Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

In many of the best books with a precocious teen protagonist, the hero/ine tries to figure out who they are and get away from where they come from. Lou Connors doesn’t have to do either – she knows very well who she is and has already succeeded in making it to the USA, at least for a summer as an exchange student. Leaving behind her sedentary, TV-fixated family, she dreams of a new life in America with her host family. The Hardings are the ubiquitous middle-class of America, a SUV-driving, white teeth-owning edifice of what’s supposed to be good and proper. Lou comes from a background of intellectual deprivation, bitterness and smutty jokes; she doesn’t know how to be tactile because no one has ever shown her. She is also slightly older than her host brother and sister who greet her with a mixture of curiosity and derision. So, what happens to uncannily smart girl, who’s just as at odds with her new environment as the one she couldn’t wait to get away from?

At first her attempts at self-amelioration result in good grades and a place in the school musical. The Hardings believe she is the model of integration, but the beneath the all-American mask she has cleverly constructed, Lou is on the slippery descent into chaos again. She is quite a self-destructive character, who craves the very things that she cannot relate to when they’re presented to her. When things are going well, she seems destined to mess things up for herself over and over again.

Some might see the book as a classic coming-of-age story, but Hyland deconstructs and inverts this notion and the narrative takes many dark (and sometimes comic) turns. We can’t help but love the feisty, intellectually slick Lou, but we despair of her decisions, while knowing exactly while she made them. She muses about desquamation (a type of blood poisoning), capital punishment and reads Gogol as she ponders if she has migrated from one prison to another. Her sense of self is constantly asserted but it’s never enough for her and we wonder what could ever make her happy. This is a strong, original first novel and Hyland has succeeded in creating a character who is an engaging puzzle and as memorable as Holden Caulfield or any of SE Hinton’s Outsiders. While the writer may balk at the comparisons to such cult classics, she may have to get used to them. No one who reads Lou Connors’ story will forget her.