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Published Jan 2015
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Millie Bird, seven years old and ever hopeful, always wears red gumboots to match her curly hair. Her struggling mother, grieving the death of Millie's father, leaves her in the big ladies' underwear department of a local store and never returns.
Agatha Pantha, eighty-two, has not left her house - or spoken to another human being - since she was widowed seven years ago. She fills the silence by yelling at passersby, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule.
Karl the Touch Typist, eighty-seven, once used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife's skin. Now that she's gone, he types his words out into the air as he speaks. Karl's been committed to a nursing home, but in a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes. Now he's on the lam.
Brought together at a fateful moment, the three embark upon a road trip across Western Australia to find Millie's mother. Along the way, Karl wants to find out how to be a man again; Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was.
Together they will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting yourself feel sad once in a while just might be the key to a happy life.
"Starred Review. [A] whimsical and touching debut...[An] ultimately powerful exploration of grief from a skillful and original new voice." - Kirkus
"Though the whimsy grows tiresome, Davis shows particular skill in getting inside the mind of a seven-year-old. Her dotty characters and themes of displacement and marginalization call to mind the works of fellow Aussie Elizabeth Jolley, minus Jolley's sharp edge." - Booklist
"Australian author Davis's debut animates characters with distinctive and fallible voices; Millie is wise beyond her years, while Agatha is limited by her obsession with aging. For all readers who have ever faced grief and felt that everyone else knows what they are doing and how to handle it. Mourning, grief, and the mystery of death will boost this book's appeal, particularly to teens, and will generate lots of discussion points for book clubs." - Library Journal
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brooke Davis has worked as a travel writer, editor, and bookseller. She is the winner of the Allen & Unwin Prize for Prose Fiction, the Verandah Prose Prize, the 2009 Bobbie Cullen Memorial Award for Women Writers, and the 2011 Postgraduate Queensland Writing Prize. Her debut novel, Lost & Found, was written as a PhD thesis on grief at Curtin University in Western Australia, a part of which was anthologized in Award Winning Australian Writing 2012. Brooke Davis attended Wilfrid Laurier University and has lived in Halifax but now makes Perth, Australia, her home.
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