![]() ![]() I don’t know what it’s like to feel dispossessed or disenfranchised. And this basic, aesthetic difference means our experiences of living in Australia are, I suspect, wildly divergent. We love words and writing.īut Maxine is black. On the face of it, Maxine Beneba Clarke and I should have plenty in common. The young mother keeps writing, the rejection letters keep arriving… What I say: ![]() Inside its covers, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney’s notorious Villawood detention centre, a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike, an enraged black militant is on the warpath through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton, a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance, a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny, and a Sydney schoolgirl loses her way. In Melbourne’s western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories. While the issues covered in this book are relatively adult, I can see older teens benefiting from the read, as it deals with dispossession and disenfranchisment – states of being which often manifest in the young adult years. A wonderful short story collection from an original Australian voice that probes how it feels to be the ‘outsider’ Who it’s for: ![]()
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