The Guy, The Girl, The Artist and His Ex
Gabrielle Williams
April 2015
Allen & Unwin

The Guy, The Girl, The Artist and His Ex revolves around a true story: In 1986, a Picasso painting called ‘The Weeping Woman’ was stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of people who called themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists. The ACT held the government ransom, demanding more funding for young artists. The painting was eventually returned, but the ACT were never found. That is, until Gabrielle Williams chose them as the protagonists for her latest fiction novel.

The painting’s theft has affected four young Melburnians very differently, and the disappearance of the Weeping Woman has now caused their lives to collide. Guy is a serious party animal who is failing his classes at school and when his parents go away, he hosts a massive party at the house. And at that party, he meets a girl called Rafi. Her and her mother moved to Melbourne from South America shortly after her three-year-old brother drowned. Her mother has never recovered, believing that she saw the legendary La Llorona (which translates to The Weeping Woman in English) shortly before her son died and that La Llorona murdered her son. Raft’s mother has since become obsessed with the legend and Rafi feels abandoned by her.

Luke is a self-obsessed, philandering artist and he and his friends have orchestrated the theft of The Weeping Woman from the gallery. But the police are closing in on them, and there are rumours that someone from their team is planning on selling the painting to a buyer in Adelaide (their original plan was to forge the painting and return that to the gallery, whilst on-selling the original for a high price). Our final protagonist is Luke’s ex Penny, whose life changed dramatically when she got pregnant with Luke’s child and had the baby. Luke treated her terribly, cheated on her, and she left him.

The story takes a dark turn when Penny leaves her baby with her neighbour for the night (Rafi). Raf is desperate to go to a party (where she meets Guy), so she leaves the baby with her mother. But her mother takes her La Llorona obsession to a whole different level, and horrific things happen.

The novel is written extremely well. The chapters alternate point of views between the four main characters, and a lot more is left unsaid than said. Their lives intersect and overlap throughout the book, and some of their decisions have disastrous consequences. Each character is flawed in their own way, so they won’t all be relatable for the reader. Gabrielle has woven their backstory into the present tense rather well, and the book is a quick read.

Whilst art is the basis of the novel, family and friendships are what hold it together. Relationships are tested and some are lost, and there’s no happy ending for everyone in this story. Some of these relationships reflect what happens in real life, and Gabrielle has added real depth to the novel by featuring so many flawed protagonists. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this and highly recommend it for readers over the age of fourteen.

Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell
September 2013
Pan Macmillan

Fangirl is a young adult fiction novel exploring friendship, fiction, family and relationships, and how a teenager should manage all of that whilst surviving their first year in college.

We meet Cath Avery, college freshman and Simon Snow fanatic. She loves all the books in the series and his storylines and she has been writing Simon Snow fan fiction for years. In fact, her fan fiction Carry On is so popular that each chapter gets thousands of views. And Cath is most excited for the final novel in the Simon Snow series that’s being published in a few months’ time. But she wants to make sure she finishes her fan fiction before that book comes out so it doesn’t spoil the storyline for her.

Cath had an audience now, a following. All these people she didn’t know, who expected things from her and questioned her decisions. Sometimes they even tuned against her. They’d trash her on other fansites, saying that Cath used to be good, but she’d lost the magic – that her Baz was too canon or not canon enough, that her Simon was a prude, that she overwrote Penelope…

Now that Cath is in college, she’s finding it hard to manage everything. She’s completely out of her comfort zone. Her twin sister, Wren, who used to immerse herself in the Simon Snow series, is off living her life in college at parties and bars. Meanwhile Cath is shutting herself in her room and writing, and she’s starting to feel like maybe she’s missing out on something. But on the other hand, writing fan fiction is all she’s ever been interested in doing. Even in her fiction class, she hands in fan fiction for her assignments.

Fangirl is for all those introverted readers who feel like they should be more sociable, but really don’t want to be. It’s for all the quiet achievers who would rather alone time than party time. Cath may be in her own little world most of the time, and Fangirl shows us that it’s fine to be like that, but it’s also okay to let people in. Cath learns that she can have the best of both worlds – her fan fiction AND her relationship/family/friends. You don’t have to sacrifice anything, you just have to manage your time well and give time to everything.

If she didn’t work on her fic, at least a little bit, every day, Cath lost the thread of it, the momentum. She ended up writing long, go-nowhere conversations – or scenes where Baz and Simon memorised the planes in each other’s faces.

There are some heartbreaking elements to the book as well. Cath and Wren’s mother left them when they were kids and their father never recovered. He devoted himself to his work and his mind slowly deteriorated. Cath feels like she should help take care of her dad because no one else will. And then, suddenly, Cath’s mother comes back into the picture and wants to be a part of their life again. Wren is thrilled, but Cath wants nothing to do with her.

Fangirl is warm-hearted, touching and incredibly moving. It’s beautifully written and Rainbow has crafted characters that are relatable and they really carry the story. It may be a few hundred pages, but Fangirl is an easy read. It really tugs on the heartstrings, exploring that time in a teenager’s life where it may be ready to let go of childhood fears and leap into the unknown.

Whisper to Me
Nick Lake
May 2016
Bloomsbury

Whisper to Me is a 2016 young adult novel by Nick Lake, exploring mental illness, grief, family and self-discovery. Cassie’s mother has died and her father is growing aggressive towards her. And then she finds a human foot on the beach, and it belongs to the latest victim of a serial killer terrorising their small town. Once Cassie finds this foot, she begins to hear a voice – a very angry voice telling Cassie to do all sorts of things that she doesn’t want to do.

The book is structured as a letter, chronologically detailing the recent events in Cassie’s life. She’s addressed it to a boy in her life – the boy whose heart she broke. She wants to explain why she pushed him away and where she has been disappearing to at nights. It’s part murder mystery and part self-discovery. There’s a love story woven into the plot and there’s plenty of drama to fill the pages. Nick Lake has done a wonderful job of keeping the reader engaged and the pace heightened.

There’s a convention: If someone has cancer, they’re “brave” and “fighting.” If someone is having problems with their mind, that person is only ever “struggling.” This is, on one level, stupid and offensive. I mean, the people who die of cancer—what, they didn’t fight hard enough? They weren’t brave enough? But on another level, when it comes to the mind breaking down, it’s not wrong that you struggle. I struggled. Everything was hard. Getting up. Getting dressed. Going to school.

Cassie is a fantastic protagonist. She’s empathetic, compassionate, but she’s also deeply flawed. She doubts herself and she makes assumptions and she distrusts easily. But, over the course of the novel, she learns to let go of these things and trust others. She comes to understand why the voice has appeared in her life and what she needs to do to get rid of it. Her story is absorbing, and really draws the reader in. It may be a long novel, but it’s a quick read and the reader won’t be bored at any point in the story. Whisper to Me really illustrates the residues of trauma and the long, arduous process of recovery.

Whisper to Me is engrossing, raw, beautiful, heartbreaking and a rollercoaster of a ride. The main character is vulnerable and self-deprecating, but she comes to understand her life and why she’s struggling and she learns to overcome that. She questions things, and she fights back against the voice in her head.

Nick Lake is a talented writer. His prose is rich with imagery and emotion, and the characters in this story are three-dimensional and representative of many people in this world who are going through some form of mental illness and who are struggling to overcome it. This novel is fast-paced and full of drama. Fantasy and reality parallel each other in this novel and I devoured it very quickly.