Lola in the Mirror, by Trent Dalton (Fourth Estate, $36.99)
Trent Dalton, author of the hit semi-autobiographical novel Boy Meets Universe, returns to the streets of his hometown, Brisbane, for this heart-rending story of a daughter and her mother living in a scrapyard in the city’s West End in a 1987 Toyota Hiace van with four flat tyres. Reminiscent of Demon in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, our narrator is at an exquisitely vulnerable stage in her life. At 17, with a fierce artistic talent, this young woman is sunny and curious. At 13, she decided to live boldly, to cartwheel through life rather than walk. She doesn’t know her name for her own safety – when our heroine was an infant, her mother killed her father in apparent self-defence and the pair have been on the run ever since.
The plan is that when the 17-year-old turns 18 her mother will hand herself into the police. A former teacher, she has educated her daughter to secondary level and art college is her destination. But life intervenes and the young woman finds herself alone sooner than she expected and discovers that the story of her life may not be true. Surrounded by good friends in the homeless community, she and her buddy, Charlie, navigate daily life in the city where a killer has started murdering the homeless. The pair deliver drugs for crime boss Lady Flo, and our heroine’s dreams seem to be evaporating when one day she meets another young artist, Danny, who comes from a wealthy family. As she experiences love for the first time, she revels in feeling seen.
The book’s title is chosen with care by Dalton, who wanted to write a story about looking at oneself and confronting the past, the potential futures and the tricky present. Our heroine has a magic mirror and a character, Lola, within, who she seeks answers from.
You want this young narrator’s future to be as good as it can be. The redoubtable heroine puts her faith in the kindness of strangers and strives to be invisible. I’m one of the few who hasn’t read Dalton’s bestseller, but I’m glad I started with this one, as it is outstanding.
Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth (Macmillan, $37.99)
Sally Hepworth likes to plant the seed early in her novels that something bad has happened in the lives of her main characters, and then drip-feed details as the novel progresses. So you tend to read her books breathlessly with this sinking feeling that you will discover something terrible about these characters you’ve become quite fond of.
Three Melbourne women in their mid-30s, Jessica, Norah and Alicia, met when they were young girls in a foster home, Wild Meadows Farm, in the small rural town of Port Agatha. It was run by the youthful, blonde and blue-eyed Holly Fairchild, who, if she was in a good mood, was a delight, especially to four-year-old Jessica when she first came to her. But Miss Fairchild was increasingly erratic and had an arsenal of subtle abuse up her sleeve.
The trio, as adults, are close to each other, but that traumatic upbringing is having an effect on how they are leading their lives.
Norah, the beautiful, bright, dishonest one, has a blind date go wrong, and her violent reaction takes her a step closer to possible jail time. Jessica, the successful perfectionist, keeps on stealing drugs from her clients’ bathroom cabinets and they’ve started to notice. Alicia, the kind social worker, is denying herself a relationship with another woman because she doesn’t think she deserves it.
As their adult lives start to go off course, they receive news that a body has been found at their old foster home. The police investigation progresses and Hepworth keeps the revelations coming. The author, who can always be counted on to inject humour throughout, takes the reader back in time, portraying the girls’ lives with their foster mother and her rule of tyranny. This initially unwelcome opportunity to face the trauma of their past in the end frees them to deal with their present. Hepworth has written another quality, intense read peopled with endearing characters.
The Girl from London by Olivia Spooner (Moa Press, $37.99)
This debut tells the true story of young British evacuees who were shipped off to South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the early years of World War II. They were accompanied by young teachers and nurses who formed close relationships with the children, some of whom never returned to their home country.
Spooner sets up the novel with parallel stories. In 1940, Ruth is a young teacher who volunteers to make the trip for her own personal reasons and who especially befriends one young boy, Fergus. In another storyline woven through the novel, Hazel, Fergus’s granddaughter, is a young Kiwi on her way to London in 2005 for her OE as a pharmacist. She and a fellow plane passenger, an Englishman called Joe, are both reading the book on Ruth’s story which her grandfather has sent her away with.
Ruth’s tale is riveting and even more so because it is based on real life – these ships transporting children and soldiers are prime targets for the enemy. She is engaged but falls in love with someone else on her travels and is on board the Rangitane on her way back to England from Australia when it is attacked by German raiders, its survivors taken captive by the Nazis for a period.
Hazel and Joe’s romance is mostly convincing, although if we all fell in love with our fellow passengers on a plane as quickly as this we would be in trouble. They try to find out what happened to Ruth after her adventures.
To be fair, it’s hard to be completely invested in Ruth. This upper-class young Londoner is a bit puzzling. She will have a laugh with some of the other female chaperones, but at other times she’s a bit prim, class-conscious and humourless.
But Spooner has brought to life for readers a fascinating time in history. Her descriptions of the crowds that greet the ships of children in Cape Town and Sydney bring a lump to your throat.
