by Boomert - A Child's Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper 08 Jan 2010

This first novel is no timid creature. Rather, Chloe Hooper has embraced big themes - sex, death, childhood, history - and has done so with a powerful individual style. The narrator, Kate, is a young teacher in a small Tasmanian town who is having an affair with the father of one of her students. Her lover is married to the writer of a successful true crime book about a murder in the area, tellingly involving a married couple and the husband's lover. This intertwining of sex and death is central to the novel. Just as the prose is suffused with sexuality, death pervades Kate's environment - the roads around the town are littered with roadkill; war memorials in country towns recall the fallen; her father's school was built on a graveyard. And throughout the book there is the palimpsest of violent episodes in Tasmania's history, particularly the genocide of the Aboriginal population. Individual histories are thus shadowed by other people's histories and by broader social history. With so much going on beneath the surface, the `undertow' in the music Kate and Thomas listen to on their way to a hotel room serves as a metaphor for the novel itself. Hooper has brilliantly created a world in which the ground shifts constantly underneath the narrator's, and the reader's, feet. Highly literary, and filled with ideas, this book justifies the `Next Big Thing' hype.

C. 2002 Thorpe-Bowker and contributors