Nicci Gerrard: Things We Knew Were True

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Of course you can tell a lot about a book by its cover. Take this one: pink peonies and pink lipstick, a silver compact spilling pink powder, a perfume bottle. This is a book for grown-up girls.

Its author is half of the very successful, psychological thriller-writing husband and wife combination, Nicci French. Gerrard's Things We Knew Were True is far less saccharine than the cover or a synopsis might suggest.

It's the story of a teenager, shy, kind Edie, in love for the first time, with scruffy, socially inept Ricky in his poor clothes and horrible haircut. She brings him home to meet her scruffy but middle-class family. She is crazy with desire for Ricky.

Her father, shy, kind, depressed, unambitious Vic catches Edie and Ricky in a bedroom together. Then Vic dies. That is the end of one kind of life for Edie and her family, and the end of her love affair with Ricky.

Two decades later Edie is married to Alex. They have three children and Edie is happy enough, except that, increasingly, she cries when she reads books to her children and finds the endings are always about growing up and leaving childhood behind. Edie's childhood was left behind in a muddle of her father's death and her own sexuality. The story comes full circle with the death of her alcoholic mother and the discovery that her mother had a lover.

She goes in search of Ricky to try to make sense of her childhood — and of her sexuality — with predictably catastrophic consequences.

Gerrard's observational skills and rendering of middle-class lives are so finely honed that this story for grown-up girls has much more of an emotional edge than such a description implies.


* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.

* Penguin, $28