewhere. Lola seems to have all the answers when the world keeps throwing up more and more difficult questions.
Questions about love, morality, identity, violence and revenge.
I loved this book. It's tough and gritty and violent, but also beautiful and sensitive. The girl with no name has an artist's eye and her perspective on the grimmer sides of life are often beautiful, even when laced with the pragmatism of survival. Somehow, throughout a life spent on the run, living in cars or tents, answering to a different name every few weeks, she's managed to maintain a love for life and a belief in the inherent goodness of people.
Before each chapter is a gorgeous illustration which is described on the following page like an artwork in a gallery catalogue, referencing the way the girl narrates her life like a documentarian making a film about the artist's life.
I highly recommend this book. It's exciting, fast paced, beautifully lyrical in places and filled to the brim with characters you won't easily forget.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
'Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what's my future? What's my past?' A girl and her mother are on the lam. They've been running for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in the kitchen with the knife in his throat. They've found themselves a home inside an orange 1987 Toyota HiAce van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River – just two of the 100,000 Australians sleeping rough every night. The girl has no name because names are dangerous when you're on the run. But the girl has a dream. Visions in black ink and living colour. A vision of a life as a groundbreaking artist of international acclaim. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld drug queen 'Lady' Flora Box. A life of love with the boy in the brown suit who's waiting for her in the middle of the bridge that stretches across a flooding and deadly river. A life far beyond the bullet that has her name on it. And now that the storm clouds are rising, there's only one person who can help make her dreams come true. That person's name is Lola and she carries all the answers. But to find Lola, the girl with no name must first do one of the hardest things we can sometimes ever do. She must look in the mirror. A big, moving, blackly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel of love, fate, life and death and all the things we see when we look in the mirror. All of the past, all of the present, and all of our possible futures. 'Mirror, mirror, please don't lie. Tell me who you are. Tell me who am I.'
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