So i just finished the new Melina Marchetta, 'The Piper's Son', and before i even started it i got that excited happy feeling of anticipation you only get when you know that there is an excellent read hiding quietly in your bag. The feeling that goes away when the book is finished, leaving only the afterglow, and the knowledge that those books don't come round everyday and it may be a while till that delicious anticipation comes back. I wish i had read it more slowly, savoured it more, but it was just a bit too unputdownable.
The companion novel to Saving Francesca, it is five years later and Thomas Mackee has lost the plot. His uncle Joe was blown up on his way to work and his dad has fallen off the wagon, hard. He screwed things up irreversibly with 'that psycho Finke' and so occupies his time by getting wasted and falling off stages at gigs, craving oblivion. That is until his feral flat mates kick him out, his pregnant aunt Georgie finds him on her verandah with ten stitches in his head and lets him move in, and he starts working at the local pub washing dishes with Francesca and Justine, whom he hasn't spoken to properly since Joe's death. Cleverly written and honestly voiced, Marchetta has created yet another classic laugh/cry/grow story for YA. About family, grief, and love, and what happens when grief is threatening to swallow everything else.
I first read Saving Francesca in yr 10 or 11 and have read it a couple times since. The characters from Saving Francesca have embedded themselves firmly in my mind, and alongside Moriarty's Em, Cass and Lyd, Anne Shirley and Georgia Nicholson, are firm book people friends. While I absolutely loved Looking for Alibrandi, i think that as a teenager i really identified with the SF characters, and still do. I don't know why that is, and could probably try and analyse it but cant be bothered right now... byeeee
