How could I not be drawn to the beautiful cover of this book? It’s the work of designer Imogen Stubbs and illustrator Rachel Szopa.
I follow Text Publishing on Instagram, and kept seeing this beautifully designed book pop up on their feed. So when I had a book shop voucher to blow I went for it! (Along with a book about little fishes for my 11-month-old.)
This book is about a uni dropout named Lona. She’s melancholic and a bit of a loner. She doesn’t have much going on. Hilariously, she is very relatable. It’s strange reading a book set in your own city, and the very university you went to yourself! (Well, when that city is Melbourne and that university is RMIT). It’s strange to read about such familiar things as Lona working at Coles, riding Metro trains and travelling to nearby southeast Melbourne suburbs like Oakleigh.
The structure of this book is interesting. Rather than defined chapters, Young writes very short snippets preceded by a subheading. This subheading is a word or phrase taken from the following short ‘chapter’. Sometimes the chapters are only a page or less. This structure makes it feel more like we’re amidst Lona’s stream of consciousness, experiencing the small, significant events and thoughts as they occur to her.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find a whole lot of depth to this story. It was a simple, pleasant read, but I haven’t really come away with anything. There wasn’t a lot of character development to speak of. Stuff happened to Lona, but she stayed the same throughout the book. The writing was simple and, as my husband puts it, ‘a bit YA’.
An easy, ‘switch-your-brain-off’, ‘read-it-in-2-days’ kinda book.
Reviews and Excerpts 