Review: Outside the Lines by Amy Hatvany

Family, mental illness and letting go of the past are the major themes of Amy Hatvany's Outside the Lines, which is being published for the first time in Australia this month. Local readers may already be aware of Hatvany through her thought provoking novel Safe With Me. Travelling between two eras and two different characters, Outside the Lines tells the story of a man with a severe mental illness and the impact it has on his young daughter, Eden, who at ten years old witnesses a tragic suicide attempt. As an adult, Eden finds herself searching for her long-lost father, who is now a poor artist living on the streets, but finds herself learning more than she expected, including one heartbreaking life lesson.

Although I found this novel to be quite tough going in places (it felt very emotional,) I also found that it was one very much worth staying with. Through David, we learn about the complexities of living with a mental illness and why taking pills is not the easy option that it may seem to an outsider, and through Eden we learn the pain of watching a loved one suffer and see her confusion as to whether or not her father loves her, and her struggle to truly understand him. The backstory for Jack, the manager of Hope House and love interest for Eden is well done, as is the way the author shows the suffering of Lydia, the wife of David and mother to Eden. However, I was not a fan of best friend Georgia or half brother Bryce and found their characters and stories a little crass in comparison to the rest of the novel and perhaps even unnecessary. On the whole, though, this is an enjoyable, though provoking novel. Recommended.

Thank you to the Reading Room and Allen & Unwin for my review copy. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more