This is my third Trent Dalton novel (the second that he published) and I have to say it’s my least favourite. I absolutely loved both Boy Swallows Universe (loved the Netflix adaptation as well) and Lola in the Mirror, but this one not so much. I don’t know if it is because of the narrator. On the whole, I thought the narrator was good at parsing sentences and conveying emotion and meaning, but the voice she did for the main character, 12 year old Molly Hook was so annoying. Molly lives through terrible abuse and hardship with courage and wisdom beyond her years, and yet the narrator gave her such a whiney obnoxious little girl voice that for me totally ruined the listening experience.
The book is set during WW2 when the Japanese were carrying out air strikes on Darwin and women and children were being evacuated (I never even knew that this happened in Australia during the war – I’ve read books about Australian prisoners of war in Japan, and of course I knew about the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour, but this is new to me).
If I had read rather than listened to this book I probably would have liked it more – I liked the descriptions of the Australian outback and the surreal quality of the odyssey that Molly takes through it to try and find the man who she believes can lift her family’s curse. The characters are well drawn – Molly’s companions are a wannabe actress who is mourning for the child she was forced to give up, and a Japanese pilot who is grieving from the death of his beloved wife and crashes his plane rather than fulfilling his mission of killing innocent civilians.
If they made a tv adaptation of this one I would definitely watch it.
Sarah Wray Writer 