Fearless

Fearless

By Tim Lott

Little Fearless is taken from her home, and sent to the City Community Faith School for Retraining, Opportunity and Hope. The school in no way lives up to its name – it is instead a dark, dismal prison, where the girls are worked hard doing the city’s laundry. Little Fearless is the bravest girl in the school, telling stories to the others in an effort to keep their hopes up. Angry about the injustice of the school, Little Fearless plans to escape – sure that once the people outside are made aware of the true conditions inside the school, the girls will be saved.

It’s a challenging story – a dystopian world, where children are betrayed so badly by the adults around them. It’s also quite a depressing tale – about the stripping away of identity and the loss of individualism, the power of sacrifice, and the importance of standing up for one’s beliefs.

Due to the heavy dependence on fairytale and fable elements, the structure of the story seems quite formulaic at times, and some sections are a bit over-written. Nonetheless, it’s a good read, with the tension lasting right till the very end.

What I Was

What I Was

Author: Meg Rosoff

A strange story, one that still leaves me uncomfortable, as though I missed something important and so didn’t quite ‘get’ what it was all about.

A first person narrative guides us through attendance at a gloomy, miserable boarding school, where regimented passivity and bullying are the main challenges to the day. The only escape is to a run-down cottage where a boy, living outside of society, enjoys a solitary life in the wild.

As with Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, this is an intimate and poignant glimpse at one teenager’s awkward and turbulent coming of age. There’s something a little bit Catcher in the Rye here - likely it’s the dry dark humour bringing this to mind. The theme of love, of passion and yearning, is nicely tangled with confusion over identity and gender.

But in the end, there seemed little point to the Big Reveal – I was so sure the story was going somewhere very different, that I almost felt cheated with where it did go. There seemed to be little learned, and few consequences, and no exploration of the impact such a Reveal had on the main character – and I was left feeling I’d read something interesting, but with an unsatisfying resolution.

Marty's shadow

Marty’s shadow

Author: John Heffernan

Marty knows something is not right. There is something in his past that has left a shadow over his life. His nightmares, flashbacks and erratic behavior leave him fearful and confused. He wants to know what happened, just as much as he fears what that knowledge could mean.

This novel is difficult to read – not the prose though, which is unrelenting in it’s stark unveiling of Marty’s psyche – but in the sheer weight of the sorrows, traumas, fears and confrontations that Marty exists under. There’s the Event in his past, his alcoholic mother, abusive father, racial tensions in the town, cruel teachers, possible girlfriend, bullying at school, his pet dog, and his uncomfortable relationship with his brother. The way he deals with all this is shadowed by the Event in the past, which is slowly revealed in a series of Post Traumatic Stress induced flashbacks.

There’s brutal realism in this story; Heffernan takes Marty to the very edge of life, destroying everything Marty has ever clung to, leaving only a shadow behind. I found the ambiguity of the ending quite frightening – is his father, to continue to protect the secret from the past, actively working to ensure that Marty remains in his traumatized state? To me, that can be the only possible reason for the gift they take him…

A disturbing, engrossing read, that has left me thinking on its themes. And it’s left me wanting to read Marty’s brother’s story now, wanting to know his experience of his family, his town, his brother.