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Set in the Australian suburban heart of darkness, Homework
follows the trials and tribulations of a Sydney
schoolgirl as she gets to grips with life in a
crazy family.
Homework
By Suneeta Peres Da Costa
Bloomsbury Publishing,
pp259
£6.99
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Home is hard work for the young Mina Pereira. Cocooned in an Australian family that makes the Windsors look functional, she struggles to hold it together in an often heart-breaking tale of childhood angst.
With a mother gripped by menopausal depression, and a bewildered father attempting to stop the sluggish descent that's taking over their suburban Sydney life by applying WD40 to everything that moves, Mina's not having an easy go of it as she slips into adolescence.
Nestled between a genius older sister quoting Dostoyevsky and a younger one whose obsession with cartoons provides a backdrop of Wile E Coyote, Mina's childhood is crushed by her loneliness and the anxieties that a child's unanswered questions invoke.
Add to that the fact that Mina was born with two emotionally sensitive antennae protruding from her skull and you have one messed-up kid.
Homework leaves you screaming with frustration. Mostly at the adults of
the tale for letting the overactive imagination
of this child go wild as she is ignored through
the trials of a
family in melt-down
But also at the author for using her extensive
vocabulary to such a patently ridiculous extent
–l; kids may suffer existential crisis from
time to time, but it's hard to believe that an eight-year-old
kid can express it as such.
Thought-provoking, touching and at times witty, Homework leaves you feeling genuinely sad for the weight of responsibility of screwed-up parents on a child who doesn't want to grow up. But it's let down only by over-use of flowery language.
Polly Curtis 16.10.00
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