10-12)Ī child finds that being alone in a tiny tropical paradise has its ups and downs in this appealingly offbeat tale from the Australian author of Peeling the Onion (1999). By the end, Cam has still not come around-but readers may be too annoyed by Tracy’s rude, aggressive character to care. Interspersed line drawings done in a childlike style, and letters exchanged by Tracy and Cam, fail to lift the heavy mood. Readers will easily see through all the tough talk to the vulnerability within, as she browbeats Peter, a younger housemate, while drawing on personal experience to help him cope with persistent bedwetting passes from denial through defiance to trying for a truce after breaking archrival Justine’s most prized possession (a cheap alarm clock from her father) and goes relentlessly to work on Cam, a visiting journalist, to take her as a foster child. Ever ready to lash out verbally or physically, Tracy swaggers through her account of life in the group home to which her second pair of foster parents have returned her, meanwhile leaning heavily on the thin hope that her long-gone mother will return to her. Wilson pushes so much pain between the lines of this portrait of a foster child with the personality of a steamroller that it comes off less a lightweight tribute to human resilience than a pathos-ridden tale of children acting out as they nurse profound inner wounds.
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