Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor
Text Publishing $39.99
Stories of young, attractive women desperately trying to escape their small-town roots by allowing themselves to be seduced by older, apparently more worldly men, are not new.
What makes this first novel from Australian writer Cory Taylor stand out from the crowd is the intelligence and appeal of her heroine.
Sixteen-year-old Martha is biding her time, trapped for the moment in a small town, where she lives with her emotionally bruised mother in the shadow of a manipulative, delusional father and an absentee brother.
Little wonder, then, that her head is turned by the arrival into this vacuum of Mr and Mrs Booker, accompanied as they are by a whirlwind of whisky, cigarettes, general fabulousness and tales of the world beyond Martha's experience.
Without children of their own, they "adopt" Martha. For Mrs Booker she is the daughter she desperately wants, while Mr Booker has a rather more predictably questionable motive.
The story falls, at first glance, into that slightly cringe-worthy genre - the coming-of-age novel. But that is to undersell it. For a start, though it is Martha who is coming of age, she often comes across as the most adult character here.
Taylor has perfectly captured her as a fine balance of innocent and worldly. Think Elizabeth Bennett rather than Isabella Swan.
She switches quickly from poetic or pithy observations: "They broke up," she says of her parents. "So now I am emotionally scarred for life. At least that's my excuse." "For what?" asks Mrs Booker. "I don't know," Martha replies. "It hasn't happened yet."
Martha is smart and a little jaded, yet desperate to seek out any hint of escape and excitement and still caught up in a degree of innocence - the only explanation, really, for why such a sharp girl would fall for the spineless and shallow Mr Booker.
The story unfolds fairly predictably, but Taylor maintains tension with a nice balance between teenage longing and an almost nostalgic eroticism, with the more prosaic aspects of this kind of affair always dancing around the edges of something much darker.
Me and Mr Booker is a short, satisfying read; not wildly original but extremely well executed.
