Irresistible new novel reflects the genius of trent Dalton

Lola in the Mirror By Trent Dalton. Reviewed by Louise Ward

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How do you write a book where your first-person narrator has no name?

It’s not that she doesn’t want you to know her name, she really doesn’t have one, names being a dangerous thing when you’ve been on the run with your mum since infancy.

That’s our hero’s situation. She’s living in a junkyard, in a van with four flat tyres and a hole in the roof. It’s the latest in a series of underclass communities that have raised her.

Mum works for Flora Box, a local seafood merchant and drug dealer. Don’t let those adorable old-lady glasses and sloppy joes fool you — Flora is a treacherous killer. The scrapyard is by the brown snake of a river running through Brisbane, a treacherous killer all its own.

Add to this a teenage alcoholic by the name of Charlie Mould, a boy in a vintage brown suit on a bridge, and a broken mirror in which resides the eponymous Lola, and you have all the elements for a wild and captivating story.

Trent Dalton has the capacity to make you laugh and cry in the same sentence.

In this novel, you will find the deepest of tragedies on the same page as a strange and bizarre happening. He writes of forks in the road, the bravery of a cartwheel, and the meaning of a name.

He has found love and family in the darkest of places and has artfully revealed the essential truths of good and evil.

The result is a novel so beautiful, so uplifting, that all I can do is marvel upon my first read and arm myself with a pencil to underline the moments of pure genius I find in my second.

Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton is available on Harper Collins ($36.99).