Everybody Jam (by Ali Lewis)

Everybody Jam is as Australian as it gets – flashbacks of  episodes of The Flying Doctors, Bill Bryson, dry heat and deserts, it’s all coming back to the cat!

Set on a cattle farm in the Northern Territories, 13-year-old Danny Dawson is our narrator who introduces us to his grief-ridden family. His older brother Jonny died and nobody has really recovered from it, least of all Danny himself, who is dead set on leaving everything in his room – including the bed sheets – just in the way it was when Jonny died. Moreover, the family is at yet another hurdle in their life: 14-year-old Sissy is pregnant and nobody knows who the father is and to top it off it’s the muster the annual roundup of the cattle, which is proving to be excruciatingly hard this year due to the blistering heat and drought they’ve been suffering from for almost 2 years now.

Everybody Jam is a great debut, featuring a great voice in Danny. For him everything is normal: the muster, the things people do at the farm, the way you think about gins (aborigines) and interracial relationships, what you ask and don’t ask for breakfast (that Pommie was bloody useless, not even knowing what everybody jam is (apricot jam – because everybody likes it) , which makes it often more alienating for the reader because we are not all used to Danny’s very obvious and ‘normal’ things. However, the two standout elements in this little gem is the language (so deliciously Australian) and the scorching setting: brutal, unapologetic, otherworldly even.

Everybody Jam was shortlisted for the 2012 Carnegie Medal. This is, incidentally in the same year as when Patrick Ness won with A Monster Calls. With that book it has a sense of honesty and raw emotion in common, something which makes it into a must read for everyone interested in Australian (Outback) culture, a great coming-of-age story or just a plain good book.

Jasper Jones (by Craig Silvey)

The smoldering hotness of much of the Australian outback surely has an effect on its writing populace if Melina Marchetta and Craig Silvey are any indication at all. The striking thing about both of these authors is the authenticity in voice and the utter believability of the characters portrayed.

In the case of Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones, the authentic voices are those of 13-year-old Charlie Bucktin and his (Vietnamese) friend Jeffrey Lu, during the hot summer of 1965, when both of them are at the threshold of becoming men yet aren’t quite as brazen yet and still behave like the boys they secretly still long to be. Charlie, though, finds out he might have to grow into adulthood a bit more quickly than anticipated, as he’s confronted with his very own Stand By Me-style rite of passage. One evening, the town’s scapegoat, Jasper Jones – who Charlie hasn’t even spoken to before – is at Charlie’s window, urging him to come with him. Jasper leads him to his sanctuary where he has found the body of a town girl, Laura Wishart. Jasper asks for Charlie’s help, because they know that Jasper, “Thief, Liar, Thug, Truant” will be blamed for Laura’s death.

Though the blurb and the initial couple of pages may make you think that this is mystery novel, with Jasper and Charlie trying to find out what really happened to Laura Wishart, the investigation is not at the heart of this well-written novel. Charlie is a bookish boy, your typical unlikely YA hero, whose best friend is another outcast – Jeffrey is the son of a Vietnamese refugee – and who gets approached by the mixed-race devil-do-all Jasper Jones. So this book is as much about dealing with differences and the tensions that arise when one doesn’t fully understand the other person, than it is about trying to find whodunit. At the same time the small town of Corrigan and one of Australia’s favorite pastimes – cricket – are almost used as symbols to show what intolerance can lead to.

More than anything Jasper Jones is a character-driven novel where childhood meets adulthood, innocence meets guilt,  and truth meets prejudice. Though all of this may sound like a bleak story, there’s a delightfully humorous undercurrent (mostly through the banter between Charlie and Jeffrey) that makes Jasper Jones a very playful effort even at its darkest moments.

Saving Francesca (by Melina Marchetta)

There is something different about Melina Marchetta. There’s this strange melancholic and slightly alienating vibe to the words on her pages that make of every Marchetta experience something special. That something is acutely present in her second novel, Saving Francesca,  which was awarded Book of the Year and Book of the Year for Older Readers in her native Australia in 2004.

Saving Francesca combines the sense of alienation and the lack of belonging that Francesca Spinelli – a 16-year-old Year Eleven girl – experiences at school and at home.  On the advice and urgent request of her overbearing mother, Francesca has to attend St Sebastian, a previously all boys school, which now counts only about 30 girls.  Francesca feels bitter and uneasy about all this: “Seven hundred and fifty boys and thirty girls? But the reality is that it’s either like living in a fish bowl or like you don’t exist. Then, on top of that, you have to make a whole new group of friends after being in a comfortable little niche for four years. At Stella’s, you turned up to school, knew exactly what your group’s role and profile was, and the day was a blend of all you found comfortable. My mother calls that complacency but whatever it’s called, I miss it like hell.” At the same time, her mother Mia, who used to be the rock of the family, suffers from a breakdown, and this causes everything Francesca has ever known to fall apart.

Being at St Sebastian’s – an outsider looking in all of a sudden – also makes Francesca reconsider the idea she had about her previous friends at Stella (her old school) and the new bunch of girls at St Sebastian. It also makes her challenge herself in ways she would never have done if she’d stayed at Stella’s and if her mom hadn’t been depressed. Some good may come of the bad after all…

Marchetta’s Saving Francesca is definitely a prime example of coming-of-age, but has that slight edge too.  Yes, it’s about the universal themes of young adulthood: friendship, love, family issues and figuring out who’s Slutty Spice and who’s Bitchy Spice. But it’s especially Melina Marchetta’s captivating prose and Francesca’s poignant voice, which raises this novel above middle-of-the-road. Despite the fact that it’s so obvious that Marchetta is distinctly non-American in her language, depiction of character and setting, and has a truly unique voice (I haven’t read enough Australian novelist, to decide whether it’s an Austrialian thing or a Marchetta thing), her prose has a universality and foreverness that lingers…

(On the) Jellicoe Road (by Melina Marchetta)

Ah, for a very long time, the cat hasn’t come across a book like Jellicoe Road. What a breath of (dusty Australian) fresh air this is! Taylor Markham is 17 when we meet her at Jellicoe School where she has just become the reluctant leader of the Underground Community who leads the territory wars between the school, the Townies and the Cadets. In an all interconnected puzzle of past and present friendships, loves and sorrows, Marchetta unfolds slowly but oh so beautifully the events that have lead Taylor to where she is at present.