Teenage rebellion

THE ICE AGE
By Kirsten Reed
Text, $32

The comparisons with Lolita are too overwhelming not to mention at the start.

In The Ice Age an older man and an underage girl drive the highways of America, eating in bad diners, sharing the same bed in sleazy motels, taking drugs together. But Kirsten Reed's road trip novel differs from the Nabokov classic in crucial and obvious ways.

For a start, it is told entirely from the teenage girl's point of view. She is obsessed with the older man, Gunther, with the graceful, practised way he rolls a joint, with the things he says and the mystery of him. For her he's a safe place in a big, confusing world. Together they travel the country, dropping in from time to time on his eclectic and eccentric bunch of friends.

There are a lot of mysteries in this novel. Why is the teenage girl on the run? What exactly is Gunther up to? Reed doesn't bother trying to answer them. Her narrative lives in the present, just like most teenagers.

The unnamed protagonist is sassy and smart. She's at the first kisses, first rebellions stage of life, in which most adults seem like idiots and trouble is easy to find. Bad things do happen to her but there's no sense of her being a victim or preyed on by Gunther, even though the minute she's legal, their relationship does get physical.

This is Reed's first novel. A visual artist, she was born in the US and spent part of her upbringing in New Zealand before settling in Brisbane.

The Ice Age is targeted at the young adult market, which is interesting as its themes are very adult and there is one particularly disturbing scene.

But it is very much a story of this moment - there are even the seemingly obligatory references to vampires and zombies dotted throughout, with the heroine fantasising that Gunther, with his sharp teeth and white skin, might be about to bite her and pull her over to the other side.

An assured debut, The Ice Age is a compelling and memorable story. Reed is an insightful writer who has captured perfectly the moment a girl shifts from child to adult.

The age-gap relationship is handled in such a way that it never seems creepy and the teenage girl's voice is more than credible. Still, if I had a young daughter I'm not entirely sure I'd encourage her to read this ...