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(More customer reviews)Body dysmorphic, both prematurely cynical and angst-riddled, Sophie daily endures the mindless chatter of her mother, Sandy, appalled by the prospect of genetically flabby arms in her own future. Sandy and Rich split shortly after her birth fifteen years ago, their environmental activism on behalf of Tasmania's Franklin River collapsing under the inertia of cohabitation. Now Rich has reappeared, suggesting a backpacking trip in Tasmania so father and daughter can bridge the years he has been absent from Sophie's life. Australian author Kennedy is fully armed in this provocative novel of disillusioned youth and mid-life attack of conscience, an emo goth teen on the cusp of understanding too much about parents' imperfections and a boy/man clinging to the temporary glory of a cause, their careful self-constructions shattered by breath-stopping reality.
While Sandy attends a Goddess workshop, forever struggling to recapture the euphoria of the Franklin River experience, a vague dissatisfaction hobbles the day-to-day rewards of existence, overwhelmed as she is with the burden of single parenthood, her body buffeted by gravity's siren song and Sophie's critical lamentation: "That's what having a baby did to your body... like balloons that had been stretched to the limit...then gradually left to deflate again... like overripe fruit." But not to worry, for Rich fares no better, his responses inconsistent, from his original impression ("She looked like one of those Bratz dolls.") to the more confessional "He wonders why, of everything, her tenderness is the very worst thing." His observant daughter quickly assesses the nature of a man on the wrong side of time with a habit of inflating global adventures, but inarticulate in the matter of fathers and daughters.
This is Sophie's journey, her faux sophistication crumbling under the weight of expectations and the false bravado that has prompted an instinctive rejection of Sandy's generous motherly overtures. It is a burden too heavy for a child, even a tough little cookie like Sophie. Ironically, it is Rich's flaws that unravel Sophie's steely endurance, inspiring a deep longing for Sandy's inane comforts that creeps treasonously into her heart while alone with Rich: "Now she watched him, that stranger. That Polaroid father." This is heady territory, especially when the language of the heart is wielded with such authority and cutting wit as Kennedy displays. This writer takes no prisoners, instinctively cognizant that anything less than the brutal truth would undermine her characters' movement toward one another.
Shifting between the 70s nostalgia that has inhibited Sandy and Rich's emotional maturity and the physically rigorous trek that forces errant father and questing daughter to find common purpose- and possibly forgiveness, Kennedy's Australia is accessible through Rich's camera lens and the eyes of a teenager awed by nature's beauty, tangentially aware of the technological and social alterations of man's indigent stewardship in the age of me. A painful indictment to be sure, but one couched in the revelatory experience of love unmasked, the bonds of motherhood intact. Shaken, Sophie rises from the ashes of certain disappointment to break the chains of fear that have temporarily stalled her growth. Scathing, precise and utterly transformative, Kennedy chronicles the troubled territory of child and parent with the indomitable humor and compassion of one who knows. Luan Gaines/2011.
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