Are You Trying to Annoy Me?

Jacqueline Bain is in an impossible situation. She is thirteen; she lives with hr psychopathic stepmother and her vegetable father in Adelaide; her own mother is the world away, in London. This extraordinary first novel - an entirely authentic piece of emotional writing - focuses on Jacqueline's fortunes and misfortunes over a period of three years. Her home life becomes progressively more unbearable. Her stepmother picks her up for lies she does not tell, forces her to make out endless absurd lists, tortures her mentally and physically. Jacqueline is in fact in the power of a sadist. Jacqueline retreats from this world into a world where her childhood toy and where inanimate objects and natural phenomena alike become living forces with which she can commune, and which afford her some comfort. She makes friends at school too, and the monstrosity of her home life is made all the more apparent in comparison with the normal and affectionate cousins to whom she can escape from time to time. Throughout these years, Jacqueline remembers and yearns for one person - her mother in London to whom she will return when she has left school. That is the light at the end of the tunnel through which she gropes. Her armour is the armour of any child resilience and acceptance. It is these two threads, and the thread of helplessness, which weave and interweave throughout this novel.