Julie Sarkissian / Hodder Stoughton
Sometimes debut novels usher themselves in unassumingly; glimmering with promise but tentative in their ambition. From the outset Dear Lucy unapologetically positions itself as beguilingly and threateningly other. Although narrated by three characters, Lucy, her pregnant friend Samantha and the owner of the chicken farm to which the girls have been sent – the formidable, God-fearing Missus – it is Lucy herself upon whom the force of the story’s telling, its strange and poetic voice, balances. Illiterate and lacking the `right words’ to express herself, her limitations and literalism allow her to perceive of the world, particularly the natural one, as brimming with unacknowledged sentience. Julie Sarkissian constructs a modern fable which is not so much moralistic as highly ambiguous when it comes to its hero and denouement. Comparisons have been made between its unconventional narrator and that of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but a closer kinship exists between Lucy and Steinbeck’s Lennie from Of Mice and Men; both are naïfs who value fidelity, and their place in the world teeters dangerously on the acceptance of others. hachette.com.au
