Children's and Young Adult Books
Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan & Kissed by the Moon by Alison Lester
You think you know what Jackie French’s Refuge (Angus & Robertson, $15.99 pb, 261 pp, 9780732296179) is going to be about, with its front cover photograph of a young boy, his dark eyes full of apprehension and sorrow. You still think you know when the refugee boat carrying the boy, Faris, and his grandmother, Jedda, to Australia is swamped by a huge wave and sinks. So you are almost as puzzled as Faris when he awakes to find himself in a sunlit bedroom with palm trees and a blue sky outside, and his beloved Jedda making breakfast for him. She encourages him to play on the beach, where a strange assortment of children is playing ball, and a naked, dark-skinned youth is spearing fish in the shallows. Faris is invited to join the game, with one proviso: on the beach he must never speak of the past. Faris agrees; there is too much pain in his past to talk about it.
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The relationships between daughters and their mothers provide fascinating, fertile ground for exploration. Mothers in books are sitting ducks, really, and these three new Young Adult books take aim. One mother is a cavalier, emotionally blackmailing bank robber; another is adored, but nosy and old-fashioned; while the third, obsessed with organic food, is diagnosed with cancer. In All This Could End (Text, $19.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781921758447), Steph Bowe challenges the controlling mother trope by portraying one who robs banks. Antonella Preto treads the complex terrain between an Italian migrant mother and her first-generation Australian daughter in The Mimosa Tree (Fremantle Press, $19.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781922089199), while the prospect of losing one’s mother encourages sweet soul-searching in Aimee Said’s new novel Freia Lockhart’s Summer of Awful (Walker Books, $16.95 pb, 288 pp, 9781921977800). If being a mother is tough, being a daughter is no picnic.
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