This is How We Change the Ending

Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781922268136

‘Blood is everything,’ Dec tells his son Nate in This Is How We Change the Ending. ‘Family time together is most important,’ declares Anna Chiu’s mother in a precious moment of lucidity in The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Each family has its secrets but, as these authors reveal, not all are as harmless as others. Although these authors do not completely give up on the redemptive power of family, the secrets and lies that trouble the families in these books are hardly of the Brady Bunch variety. While the teen protagonists dream of a normal life, they are caught up in an exhausting struggle to maintain an illusion of normality. When this illusion shatters – as it inevitably does – feelings of hopelessness, anger, and betrayal can take hold.

It is precisely the feeling of parental betrayal that unites these four novels. In the opening pages of Kenwood’s It Sounded Better in My Head, eighteen-year-old Natalie calls her parents out on their dishonesty. ‘So, you’ve been lying to me all year?’ she asks. ‘Not lying,’ her father replies. ‘Pretending a little. Omitting details.’ Like Natalie, the teen protagonists are confronted by their parents’ manifold failings. It is not just that they have realised their parents are human – though this is certainly part of it – but that something more sinister is going on.

Of the four novels, Wakefield’s much-anticipated This Is How We Change the Ending stands apart. Set in Bairstal, a fictional working-class suburb on the urban fringe, it explores the cycle of abuse governing the lives of some of Australia’s most disadvantaged youth. There are good things in Bairstal. There is also a lot of bad stuff: ‘hate, racism, crime, dirty politics, segregation, terrorism, drugs, neglect, false religion, the wrong kinds of love, and more hate’. Against all odds, Wakefield’s sixteen-year-old protagonist Nate McKee has not yet been broken by the system. He recognises ‘how fucked up everyone is’ and worries about everything: climate change and animal cruelty; being a good person; becoming his father.

Stirred to action by his altruistic English teacher and an angry graffiti artist at the local youth centre, Nate struggles against apathy. Peppered with pithy proverbs, startling moments of personal introspection, and piercing questions, This Is How We Change the Ending has a shrewd allegorical undertow. This is not just a book about changing the ending but about surviving to see the end. It is a raw and poignant work of storytelling, a clever melding of poetry and prose with a compelling narrator, curt dialogue, and gritty realism.

My Fathers Shadow

Magabala Books, $14.99 pb, 232 pp, 9781925936704

Compared with This Is How We Change the Ending, Jones’s, Kenwood’s and Chim’s novels are lighter reads. My Father’s Shadow, which won the 2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship, is Gunai writer Jannali Jones’s début. It follows the story of seventeen-year-old Kaya Lamb, one of two surviving witnesses to a drug crime she cannot remember, as she flees from a drug ring. Struggling with the debilitating symptoms of PTSD, Kaya hides with her mother at their family holiday house in Mount Wilson, a small garden village in the Blue Mountains.

From the outset, the premise of My Father’s Shadow – hiding in your own holiday house – seems a bit of a stretch. Many of the loose ends that Jones avoids with the six-month time-lapse between the preface and first chapter are left unresolved; they become distracting plot holes. Loose ends aside, My Father’s Shadow is a fast-paced Young Adult thriller. The opening garden scene is strangely dystopian, and the eerie sense that Kaya is being hunted intensifies throughout the novel. As the mystery unfolds, so too does Kaya’s fractured relationship with her mother.

It Sounded Better in my Head

Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925773910

The rocky relationship between a Year Twelve student and her parents is also a theme of Melbourne writer Nina Kenwood’s début It Sounded Better in My Head, the winner of the 2018 Text Prize. After being ambushed by the ‘bombshell’ announcement that her parents are getting a divorce, Natalie spends a weekend at a holiday house where she is drawn into an unlikely romance with her best friend’s older brother, the kind of popular attractive party boy whom, normally, she would ‘instinctively avoid’.

Natalie’s relationship with Alex brings her face to face with her greatest insecurity: her skin. Teenage acne has left Natalie with scars that run far deeper than the pockmarks on her back and shoulders. Her self-worth, personality, and behaviour have been irrevocably affected by her acne. She hates the beach, fades into crowds, inspects her make-up in toilet cubicles, never wears bikinis, and is suspicious of Alex’s affections. For many readers, this will be an all-too-familiar story. By giving an authentic and funny voice to the awkward experience of adolescence, Kenwood bravely documents the often-invisible legacy of cystic acne, offering a glimmer of hope to those struggling to see a future away from the bathroom mirror.

The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling

Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781760631581

Unexpected romance is at the heart of Wai Chim’s novel The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Year Eleven student Anna Chiu is spending her school holidays working in her father’s kitchen when she interviews Rory, a skinny, brown-haired, early school leaver with a flair for English and theatre, for a delivery job. As the two begin to fall for each other, Anna and her sister, Lily, desperately try to hold their home life together as their mother’s mental health deteriorates. With their father sleeping overnight at his restaurant in Gosford, the two sisters are left alone at their parents’ apartment in Sydney’s inner west. ‘My father won’t fix anything,’ realises Anna. ‘He’s just running away.’ Strengthened by a sense of duty as the eldest daughter, Rory’s steady support, and an unassailable love for her family, Anna fights against the shame and rage ‘bubbling up’ inside her.

There is much to admire about The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling. Chim has skilfully woven colloquial Cantonese and Chinese culture into a heartfelt story about the burden and stigma of mental illness, first love, and family. There are, however, some missed opportunities. The portrayal of Asian racism, bullying, and hospital psychiatry feel strained, reinforcing familiar, sometimes crude, clichés. Elsewhere, barring one or two exceptions, the charms of the inner west are largely obscured behind car windshields. Where Chim could have explored community and the urban space, she has turned inwards to Anna and the safety of a small cast of characters.

Aside from Nate McKee, the teen protagonists in these books are largely disengaged with the world around them. They are loners and bookworms rather than debaters, bullies, or school captains. This tendency towards introverted protagonists, while not unusual in the Young Adult genre, reflects the strong autobiographical aspects of these four novels. Though parental betrayal might be the defining feeling of today’s youth, these are also stories about yesterday’s youth; a time before the school strike for climate, Brexit, and Donald Trump. They champion the individual’s – not the collective’s – capacity for change.