Slights - Kaaron Warren
Stevie, the somewhat disturbed central figure relating events in Kaaron Warren's fantastically readable novel, is a young woman with a few emotional and behavioural problems that stem from her relationship with her parents - a mysterious father, a cop killed at a young age in the line of duty, and her mother, who Stevie has accidentally killed in a car crash. The author nonetheless makes Stevie, for all her problems, her abrasiveness and her particularly twisted view of the world, real and sympathetic - a kind of twisted Holden Caulfield character who has the ability, or curse, to see through the phoniness of people and their behaviour, but who is wonderfully unable to prevent herself from speaking her mind about it. She has an idea of how the world should be and how things should happen, but like the back garden that she imagines one day being filled with jasmine, the reality is a rotting pile of manure and some troubling objects that lie buried beneath the surface. Stevie's ...