KEY POINTS:
THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO LIVING
By Lia Hills
Text, $25
It's a curious category of book, this young-adult fiction. I don't remember it existing at all when I was in that demographic and to me there's a risk that being labelled young adult might limit a novel (for example, Marcus Zusak's excellent The Book Thief) with a more cross-generational appeal.
Lia Hills' debut book, however, falls squarely within the genre. This New Zealand expat has managed to climb convincingly inside the head of a teenage boy. Will is a 17-year-old Australian kid at a crisis point. His mother has just been killed in a car crash and he's struggling to find some meaning in life. Plus he's a seething mass of hormones and experiencing his first physical relationship with Taryn, a girl he met at his mum's funeral. Dealing with death and dating concurrently and for the very first time makes for some interesting material.
Melbourne-based Hills is a poet whose verse is lyrical and this quite often comes through in Will's narrative. "Dawn leaks into a room" and "Night collapses" for instance. It's not quite how the average teenage boy talks, but then Will is different. His mother's death has sparked some pretty big philosophical questions and he's trying to solve them by reading works by big thinkers like Seneca, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Buddhist master Sogyal Rinpoche and more.
Threaded through the story are some complex ideas, a sort of interesting cocktail of deep thought from across the centuries filtered through a young mind. It could easily have become a bit unwieldy, pretentious even, but the book's structure is cleverly designed to appeal to the Facebook generation, layered with photographs, questions, memories and fragments of email correspondence to hold the attention of any teenager used to a more interactive reading experience.
This is an absorbing, thoughtful and refreshing story and, while it tackles grief head on, it's as much about finding a way to live as it is about loss.
Hills, who was born in Wellington, has been hailed as a strong new voice in New Zealand literature. It seems cheeky for us to claim her as our own since she lives and is published over the Tasman, but she is most definitely a writer to keep an eye on.
