This legacy of parental neglect – not materially, not even so much the lack of love, more a carelessness towards a growing child’s being – gives rise to an uncertain persona, a woman who mistrusts the gifts of life and love. The quest for an absent father figure looms, but never overtakes, in the burgeoning affair with Jude. It happened so quickly, the pieces swept away, the board closed up and slipped back into my father’s coat, and then he was gone. I tried to mirror him, moving my pawns forward one square at a time until he cornered my king in five moves. She recalls the occasion of playing a game of chess with him: The narrator yearns, too, for her absent father, whom she sees sporadically due to her transient upbringing. Love is a central theme, communicated with a finely attuned sensibility that never descends into trope. She shares with her mother “a marrowed loneliness, passed down womb to womb”. She sees it in the “raised-by-wolves look in certain pictures from the years after my mother left my father”. The passionate affair with Jude forms the core of the novel, but neither love story nor coming-of-age are quite adequate to capture the deep and affecting emotional complexities explored in this novel: from the heartbreak of parental separation and estrangement to the losses of what might have been. She wants to “establish a life outside her purview, a life that was mine alone”. The narrator, never named, is breaking from an unusual closeness with the single mother who raised her. Any of us who has ever known (or wanted to know) rare intimacy in all its sensuality and rawness will recognise it in these pages. In Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas builds an emotional world so real that we viscerally inhabit the mind and heart of her young narrator. Review: Thirst for Salt – Madelaine Lucas (Allen & Unwin) The Comforting Weight of Water – Roanna McClelland (Wakefield Press) My Father the Whale (HarperCollins) The territory they inhabit variously hovers between the recognisable real world, in two coastal novels that include themes of parental closeness and estrangement, and the purely imaginary – in a dystopian debut where the protagonist grows up in a near-future where it never stops raining. In these three debut novels, growing up happens very differently for each protagonist, across diverse Australian settings. For the reader, they can feel like a hybrid of memoir and fiction. First novels often draw on personal experience. Coming of age is familiar territory for first-time novelists – the journey from youth to adult maturity.
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