Book Review: Floundering by Romy Ash
I have launched a new series on the Emerging Writers’ Festival blog, called Debut Review looking at the first books of Australian authors. You can read the first review below.
Floundering by Romy Ash tells the story of a mother who loves her two boys, but lacks the skills to care for them. Eleven-year-old Tom and adolescent Jordy live with their grandparents until their mother, Loretta, returns to take them on what she thinks will be a summer holiday. They travel across the Nullarbor to the west coast of Australia with no food and not enough petrol. When they arrive, they spend several days living in a caravan surviving off baked-beans, surrounded by families celebrating Christmas. Loretta is increasingly absent and unwittingly leaves her sons in more danger than she could have expected.
The novel is told from the point of view of a young boy called Tom. He is not a adult-in-a-child’s-body, he is a normal boy who has been forced to take on responsibility for himself. He can’t multiply large numbers in his head like Matilda, but he does pick up his mother’s discarded cigarette butts on more than one occasion. However, he has developed survival skills beyond his years like being cautious around sand dunes and knowing what the symptoms of sunstroke are.
He still has a child-like curiosity which his older brother, Jordy, is self-consciously shrugging off. When Tom wants to play with a tennis ball, Jordy just ‘rolls his eyes and sits down, hunches over his knees’. Jordy doesn’t view life with the same wonder and sincerity as Tom. When Tom tastes some salt from a dry salt-lake, he thinks it tastes like salt and vinegar chips, but Jordy says it tastes like dirt. One of Tom’s most endearing habits/neurosis is saying sorry to nearly everything including a dead fish.
This book felt eerily like my own memories. All of the imagery is clearly rendered and so familiar, but the tragic level of neglect was new. I remember the sticky car seats, drying off sandy feet, salt-stiffened clothes and the sound of the screen door of a caravan. The difference is, on my family holidays, my parents would smother me in sunscreen and carry a backpack full of food, water and first aid. In the novel, Tom and Jordy go for hours without eating and days without brushing their teeth or having a drink of water. Tom is constantly dizzy and has what he calls ‘desert mouth.’ He notices his brother’s sour breath and sun-damaged skin. Later in the novel, he wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother’s car leaving and he doesn’t know if she’ll be back.
The reader understands the reality of what is happening to the children. The tension in the book occurs between what the child sees but doesn’t understand, and what the reader understands is happening. To be able to tell a story with such adult themes through the eyes of an ordinary boy is a huge achievement. The child is so sincere, and the story is so dark. You genuinely care about the two vulnerable boys and all the children who are in a similar position.
